![]() After it's managed to *beep* and latch onto something with AF, then take your finger off, find the Manual Focus (MF) switch (usually on the side of your lens) and switch your lens to MF and then you're good to go - now just remember not to bump that autofocus ring (or the zoom ring either as on some lenses changing zoom affects focus, so it might be best to set how wide you want to zoom first). It helps to set your camera to use only its centre auto-focus point so you can precisely select what to focus on. Yes you usually can actually Auto Focus (AF) at night, providing you accurately point at a star that's bright enough, or at something like the moon, or failing these, on a point light source on the horizon somewhere - its all about the same distance away as far as your camera's concerned. Don't let all these ideals dissuade you though, you can still have fun and get some pretty cool shots in your backyard, in town.īefore you get tangled atop tripods, get your focus sorted first. I think the best star trail shots are ones with something interesting framing up the foreground, so perhaps near some impressive trees and an old shed or something. Another point to consider when picking your location is what to have in your foreground. Also it's best to shoot from somewhere where there's less chance of a car, a torch-wielding person, or even a plane accidentally ruining your shot. Of course you need a clear, cloudless night, and ideally a dry (not humid) night too, else condensation may form on your lens (some people literally wrap those little hand-warmers around the lens to keep it warm to prevent this). The moon too adds significant light pollution so shooting during a 'new moon' (no moon) is ideal, or when the moon has set below the horizon, or at the very least, is well out of shot (and won't move in!). There are even some gimp plugins to automate the process for the user, such as GIMP Star Trails Compositor or StarTrails for videos.You really can try this anywhere, but you'll find that if you're too close to town, then the 'light pollution' that emanates from civilisation makes it harder to see the stars, so rather than being nice and black, the background to your stars will become a pale haze instead, and this also means you won't be able to take as long a photo (ie such long trails) before it becomes completely washed out. ![]() Repeat the above step for all angles of star trails.Go to Filters>Blur>Motion Blur… adjust the angle by dragging the angle slider and keep an eye on the effect in the preview window. Select a group of star trails that have roughly the same angle (pointing in the same direction).If your camera needed some processing time between each photo, resulting in something resembling LEDs: continue with: ![]() In GIMP select each layer and change the blending mode in the layers dock (top right). Change the blending mode of all the layers to Lighten.One that I found that was nice and concise was this and the processing steps were: Lots of tutorials on the net for how to make star trails using gimp which is a free, open source, cross platform and very powerful photo editing tool.
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