This was our grand, and somewhat weird, adventure last weekend.
My son had a great time last year attempting star trails. So when this challenge was announced, I thought it would be fun for the family to head out to the hills and see if we could get star trails over the Appalachian mountains. The grand plan was to spend the night and wander the trails the next day.
Didn't work out on Saturday night for many reasons. So even though we couldn't wander the mountains on Monday, we left Sunday afternoon around 4 for the 2.5 hour drive to the mountains. It was a low of around 10 degrees, so it was cold, but not too bad. We stayed at one spot for about an hour or so for my son and daughter to shoot for awhile. This is where I found out that you have to be down below and closeup to include mountains in a star shot. Since you're using a wide angle lens, mountains across the valley don't look like mountains. They don't even look like hills!!
Then moved over to raven's roost so I could shoot for about an hour.
I tried non-moving stars and star trails. Here's the star trail entry I was considering:
My daughter was done and getting cold, so she stayed in the car, joined shortly by my son. My valiant husband kept me company!
The hardest thing about night photography (for me, at least) is seeing through the view finder and focusing! I couldn't tell what I was seeing -- it was too dark! I had to lay the camera and the ground and prop up the front and hope.
The experience was fun, the aftermath wasn't that exciting. My daughter ended up with a mild case of hypothermia and it took a couple of hours in the motel to start feeling decent again -- just in time to sleep. The next morning we were going to drive up skyline drive and see if there were any deer in the meadow. The road was supposed to open at 8am. It didn't open. We sat around with other cars for about a 1/2 hour. Turns out the road was closed for ice, but they didn't bother posting it. We headed back home with kind of an anti-climatic feeling.
Fun adventure for a couple of hours. Strange adventure for more hours. :)
I'm amazed at how well this is doing, but my hopes aren't all that high, because I think this will be an extremely high scoring challenge -- there are some wonderful shots in there!!
Thanks for all the wonderful comments!
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Place: 1 out of 77 Avg (all users): 7.4780 Avg (commenters): 8.3500 Avg (participants): 7.1220 Avg (non-participants): 7.5671 Views since voting: 5491 Views during voting: 459 Votes: 205 Comments: 50 Favorites: 9 (view)
Congrats on continuing to update your top row. That's hard to do when you score as high as you do! This shot is my incentive for getting a new monitor because mine is apparently way too bright (I see a ton of chromic noise but it looks awesome on my phone!) I'd tell you to keep up the good work but you do that naturally!
Thumbs up from this astrophotographer. I simply couldn't take the time to drive to the Appalachians for a photo contest.. although I sure would like to! I shall live vicariously through you.
This is awesome! Impressive that you were able to get so many stars, especially considering the city lights below the horizon. Well done! (voted earlier)
Two possible improvements in my eyes:
Venus (I assume) could have been composed to the right of the tree, and might have come out stronger (maybe!).
Some de-noise in the sky could be good too. Stars are hard because you want them to expose, but you don't want noise. I struggle with this a lot myself. The most amazing sky images have stars that pop from a smooth background.
The tree is such a strong focal point, I think you should have cropped out the city lights on the right. However, your photo is worthy of a good vote. Bump up to 8.
Raven's Roost
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