White Pine Lake

This post is coming like 2 months late because I had an entire month full of professional development and it killed my soul. Killed it so bad I didn't make it out shooting for the rest of the summer. And also, this particular trip was strenuous enough to make me lazy with the rest of my precious summer. ~sigh~

Anyway, these pictures are from a camping trip with my Dad up at White Pine Lake. We backpacked in about 4 miles, set up camp, had a grand old time, and didn't really ever go to sleep. I took a couple sets of star trail pictures, and while my camera was doing all the work automatically, I set a timer and crawled into my sleeping bag and talked with Dad. We left the rain fly off the tent, so we had a glorious view of the stars overhead. They're magical, I tell you. I never get tired of seeing them.

We'll start with those star trail pictures:


Dad is in the tent in the photo on the right--the little light is his Kindle. I'm probably in there too, actually. You can be pretty sneaky with star trail pictures--you light paint the first picture, and then set an intervelometer to snap pictures every so many seconds for a half hour. I used the foreground of the light-painted picture, and combined the background of about 40-50 images to create the star trail effect. Me sneaking back into the tent is totally invisible!

I also managed my first ever decent panorama! These are SO hard to do, especially in the dark--you have to just cross your fingers and hope that you're pointing the camera in the right direction, that your pictures are overlapping each other and that you're taking enough of them.



The rest of my shots were just simple Milky Way pictures. In some I attempted light painting (mostly failure--the interesting stuff was too far away for a flash light to illuminate it), but I ended up taking a lot of composites--take a picture of the sky, and then take a looooong exposure of the exact same thing to try to get some interesting foreground details. Then you combine the two images in Photoshop. The scenery was gorgeous out there, but it was SO dark, even the long exposures didn't capture much light.


And finally, our view of the stars out of the tent:



It was a fun little trip, even though I paid for it dearly for a couple weeks after--my back did NOT like carrying all that weight up and down a mountain. :P