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Description
Canon EOS 6D | EF 17-40 f/4L @ 21mm | 1813s | f/7.1 | ISO 400

The title to me is about our journey, here is a road perched on a cliff at the edge of an ocean underneath an even greater ocean that stretched on until the end of time. Never quite sure where that road will lead.

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After an evening photographing the coast of Big Sur in California, I headed back our hotel to relax and regroup for the next day of traveling (and photography of course). Knowing I was in an area far enough away from cities I became restless and had to get outside to try and photograph the sky.

After a few attempts at some 30 second or less exposures, I realized that the sky might not have been as dark as I wanted and the angle might not have been the greatest for getting good shots of the milky. Having never shot star trails before, I decided to give it a try.

I know the usual method is to take multiple shorter exposures and then perform some kind of blending of the exposures in post processing to get the star trails you want. Since I was not quite prepared for that, I decided to just go all out and start seeing how long I could push my exposures. After doing a few "short" 200-300 second exposures and checking the exposure level, I decided to stop down a bit, lower the ISO and go for some longer exposures.

I tried first an exposure that came to 1020 seconds. I could see the trails, but they were a bit short and the exposure was a bit dark. So I knew I wanted to shoot for about 30 minutes (1800 seconds). I started the exposure and waited, and waited, and waited, until the counter on the camera reached 1000 seconds and then ran out of digits and stopped counting. After waiting a while longer, I guessed about how long I thought it might have been and managed to only go over my 30 minute mark by 13 seconds.

So I present to you my first attempt at star trails, a single 30 minute exposure. There were a lot of hot pixels and a lot to clean up, but I am rather happy with the result and I hope you like it too!

Description
Canon EOS 6D | EF 17-40 f/4L @ 21mm | 1813s | f/7.1 | ISO 400

The title to me is about our journey, here is a road perched on a cliff at the edge of an ocean underneath an even greater ocean that stretched on until the end of time. Never quite sure where that road will lead.

----------------------

After an evening photographing the coast of Big Sur in California, I headed back our hotel to relax and regroup for the next day of traveling (and photography of course). Knowing I was in an area far enough away from cities I became restless and had to get outside to try and photograph the sky.

After a few attempts at some 30 second or less exposures, I realized that the sky might not have been as dark as I wanted and the angle might not have been the greatest for getting good shots of the milky. Having never shot star trails before, I decided to give it a try.

I know the usual method is to take multiple shorter exposures and then perform some kind of blending of the exposures in post processing to get the star trails you want. Since I was not quite prepared for that, I decided to just go all out and start seeing how long I could push my exposures. After doing a few "short" 200-300 second exposures and checking the exposure level, I decided to stop down a bit, lower the ISO and go for some longer exposures.

I tried first an exposure that came to 1020 seconds. I could see the trails, but they were a bit short and the exposure was a bit dark. So I knew I wanted to shoot for about 30 minutes (1800 seconds). I started the exposure and waited, and waited, and waited, until the counter on the camera reached 1000 seconds and then ran out of digits and stopped counting. After waiting a while longer, I guessed about how long I thought it might have been and managed to only go over my 30 minute mark by 13 seconds.

So I present to you my first attempt at star trails, a single 30 minute exposure. There were a lot of hot pixels and a lot to clean up, but I am rather happy with the result and I hope you like it too!