Photo of the Week for May 6, 2016
Digital photography has made life for astrophotographers much easier compared with the frequent frustrations of the film era. But there is one exception: star-trail photos. With film, it’s as easy as putting the camera on a tripod and making a long exposure. In the digital world, that same shot requires shooting dozens and dozens of short, individual exposures and later computer-assembling them into a final image. But no more. Now some digitals are able to accomplish this compositing “in camera,” outputting a finished star-trail picture. The photograph shown here, by Oakville, Ontario, photographer Brian Gibson is a fine example.
Brian made this image of star trails over Lora Bay, Ontario, on April 29 with his Olympus PEN-F digital camera fitted with an Olympus Zuiko 12mm f/2.0 lens. The exposure time was 35 minutes using the camera’s “live composite” mode to build a single image in-camera that consists of 70, 30-second subframes. You can read more about the technique here.
