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.

To create this I shot for the foreground during blue hour at f/8 iso 400. 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 sky into my blue hour foreground image.

In addition to all that I also fired off several flash pops during a few of the 30 second exposures just around the chairs, boats, and foreground vegetation. I did this with an AD 300. I just walked around and hit the button on the back of the flash that makes it go off during a few of the exposures. I blended in the flash shots using a brush on a very low opacity in photoshop. This just helped bring out some detail in the foreground and sharpness in the leaves.