Loading…
14
Warning: your star trails are fake and a guy at a dark sky meetup in Utah called mine out
Two years back I drove out to a dark sky event near Moab with about 20 shots I was proud of. An older guy with a beat up tripod looked at my best one for maybe 10 seconds and asked if I stacked it. I said yes, 40 frames at 20 seconds each. He just nodded and said "so it's a picture of your software, not the sky." That one stung for a week. The thing is, he was right. I was getting perfectly smooth arcs with zero gaps and calling it astrophotography when really I was hiding a bad polar alignment behind a stacking program. So I changed two things. First, I started doing single long exposures again, even ugly ones, and posting those next to the stacked version so people could see the difference. Second, I dropped my ISO and pushed my exposure time until the trailing showed up on purpose, because that trail is the actual record of the earth turning. Turned out my mount drift was worse than I thought and I never would have caught it with the stacking crutch. Has anyone here gone back to unstacked frames after leaning on software for a while, or am I just being a snob about it?
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.