Here is the very first star trail I have ever taken. I'm really pleased with it - not because its a great image - but because the story behind its acquistion is one of persistence and perserverence.
Let's jump in and unpick the story behind it.
Location: Wembury Beach in South Devon - the building is the old Mill House owned by the National Trust
Image details:
- 90 x 30" lights with 2" interval between photos
- ISO 800
- F/2.8
Equipment:
- Astromodded Canon 800D
- Samyang 14mm F/2.8 mm lens
- Benbro Mach 3 Carbon fibre tripod
- Joby Gorillapod 5Kg ball head
- one power bank for dummy camera battery
- one power bank for dew band heater
- Neewer dew band heater
Issues on the night:
- car lights from cars entering and exiting the car park above the mill house
- red head torch glow from other astrophotographers visiting the site
- facing a direction and part of the sky which had regular plane traffic crossing it
So, where does the persistence/perserverence part come into the story?
I used two programs to obtain the image - STARSTAX and AFFINITY PHOTO v1.
A straight starstax of the original, unedited files, gave me this image:
It is straight out of my astromodded camera and has some sort of artistic merit I am sure. The Andy Warhol image of the astrophotography world! 😉
What I wanted to do was to batch edit the 90 photos in one go in Affinity photo - simple things - quick edits - so that I could just try Starstax:
- white balance adjustments
- colour adjustments
- contrast adjustments
- shadows and highlights adjustments
- sharpness and noise adjustments
The first step - batch editing the 90 RAW files and converting them into TIff files for Starstax - went off without a hitch.
And then I descended into a three hour long hell - Dante's pit deepest level stuff.
Affinity Photo would record a macro of the adjustments I made on one of the photos but wouldn't then send it to the library so that I could then batch apply the changes to all the other images.
In desperation - I asked 'CoPilot' for help.
Three hours later.........
CoPilot suggested all sorts of fixes - none of which worked.
It gave me alternative methods - none of which worked.
Between every new suggestion it - reassured me that it wasn't my fault. It assured me that the next fix was the one that would work immediately. It thanked me for my patience and reminded me again (and again, and again....and again) that none of this was my fault.
At the end of three hours - it told me that this was a known fault with affinity photo version one and so there was nothing I could do about it! And thanked me for my patience!
No, seriously, that was its parting message to me. I didn't mind the trying of the different fix approaches - that was fine - a problem solving step by step approach. Up for that.
It was the condescending claptrap - lines of it - between each fix which drove me up the wall. It was like a parent trying to sooth a stroppy toddler or teenager. All praise, all support - "not your fault, you are such a good boy waiting so patiently and dont worry I will definitely fix this for you - you need to do nothing!"
For Pete's sake! 😠ðŸ˜
Lessons learned:
- Know when to bail out on CoPilot
- after doing the basic edits - take time to do some masking - so that the foreground detail is drawn out further - and the sky stars are enhanced
- some good noise reduction and clarity work on the sky and stars
