Light painting and star trails

[Robert Watcher]

Light painting the Lighthouse last night and capturing star trails around the nucleus of Polaris (The North Star) - one hour and forty minute exposure, using Olympus Live Composite.

The second shot was the initial exposure to figure out how dark the lighthouse was in the scene.
The third image was the first test attempt at lighting the building while walking around it with my small led lamp. I determined it was too evenly lit and needed to keep the light from hitting the ground and exposing my shadows.

The first image looked so much better with me lighting the edges of the lighthouse as well as going in behind and lighting the upper back of the building. Normally it would take around 3 hours or more to get a saturation of the circular star trails, but with the cold evening I decided to cut it short once the hour and a half passed by.

 

[Robert Watcher]

A night photo I took on the way to the lighthouse, of the lit up area in the port where lakers were being filled with salt and grain. A busy hive of activity.

 

[Asher Kelman]

Robert,

Are “Lakers” the term for Canadian lake cargo vessels?

So what generation Okympusxwoukdcthis be?

…and do you keep the camera still for each different shot of thr sky and lighthouse so you could blend them as you wished?

Asher

 

[Robert Watcher]

The lakers are the large ships that carry content through the Great Lakes —— from Lake Superior to the St Lawrence Seaway. They travel through the canal locks near Niagara Falls to make that treck.

All Olympus camera models provide Live Composite mode. My camera bodies are all older E-M1 and E-M10 models that I’ve been using for years in my street and professional work.

In this mode there is only one frame taken. Unlike the traditional way of creating star trails with many long exposure stills that are composited together after the fact in software, the light is added in camera without affecting the overall exposure, so it’s impossible to overexpose the image unless the initial exposure is overexposed. The result is one finished jpg file, regardless of the exposure time being one minute or 4 hours.