Time lapse video of this image being created
This is the first in a two-part series that I’ll be sharing today and next week, and also the first time I have ever taken (or even attempted) a star trails picture. Hence the series :) But first, as I sometimes do here on Weekly Fifty, a bit of background.
Every year my family goes on vacation at Milford Lake, Kansas, to spend a few days playing at the beach, swimming in the pool, roasting marshmallows, fishing, and staying up way too late to catch up on life. It’s always a good time and something my wife, our kids, and I look forward to every summer. I always come home with a boat-load of pictures including several that have been featured here on the blog, but this year I wanted to try something a bit different. In addition to pictures I wanted to get some videos of the kids playing, tubing, and generally just enjoying their time together but I don’t really have a camera that is equipped for that sort of thing. My DSLRs are all great for still images but awful for video, at least when the subjects are moving anyway. My iPhone I guess, but for this year’s vacation I wanted something that would get a whole new perspective. I wanted video clips of the kids (not just ours, but all the nieces and nephews too) that were up close and personal, not taken from a dozen yards from the safety of the shore or deck of the pool. Most modern smartphones are waterproof, or at least water resistant, but one wrong move and you lose the whole thing—not just pictures and videos, but emails, messages, apps, and the rest. The solution? A GoPro.
I have never owned an action camera before so, like any modern tech enthusiast, I researched the dickens out of these boxy little wonder-cameras and concluded that the newest model, the GoProHero 12 Black, would work just fine. And my goodness, did it ever work. My wife and I were able to basically just let the kids have at it without worrying at all. We let the kids take the GoPro with them everywhere and didn’t think twice about whether it might get dinged or damaged while they were able to get incredible video clips that we have never even considered capturing until now. (To be fair, we also bought a clear plastic case for the camera just for added peace of mind which also helped with overall durability.)
So what does that have to do with this week’s photo? Well, it turns out the GoPro has a built-in Star Trails mode. All you have to do is put it on a tripod, tell it when to start recording, and come back in the morning. That’s it. As long as you have a good view of the sky you’re going to get something cool, and this week’s image is the result of my first such experiment. It’s a three-hour time lapse that the camera stitched together from a series of 30-second exposures, and it shows a bit of context like the lake, some trees, and even the roof of the cabin in the corner. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it was certainly a good starting point and gave me a lot to think about for the next night’s attempt. And the fact that I was able to get this not on a big expensive DSLR or Mirrorless but on a tiny action camera that fits in my pocket just kind of blew my mind. I do think you could probably do something similar on a mobile phone with the right camera software, so I’m not trying to say that this picture is incredibly unique or special, but it was a first for me and gave me a lot of ideas for what else I might be able to capture…
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