Looking For a Distraction

As you may or may not know I am a huge Green Bay Packer fan. Sunday was not a good day for me. The Packers dominated the game, but could not score touchdowns. That led to a late improbable comeback by the Seattle Seahawks to reach the Super Bowl. I was not thrilled with the outcome of the game, and I needed something to get my mind off of it. I decided to go outside and try and photograph star trails. I had only tried this once before, but I thought it would give me enough problems to take my mind off of the game. I don’t think that the sky was quite dark enough for this to really work, but it did work fairly well.

Getting Through the Problems

To start out here I knew that to make a longer exposure that I would need a trigger to get my hands off of the camera, and to lock down. I do not have one for my Canon 5D Mark III or my Canon 7D Mark II. I found my remote for my 60D, and made a couple of alterations to make it work for the two newer cameras. Now that I had a trigger I used a thirty second exposure to figure out my exposure. From there it was a matter of using a little math to calculate the longer exposure that would produce the trails that I was looking for. I made an exposure at ten minutes, and it looked good. I decided to go up to twenty minutes where I got the photo that you see above. I then set up the camera to make a thirty minute exposure which I thought would be the one. During that thirty minutes though my lens fogged over as a heavy frost was beginning. I then switched to the 7D Mark II to use the interval timer on it, but once again my lens would not stay clear. At the end of the day though I made one photo that I liked, and I got lost in the process which is important.