We vacation almost every year in upstate New York, near where my wife's family is from. I have made kind of a tradition of doing a star trail photo every year. We usually stay somewhere in or near the Adirondack Mountains which have some the best night skies on the east coast. This is my 2025 photo from our vacation this year staying on Sleepy Hollow Lake in Athens, New York. I took this from one of the back decks of our vacation house.

To create this I shot the foreground during blue hour at f/8 iso 400. This allows me to get a sharper cleaner image for the foreground (everything but the sky). Then I waited for it to get dark and the clouds to clear to start my star trails. Star trails are 165 photos shot at f/2.8 iso 1600, 30 seconds. I blended the star trails in photoshop and then blended in the star trail image into my blue hour foreground image.

Basically, I used a brush in photoshop to paint in the star trail sky into my foreground image. I wanted there to be a transition from dark night sky into the glow on the horizon from my blue hour shot. I used a brush on a lower opacity to achieve this. I also added in some flash shots I took to bring out some more detail in the foreground, mostly on the boats and chairs and some of the vegetation.

Once everything was blended together I used Radiant Photo (Elia's software) to help harmonize everything. Then I did some further selective basic edits to the sky and foreground using photoshop and camera raw.