burnt embers

We spent Canadian Thanksgiving two weeks ago with friends on Read Island. It is located near Campbell River between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Before we left my blogging friend Melinda (One Day | One Image) suggested I try some star trail photos seeing as how we would be away from light pollution.  She kindly sent me a couple of her shots as inspiration, and some how-to links. I did not get a chance to look at the links, but should have.

I was convinced to take my tripod, even though clear nights seemed unlikely and it was an extra bother since the trip ends with travel in a small boat (after a bit less than 4 hours driving, a ferry to Quadra Island and another 45 minutes in the car).  In any case, this is one of the shots I took. It is a single exposure taken, so the EXIF data says, with a 4,435 second exposure (which is 73.92 minutes). Thanks to some software rescue and a very good sensor, it worked out OK, but nearly was a bust.

At first my shots were much shorter exposures, but I wanted the longer star trails which I suppose people usually obtain by stacking a number of photos. In one of the first photos I managed to find the North Star, so that view became the focus of a second much longer exposure the next night. The earlier shots looked pretty good on the camera screen so I was content to carry on in this way. However, there were many difficulties.

The structure is called a boat shed by my friends, but really it is not for boats. Below here is the dock, and the shot is taken from a turn in the ramp down to the dock, probably about 10 feet above the water. There are no handrails, no lights and very little room to move. I chose this spot because it has a concrete pad where the two ramps join.  I could get two tripod legs on concrete, and a third on a rough spot in the cliff beside the ramp, thus preventing camera shake from ramp movement.  I had found it a bit spooky on the first night sitting in the dark on a ledge on the bedrock, feet on the ramp, for 10 and 20 minute exposures. After a while I could hear every little snap and slither in the forest behind me, I swear I could even hear springtails breathing in the litter-mat.  Soil dwellers are fine by me, but since there are cougars, wolves and bears in that forest my eyes got quite large while I sat there back to the forest. You know how it works, the larger you open your eyes, the better you can hear, right? Besides imagined fangs, it became kind of boring after an hour or so.

So, for this exposure I decided to just let it run by itself and hope no large animals (including humans and dogs) would knock the camera into the ocean. I went back to the cabin and drank some single malt while the camera gathered what little light there was. The exposure looked great in camera and I was pretty pleased with myself, never having taken star trail shots before. Pleased until I got the photo home and looked at it on the computer screen. Man, was it noisy. Incredibly so. And why did I expect otherwise? Inexperience, and nothing more. Below is a ~1:1 out-of-camera crop so you can see what I mean.

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I am glad I remembered that I have a copy of Topaz DeNoise, never used, downloaded as part of a bundle I bought a few months ago. After doing some not very successful noise reduction in LR4, I ran it through the Topaz plug-in, to satisfactory effect, though at a cost to detail. Below is a similar crop from post-Topaz processed image at the top of this post. It makes for a useable image, though not one I would want to blow up very large. I had a bit of a go at cloning out some hot pixels and other spots in Lightroom after the Topaz processing, to clean things up a bit more, but very little. I tried to straighten the shot (I should have used a level on the camera…) but I lost too many bits of the photo that I like, so I left it with the original angle intact.

I am glad to have salvaged this image – it was a fun weekend and so it is nice to have this memory to go with it. As it happened by pure fluke my job (the one I am about to ‘retire’ from) took me up to this area the following friday and so I took the opportunity and spent last weekend there as well, helping with the initial stage of a research project I will be part of in the coming months. Not a bad spot to be doing field work. You are likely to see a lot more from this part of the world next year.

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Canon 5Dii, Nikkor-N 24mm/f2.8 lens,  ISO100, f11, 74 minute exposure (picture below – Canon G15, 30mm, ISO200, f8, 1/200th).

Essential gear for long exposure photography

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