Night in Utah

Goblin Valley at Night © Jay Goodrich

Last night I was in Goblin Valley State Park shooting the afternoon light, sunset, and then stars and star trails as day became night. The night before when Brendan and I were shooting the residence in Colorado we were talking about how to shoot star trails, so I have decided to post an image and explain how.

In the past, during the film days, this very image would have been impossible due to the grain generated with a high speed film in the realm of ISO 3200. Now all we have to due is ramp our ISO up to 3200, and capture. The unfortunate sacrifice with digital is that we cannot shoot a single eight hour exposure to get those amazing star trails that photographers like Art Wolfe used to capture. This is due largely impart to the noise that is generated with such an action in digital. We can however, take many exposures and fuse them together in Photoshop though. Floris van Breugel has a great article on NPN that explains how to do just that.

This image was taken at 8:05pm in complete darkness. I needed to use my camping head lamp to light up the formation so I could compose my frame and line the feature up with the Milky Way above. The formation itself was illuminated by the waxing crescent moon that was out last night. The camera was of course on a tripod, with an interval timer and 16-35mm lens attached. The lens was zoomed out at 16mm and set to f2.8. My ISO was at 3200 and I captured the image with a calculated 30 second shutter speed. Other than that nothing else was used. I did process the image through Nik’s Dfine software for noise and then mastered it in Photoshop.

I spent the day in Arches National Park and I am planning on making another post tomorrow, stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. The Whirlwind

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 8:22 pm. It is filed under news, photography tips and tagged with how-to, nature photography, photo tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.