We vacation almost every year in Brant Lake, New York. I've made a habit or a tradition out of doing a star trail photo at our camp every year. This one is from last year, 2024.

To create this I shot the foreground at blue hour iso 500, f/8, 6 sec exposure. I then waited about an hour or so for the stars to come out to start my star trail exposures at f/2.8 iso 1600 and 15 sec. I was only able to get a little over 200 photos for star trails as clouds started to roll in and ruin everything. I actually wasn't sure this photo was going to work because of the clouds.

I used photoshop to blend everything together. I exported my star trail images as jpegs to save on time and space and then used the lighten blend mode on all of the layers to create the star trails. This also makes it easy to get rid of satellites, airplanes, and other distractions. Using this method gives you much more control over your trails then using starstax or something similar.

Once I had my star trail sky I flattened and saved it as a tiff, again to save on time and space, and then opened it in a new psd file with my blue hour foreground. Using a graduated filter in photoshop I blended in the star trail sky into the blue hour foreground shot. Once it was all blended together I finished it off in Radiant Photo, Elia's software, and camera raw.

Everything was shot on my Sony a73 with my 12-24 gmaster. Sadly, we learned a few weeks ago that the house on this property where we stayed completely burned down. So this may end up being the last star trail photo I get from this location. I have a series of 4-5 star trail photos I think from the past few years that you can see on my profile if you're interested.