Star Trails over Crater Lake, Oregon
Star trails are one of my favorite ways to show motion blur at a completely different scale -- instead of freezing a fraction of a second, you're recording the slow, relentless rotation of the Earth itself. This was captured on the west rim of Crater Lake on a single uninterrupted exposure of about 10.5 minutes, which gave the stars enough time to carve those long circular arcs around Polaris in the upper left.
Shot on a Nikon Z6III with the Nikkor Z 28-400mm at 28mm, f/4, ISO 400 on a tripod. The wide aperture and elevated ISO were necessary to pull enough light from the stars without the exposure running even longer.
The biggest challenge was remembering that a 10-minute exposure means 10 minutes alone in the dark, in the cold, on an empty mountain. Somewhere in that wait, a herd of deer clopped onto the road in the dark, making a sound I absolutely could not identify. After spending all day hoping to spot a bear, I was suddenly very sure I had found one, and spent an embarrassing amount of time fumbling for my flashlight before the culprits revealed themselves.