Night over Fatra

outstanding photo.

Ahoj Lukas, a very nice star trail shot, the kind of light I like. The contrast of warm lights on the horizon vs blue i the sky is pleasing. I tried star trails on digital only once, I was pleasantly surprised how good today's sensors are (and still I do not have a FF sensor, just a 550D). The only thing that worries me is the look of the star trails when sharpened for web. They look a bit jagged. I try to bypass this problem by selectively reducing the sharpening on the trails after downsizing to web. At what ISO and aperture did you take this ? Best regards. Peter

Caf Peter, thanx for stopping by. I still have 400D - and I'm not that pleased :-)) Too much noise. Yes, they are bit oversharpened, but prefered this instead of loosing their visibility. I usually use selective sharpening(-> masking) for web presentation.

Camera Model    Canon EOS 400D DIGITAL
Firmware    Firmware 1.0.4
Shooting Date/Time    10. 7. 2010 23:34:32
Owner's Name    unknown
Shooting Mode    Manual Exposure
Tv( Shutter Speed )    440
Av( Aperture Value )    5.6
Metering Mode    Center-Weighted Average Metering
ISO Speed    1600
Lens    17.0 - 50.0mm

Well, 550D is not much better at ISO 1600 - I would not pleased either. I tried ISO 100, f/4.5, 30 minutes for my shot (Under the stars, version 3). The advantage of star trail shooting is that the stars are point sources that appear to move very slowly - allowing enough exposure even at lower ISO although they are quite dim. Of course, there is no doubt more trails are picked up at higher ISO, but there is the tradeoff between the amount of trails vs noise.

I was thinking more about 60D or so.

For me the main problem is getting enough light into foreground - sky, star trails and noise there is very easy to compensate in PS. However if the foreground is black - I'm done. So for me it's a tradeoff between a noise from camera or noise from PS(when lightening shadows).

And also - I would prefer spending less time shooting (ISO 3200/6400) and going to sleeping bag sooner :-)))

One solution I have seen other people do - you could do a blend - long exposure for star trails at a lower ISO and a shorter one for the foreground, focusing closer and at a higher ISO and/or with lightpainting, if the foreground region is not very large. 

In this case that method would work fine. But shooting scenery like this would be quite problematic:

http://www.photoab.wz.cz/Latest_additions/imagepage12.html

:-)

The photo in the link is a dream ! You are right, for that case it would not work.

just great