Modern Photos

I shot this in my back yard during the total lunar eclipse back in March of this year.

I had an idea of having star trails with a static blood moon. I didn't have a tracker so the only way to do this I could think of was a composite. I shot the moon at 600mm. Then I left the camera in place and waited for the moon to leave the frame (I probably could've just shot a different part of the sky but I didn't). Once the moon was out of the frame I set my camera's intervalometer to take 30 second exposures at iso 400 f/5.6 still at 600mm. And I went back in side because it was 3:30am at this point and I was tired.

I only shot about 40 minutes of start trails, mostly because it was about 4am at this point and I had basically been up all night.

To put this all together I created the star trails in photoshop using the lighten blend mode on all of my photos. I then took one of my moon shots and masked it in to my star trails. Once everything was together I finished it off in Lightroom with some basic and local adjustments to try to bring out a little more color in the star trails.

Overall, I think this came out better than I expected. I wasn't even sure this was going to work at all really. I had never shot star trails at 600mm before, but I figured theoretically it should be the same. I'm torn between this version and a portrait orientation. It's currently my phone's screen saver and I like it as a vertical composition almost more.