Vito Paratore Photography

As mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I was able to take two trips to the reservoir: Last night and Wednesday night. Last night, I was more successful in lighting the foreground. I used a Maglite flashlight to “paint” the foreground with light. I used the stacking technique in both attempts, which gave me a bit of flexibility with the foreground. I used the flashlight on the first and last exposures I took; that way if one was too bright or two dark, I had the other one as a backup. It turned out I exposed too much light on the first frame, so I used the last frame for the foreground.

For this photo, I was facing a few degrees west of south, so my trails were longer. I got to the spot earlier as well, so my total, stacked exposure was twice as long as Wednesday night’s (approx. 42 minutes). I was amazed at the number of airplanes that flew over during that 42 minutes. Most of them did not expose on the image, but you can see a few there now. For any prints I may make of this shot, I will probably clone them out.

Last night, I rode my bike 4 miles in the dark to shoot star trails in 16 degree weather, with around 25mph wind gusts. I was prepared for the cold and was warm enough. Other than the issue of ambient light in New Jersey, I have come up with two main things I could do next time to make this shot better: First, the foreground is barely visible (on my monitor, at least) and could do for more detail. Second, I should have used ISO 400 instead of 200, so the stars would be brighter while potentially having more stars visible. My next blog entry will include tonight’s photo, which takes both points into account, leading to a better result. Tonight’s photo, however, has much less wind, so the reflections aren’t as soft and nice as this one.