Ok – couple things about this image. First, I specific use the word image because this is actually close to 400 photos (the entire series was 410 photos, but I lost count of how many I had to cut out from the front and end. In the past, I have done star trail photos as a single very long exposure, but I learned how to take all the individual photos I use to make my time lapse videos and use them to create a “stacked” star trail image like this. This one took me a bit of time (as I think they all will based on the steps required to do them), but the more I put into it, the more I wanted it to be perfect.
My first output looked like this:
Which alone was pretty awesome looking – enough so that it kept me interested enough to come back to it and decide that I felt it looked a little washed out… I mean this is a nighttime image, and it just looks a little to “bright”. So I did another bit of processing on it…
Ok – now we’re getting closer… but now that airplane trail running diagonally across the sky turned from being ok and maybe even a little cool to being something I was finding distracting. So I cleaned that up and again darkened things a bit more.
Honestly, right now I’m feeling extremely satisfied with this image – I think it is possibly the best starry sky image I’ve ever done (… maybe … I’d have to look through and see if I have any really good Milky Way photos I like better). But it is definitely the absolute best composite image I’ve ever done, it is the most Photoshop work I’ve done on an image. I like that it has just a bit of a dreamy haze to the mountains, and I like how only the brightest of the stars showed up in the reflections on the lake… I also like how the image has a primordial feel to it – to me it evokes ideas of how this might have looked during the time of the dinosaurs (though maybe it is those couple star trail reflections looking like giant fireballs that is triggering that).
Oh, and by the way, did nothing special to make those reflections show up, and the colors are accurate to the original photos… at least in so much as any processing I did, I did to the image as a whole, nothing localized to just the star trails.
I’m happy enough with this image, that I am actually contemplating submitting it to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website that I look at daily. That would be a pretty awesome accomplishment to get my image posted there. We’ll see…
Finally, because I’ve had a resurgence of interest in black & white photos and just for kicks, I decided I wanted to see how this image looked in black & white… turns out, pretty darn good I think…
Oh… and a couple extra thoughts on this image…
First, there will be a time lapse video in the future (no idea or promise as to when) comprised of the individual images from this set. It is a really nice clip and has a couple surprised of its own (different from this star trail image).
I might process this image one more time, mainly to look for any evidence of potential aurora in the shots. One of the time lapse sequences I’ve processed already might actually have some very faint aurora in it – which I am equally stoked that I captured, and bummed that I didn’t see it in person and also missed when the big aurora hit the area (I didn’t know about it and I am 99% sure the area was covered in thick clouds that night).
Lastly, I seem to have gotten pretty lucky with the calm conditions on Lake McDonald. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, after I took those photos a gentle breeze rippled the surface enough to break any reflections… and when I went up to the part for my last visit before leaving Glacier National Park, it was windy enough to have white caps and waves on the beach. So I am quite pleased to have gotten lucky with these beautifully calm conditions.
