I wanted to take a small break from the topic of filters, to talk about my OH NO! star trail last night! Tomorrow, I should continue with the filter topic, moving on to the Cokin filters.
What in the world do I mean by OH NO? I was SO happy when I went outside at 3 am this morning and saw that the camera was still standing and the glass was not fogged over. And after reviewing the data on my computer, I had gathered a total of 5 hours worth of star trails! HOW AWESOME IS THAT! And then, this afternoon, I went to my star stacking program and saw the OH NO! during the beginning of the process, I saw right away my first OH NO. The first 3 exposures went well, then I realized there were gaps! 4.5 minute gaps! The camera chose 3 exposures, only three out of 62, to do the in camera noise reduction (NR) processing. What is that? If the exposure is 4.5 minutes, 270 seconds, then the camera will take that same amount of time to process. So, the image was 270 seconds and the post processing, in camera, was 270 seconds making one image the time to take and process a total of 9 minutes! For one image! And that happened only in the beginning.
The second OH NO! moment of the night/morning. Right around exposure number 27, the camera shifted some how! Shifted by a large amount! More so then my earthquake picture. So, my flickr image is only the last 36 images and this one here is a total of 62 images, with the shifting and all. The good news is, the one good image I created to share on Flickr is still a whopping 9720 seconds long! THATS a lot of time! Each exposure is 4.5 minutes long for a total of 36 exposures. Now, the one you are looking at here, is the full version. From 10pm to 3am! The whole 5 hours. Exposure time total, 16,740 seconds. This time does not include the three gaps for the in camera NR and the one second gap between each exposure.
Not much more to say really. Except I plan on trying this again! And soon. This for me is all about trial and error, next shot I will use a lower ISO and that should take away the issue of the NR processing. And for less gaps in the exposure in all, I might try at 7 minute exposures. Now that I have a timer cable, I can program it to do what I want it to do! YA! :)
For the record, for those who might want to give this a "GO" the cable I use, Opteka, OP.C3 Timer remote cord. I got it on Amazon.com for about $50. Which is a great prices considering the Canon Exposure lock is $60 and the only thing it does is open the shutter and lock the exposure! :)
I encourage you to visit my Flickr site to view the smaller version, it looks more perfect, but this one, it has charter! :)
Thank you for stoping by and taking time time to view and read my blog.
Fabulous!
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