The Kaena Point Natural Area Reserve on Oahu, Hawaii is the number one place I go to take shots of the night sky. It’s the only area on the island with a relatively low light pollution. A few months ago, I created an image of some Laysan albatrosses under the night sky. It was really fun and I was satisfied with that image, however, a week later I went back to Kaena Point with another image in my mind. I wanted a picture of an albatross with star trails. There are two ways to create star trails: a single very long exposure or a stack of many shorter exposures blended into one. I chose the second way, because a very long exposure would have produced an awfully noisy image and I would have had to use a flash to get the albatross sharp without any motion blur, but I didn’t want to disturb the birds. Lastly, I took more than one hundred images and blended them into one. The first image was taken during twilight when there was enough natural light to expose the bird without using any artificial light. Then I waited for the complete darkness and started to take images of the night sky. I set up my camera for 30 sec long shutter speed with continuous shooting mode then locked my cable release and left my camera to do the work. I wanted to show about an hour long movement of the stars across the sky that resulted 114 images. These images were blended into one photo with an application called StarStax. This software stacks the pictures on top of each other to create an image with the star trails effect.

Gear: Canon EOS 7D camera, Canon 17-40mm F/4 lens, Manfrotto tripod