126
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Ben Lockett's picture

Touch the Stars

Testing my astronomy knowledge a bit lining her hand up perfectly with the North Star, and then a 3 hour (slightly cloudy) star trail taken behind it.

Canon 6D
11mm · f/4.0 · 30s · ISO 1250
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13 Comments

Great work there!

Thanks:)

Amazing!

Wow. You nailed it, man.

Cheers, I think more than a bit of luck played it's part here!

Perfect composition.

Thank you:)

How many photos went into this? Did you cut the girl into this, or did you actually line her up with the North Star?

I took about 400, and used about half of those (it was partially cloudy when I was taking the star trails). The image as a whole is 3 layers, the rocks used a very bright exposure of about 2 minutes, the stars 30 seconds (just lots of them), and the girl was actually on top of the rock, in (almost) the right place - if you look really closely its not aligned perfectly - and she's backlit with a torch, while holding another one, which is why she's darker than the rest of the image. The reason for this is that its really hard to stand still for more than about 5 seconds, especially in as precarious a place as that, so I had to use a much shorter exposure on her. Then it was just stacking the layers on top of each other in photoshop.

how do you get the rotating star effect

Really cool concept.

I think you could make it even stronger if you were to either light the person or bring down the exposure on the rocks to almost silhouette. Also, tweak the crop just a bit to remove some of the lower foregrounds and put the point of light dead center in your composition.

As I said above, I really enjoy this image and think it is creative.

Cheers Matt! This is definitely one I’ll revisit in future as I was never 100% happy with it in the first place. You’re definitely right about the silhouette, I think making it more model centric is key.

Great composition on this. The clouds add a nice effect in the star trails