77/365 Different Flavors

Well this image came in a few different flavors...

A practice star trail shot taken in my back yard last night. About 190 30 second exposures stacked. Done partly to test the new 14mm Rokinon lens with star trails ready for the Joshua Tree trip next month.

While a few of the exposures were running I also did a little light painting on the house and the trees with my new 2 million candle power spotlight, its a bit of overkill on things close to you but its works pretty well.

I processed the images in several ways. The plain stacked shot including light painted house and trees and lines from passing airplanes, the light painting but with the airplane trails processed out and a version with no light painting and no airplane trails. I also varied the white balance in a few versions to change with sky color and tried a few different crops that focused on just the trees and a portion of the lights.

Several different versions can be seen via the link below...

To me different versions of the shot tell different stories.

A plain star trails shot with with no house and no plane trails just tells the story of the earth turning causing the stars to appear to rotate overhead.

The house and/or the airplane trails add human story to the shot... while the world turns human life goes on regardless. People to not see the rotation of the stars as they get along with their lives.

I have a different version of this shot that I took a while back. It had the plane trails and the house was not lightpainted but the light in the room upstairs was switched on. I felt this added to the story, the world turns while we live our lives unaware of such an amazing thing happening, we hurtle through space spinning but we rarely if ever consider this fact. I entered the shot into a competition on Motion at our local camera club. I titled the image "As the World Turns", I thought it told the story of people being inside the building and time was moving, the world was turning with the people inside unaware... I guess the judge didnt see my story because other than liking the image his thought was it may be better if the house was cropped off the shot or at least switch the light off... Well that would have eliminated the idea of the story... oh well.

The images of the different flavors can be found in this album on my Google+ page.

Oh yeah... This one is the house light painted and the plane trails removed.