Jim, that's a very interesting mix of events ....I like it! YNP is a great place at night, last time I shot some star trails there, I was well off the road and a coyote found me and just curled up beside me for a couple hours - needed company I guess.
blueimage wrote:
Jim, that's a very interesting mix of events ....I like it! YNP is a great place at night, last time I shot some star trails there, I was well off the road and a coyote found me and just curled up beside me for a couple hours - needed company I guess.
roguecoolman wrote:
Wow. amazing shot Jim. I should try my hand on star stacking. I like the composition of the foreground lines, really pulls you into the geyser. I think what really makes this shot is the venting of the geyser. The trails are cool but that wisps of water makes it shine.
Jason
Hey Jason,
Thanks so much! Yeah, you ought to do it! I always shoot these in 30 sec increments, so that way I can have the best of both worlds. I can try star trails and see if I like the look, but I also can just use a single frame for still star shots if I want. The program I use is Startrails, it's free, and works really well.
boingyman wrote:
Really cool shot Jim. I always enjoy viewing night astro stuff, but I rarely get a chance to do it myself. Just curious what are you doing while you wait? Or do you have another camera setup to shoot other things?
Thanks! I am glad you liked it.
What I do while waiting just depends. In this case I did set up my backup camera and shot some star shots with it too. When I was at the Great Fountain geyser shooting the star trails there if I remember right I went back to my jeep and made a jelly sandwich while the cameras were firing away. Most often though I just hang out around the camera, depending on the area I will sit down on a nice comfy rock and just enjoy the seat and the beauty unfolding around me... It's a great time to be out and alive...
uintaangler wrote:
Jim, this is an outstanding image.
Great visualization, great execution, perfect processing
By the way, I am getting a strong feeling that you may be a complete wild man
Roaming through our National Parks ALL night creating these fantastic images.
Never sleeping, only eating the poor animals that have the misfortune to wander across your path at 3am while all other humans in the park are safe and warm in their sleeping bags
Bob
Ha ha... thanks Bob! Some might call me a bit of a wild man at that...
You know... it's just too beautiful out there at night to be sleeping... I figure I can always sleep when I get back...
aFeinberg wrote:
No idea how you got to stack the geyser back in...but very cool. Nice stuff!
Hey Aaron,
I didn't stack the geyser back in... The Star Trails program that stacks the stars, averages out the non star areas, so in this case, I had the geyser errupt twice for 2 mins for a total of 4 minutes with the normal slow steam rising from it anyway, and so it did it for me.
Now, I didn't post it, but I did stack about 45 mins of star trails through the program and with that one, the geyser was just barely seen when it came out of the Startrail stacker program. With that I did take one of the 30 sec geyser erruptions that looked good, and simply laid it on top and reduced the opacity of it until it let the star trails behind it somewhat ghost through. But I was really happy that when I tried this shorter one, that with it technically having more time with the geyser errupting that I didn't have to do any of that.
This is really sweet Jim. My only nit pick is the star trails themselves. The north star is just outside the frame and I feel that it would really help the overall comp. if you included it in the frame. Otherwise it's great, I really like the way the geyser is lit.
