The World is Spinning

Photo of the Day

It is funny how things work out sometimes. When I took this picture a couple of weeks ago I was mad as heck. This was a half hour exposure of the Colorado night sky. What I was mad about was the fact that after the shot my camera took a half hour to run noise reduction. I had turned it on for a shorter exposure, and of course I forgot to turn it off. So what you see here took an hour to produce at night. To compound that I did not realize what I had at the time. I had the exact thing that I was going for, but I needed to expose the shot for just a bit longer. It was not until I was back home when I moved the exposure slider over in Lightroom that I realized that the star trails were there, and acting just as I thought that they would. They were spinning right about Hahn’s Peak. Of course I had to move the slider over nearly two and a half stops so I have a lot of noise here. I really need to go back out there a little better prepared so that I can get this shot right. This is the one that I wanted, and it was right there for me. In case you have not figured it out photographers are never happy.

Technical Data

As I said I had to move the exposure slider over nearly two and a half stops to get this shot where it should have been. I had some exposure calculators bookmarked on my iPad, but no signal made those impossible to pull up. I was guessing as to exposure times because I did not know. This was a 28 minute exposure. After the 28 minute noise reduction my camera ran I took a 56 minute exposure. From what I could tell that would have been pretty good, but a snow storm moved in during that time. The clouds and snow leave very little stars visible. The stars that I can see though left very long trails. This was my first time shooting star trails so problems can be expected. I love what this shot stands for though. One more try at it, and I will have the shot that I want. I had to really stretch everything that I know in Lightroom to get this shot near good enough to post here. It is not print worthy by any means, but it is a good shot.

The final step was to run the photo in Topaz DeNoise to try and limit the damage that the underexposure did to this photo. I had never really used the program before, but it did a great job with this shot. I will have to keep it in mind in the future to help revive the odd photo that I underexpose.