Star trail-01!

I'm in love with star trail. The movement attract me so much. Every night, we did not realize that the star is moving. It so beautiful. How to capture star trail? I will tell my experience here. It is related with my first post in my photography world (Long exposure). In capture star trail, you need a lot of patient, and some good subjects for example car, house or anything that make a story behind it. To make good star trail, I suggest that you spend time about one hour and half to make good circle. This is based on my experience. However, it is up to you because the more you spend, the longer trail you'll get. AND, it also depend on the weather. Sometimes, when you start the capture the trail, the cloud is invisible. After 30 minutes, it is possible that the cloud slowly appear. This will make star trail not visible and then cover up by cloud movement.If this happen, it is normal and it happened 2-3 times for me. Urgh!

Source: Adib.wahab Flickr

The first star trail I made was early of this year. After read some advice and suggestion in digital camera magazine, I gained some of basic knowledge to do this. There are two different technique that you can use. Firstly, you can capture star trail with combination of many picture of star trail. To make you clear, I give you example. You capture many picture of star trail with long exposure about 30second, and then you combine it all with Photoshop or more easy, Star trail software. Secondly, you can apply really long exposure like 1-2 hours. This is more easy as you do not need to combine any pictures. However, i havent use this technique yet. I feel more comfortable with first technique as I dont need to think best aperture for it. If you dont choose right aperture, it possible that your picture will be overexpose, or maybe underexpose. That's one of reasons why i didnt apply second technique. 

Picture above is my first try capturing star trail. It was in front of my house actually. That picture was combination of 52 pictures of 30 second exposure at f4.0. Actually, i captured more than 50 pictures but i cant combine it because of unlimited space of my laptop (Weird isn't it?). When you combine all the pictures using Photoshop, it will take long time and use more space to open up all the pictures, then start stacking all of them. It's depend one the file size. One more thing here, make sure you use jpeg format rather than raw format as you dont need to edit the picture. You'll edit the picture after the staking of pictures are done. Then, raw format file size is bigger than jpeg format. That's why my laptop didnt have enough space when staking the pictures. Up until here, and i will tell more in next post.