All Day I Dream About Photography

Picture by Antoine Khater

Introduction

Star trails photography is at the same time easy and rewarding, it can produce results that will leave most viewers in awe with very little effort.
I will try to cover in this article the basic photography technique and equipment needed for star trails photography.

Understanding how does a light meter work can make the difference between a poorly exposed picture and keeper. Unfortunately, a lot of people nowadays just rely on their cameras without taking the time to understand the basics. So they end up frustrated by the “poor results” of their camera.

So what is a light meter ?

In short, a light meter is a device that is sensitive to light who’s basic job is to balance an equation.
You typically give the light meter 2 out of 3 variables (ISO, shutter speed, aperture) and it will give the correct 3rd variable to get a well exposed picture of the given scene.

I’ve been a Canon user ever since my first DSLR and one of the things that always frustrated me is the uselessness of the LCD to evaluate the sharpness of your pictures.

In fact on the back LCD if you try to zoom while reviewing a picture it will quickly becomes pixelated and blurry. No need to tell you my deception when I was trying a friend’s Nikon and noticed the picture was perfect even after a 10x zoom and he could easily check if it was sharp or not.

Sensor dust is probably one of the worst nightmares of DSLR owners. Manufactures are trying hard to solve this problem with the introduction of “auto sensor cleaning” features in the newest bodies like the Canon EOS 40D or 450D.
Sensor dust will show in pictures as dark spots that will appear constantly at the same place and will be more pronounced at small apertures.

As of today there is no “dust free” solution for DSLR cameras yet, the sensor will accumulate dust over time and you can either learn to live with it or clean it regularly, however some precautions could considerably reduce this problem.

By definition a silhouette picture is an image where a dark foreground is outlined against a lighter background.
This type of photography is usually achieved by placing your subject in a bright scene and let your camera meter for the background e.g. A person at sunset. The resulting image will be a black, usually without details, focal point that is outlined in a well exposed scene.

For your inspiration and pleasure here is a collection of 13 of the best silhouette pictures that can be found at flickr under the Creative Common License.