The Story:
Every year we vacation with my wife's family in Brant Lake, New York in the Adirondack Mountains. They rent the same house every year that backs up to this dock. There's also a shed to the left out of frame. The Adirondack's have some of the best night skies on the east coast. So, every year for the past few years I do a star trail photo of our spot on the lake. There are several others in my portfolio you can check out if you want. Some featuring the shed mentioned earlier. It's pretty cool to see my evolution in doing these over the years.
It's a pretty cool spot for star trails as the North Star lines up pretty well with our spot on the lake. There's not a whole lot of options composition wise and I felt I've exhausted my compositions using the shed so this year I focused on using our dock.
The Image:
For this image I used a little over 200 15 second exposures for the star trails, shot at iso 1600 f/2.8. I was hoping to use more photos but unfortunately some clouds rolled in and ruined everything. So I only had about 2 hours of usable photos. This actually came out better than I expected as there was also a haze in the sky and I wasn't sure the star trails were going to work out on this night.
I exported all my star trail photos as small jpegs to save time and space and used the lighten blend mode in photoshop to create the star trail image. I also used a technique I learned from PTW w/Elia where you reduce the opacity of each star trail image by 1% (start at 100% then 99% for the next layer then 98 and so on) to create a kind of "shooting star" effect in the stars. You can tell the star trails kind of fall off if you look closely.
Before I started the star trail photos I shot several blue hour images at f/8 and iso 50. I then blended in the star trail sky into the blue hour image using the gradient tool and a mask. Using the blue hour image for my foreground allows me to get a sharper cleaner image in the foreground. And also let me git rid of some obnoxious lights that were on once it got dark.
Everything was edited with basic adjustments in lightroom. Put together in photoshop. Then I used Elia's software, Radiant Imaging and adobe camera raw to bring everything together. If you've never tried Radiant Imaging I highly recommend it. It does a lot of things I used to do with PS and/or the Nik Collection with just the click of a button. Big time saver.
If you made it this far, thank you! Sorry for such a long explanation. Thanks for looking!