I never tried to shoot stars in the middle of a city, and I haven’t seen many photographers doing it either. But after the experiment I posted two days ago, I thought I give it another try. Of course shooting just stars does not work that well, but shooting star trails works much better. You don’t need to have so many stars visible in the shot, to be able to get visible star trails after blending.

As this was only an experiment, I was really not sure if I get something usable. The sky looked so clear, until we got to the spot, and then few almost invisible clouds started moving across the sky (I seen them only when checking the photos). But still, I seen enough stars on the shots, to give it a try. Next time I just need to take many more shots, as the trails are shorter than I hoped for.

This is a blend of 48 exposures for the sky (30s, f2.8 and ISO 100), and additional 8 exposure HDR for the foreground.

I just could not fall asleep yesterday. It’s possible it was due to the full moon shining directly into my bedroom window. But as the sky was very clear yesterday I got up and set up the camera on the balcony of my flat. Just for fun, to see what I get. And I was pleasantly surprised with the result. Even while shooting in the middle of a city, I got very nice star-trails. This gives me a lot of ideas where to try this next time :)

This is a blend of 86 exposures in Photoshop. The big bright line on the top is of course the moon. Looks almost like a falling asteroid, like in the movie Armageddon :)

The Narrative clip

Yesterday, finally after a year of waiting, I got my Narrative clip camera. For those unfamiliar with it, its a small wearable camera, that automatically takes a 5Mpix photo every 30 seconds. It also stores the GPS location into every photo. The main purpose of a camera like this is to document your complete life. I personally don’t plan to do that, but I will like to use it when I take a photo trip to a new city. I’m usually preoccupied with looking around for good photos pots, and this camera will make a very nice behind the scene documentation.

I tried it a little the last two days, and it’s mostly what I thought. The quality of the photos is on par with a last years phone and as they say, around 5% of the photos are ok. Many of them are blurry, but with the number of photos taken, you end up with enough good ones anyway. I will try it more on my next trip (probably the Dubai one) and will post a review and more sample shots later.

Two towers

Some photos are exactly how I would like them to be. Like this one. It’s nicely sharp, the colors are saturated, but not over-saturated, there is a nice clarity and it feels real, like if you were standing there. To bad not all my photos are like this yet, but I hope more and more are. There was this slogan in a commercial a long time ago “not always, but always more often”(does not sound as good as in the original German :)) and I try to have a similar view of my photos :)

This is a manual blend from 3 exposures.

Taking photos at the same spots can get quite repetitive. One tends to see the same compositions and it’s sometimes hard to find a new one. So for this classic view, I though to use a little bit of framing. And I also wanted to cover up the boring sky, so it worked out quite nicely :) I actually behave quite stupid here. I seen the composition, but then I walked across the snow. And I really wanted no footsteps there. So I had to find a new spot with the same view.

This is a manual blend from 4 photos. I took 10 in two series of 5, one focused on the castle, one on the tree. I then blended only those I needed.

Planing my first trip for this year

As I mentioned few posts ago, I need to plan some trips for this year. And just today, I started planing the first bigger one, as I bought a ticket to Dubai :). I still have to wait a month before I go there, but I already can’t wait. It will be 7 days filled with photos, photos and more photos :)

A little bit of snow by the river

I like to tone my photos more towards the blue, but I really liked this soft yellow/red cast this one had, so I let it be. I could even make this shots from a single exposure, but in the end I used there. I’m just so used to blending, that it’s sometimes easier to do it, than to get more from a single photo. And blending usually results in less noise anyway.

This is a blend from three exposures, created in Photoshop.