Photography - Painting with Light. The Nature can do best. Why not letting the stars paint their trip over the the sky?

Star Trail photography got so much easier with digital cameras and workflows these days. Besides the great sensitivity of modern sensors with little noise, you can also immediately see the results and correct parameters if necessary.

The advantage of postprocessing images on the computer opens even more opportunities. This image is not a single one, but hundreds taken over a few hours - finally being merged at the computer.

The big deal with this way of producing star trail images is, that existing light sources like the sunset of artificial lighting do not massively overexpose those areas with light (if exposed correctly).

Every single image is exposed 120 seconds, then the next image starts. This can be triggered by an external timer, an internal one (if your camera offers that feature), or you can use the "Magig Lantern" SW package for your Canon DSLR, which opens such kind of options not existing on the original Canon SW.

A last thing was required to finish the picture in the way I had it in mind: One image was taken with light painting (using a strong X21 LEDLenser flashlight) - the trees ans shrubs would have been completely black standing as silhouettes without that trick.

The LAPP image then is also added to the the rest of the hundreds of images taken before.

Generally you might use specific SW (a free version e.g. at startrails.de) or Photoshop (using layers and mode "lighten") to merge the images. I recommend to make an initial processing on all images (e.g. some contrast improvements) before merge the images.

It is not a snapshot but will take it's time - with wonderful results.