The Sun, The Moon and the Stars

At the end of a full on but very enjoyable day yesterday I went to Wheal Owles at Botallack with Bob Sharples to catch the sunset and clear night skies over the classic coastal mine engine house.

We arrived in time to catch the sun dipping to the horizon which turned the engine house and coast line into a dramatic silhouette.

We then spent some time setting up the engine house stack to line through with the pole star and as darkness fell we played around with various forms of internal lighting to highlight the entrance and windows.

With cameras and lighting set up we then settled down to complete 180 x 30sec exposures to create a stacked star trail in post production later.

As we were leaving around midnight the crescent moon was dropping in the sky behind the mine with Wheal Edward adding its presence in the background to complete the scene.

Summer weekend

It has been a super hot weekend here in Cornwall,  Ours was a busy one with Heathers end of college year exhibition opening on Friday evening and lots of visits with family and friends visiting us over the weekend,  But I still managed some very early sunrise images from St Michel's Mount harbour and sunset images around the Botallack coastline and topped them off with two night time star trail composits at the same location,

Wheal Prosper Star Trail

This image of Wheal Prosper near Rinsey car park was taken between 11pm and 0.40 am on what was a clear dark night without any moonlight. The only artificial light used came from my mobil phone torch within the picture composition and was captured on a single time exposure of thirty seconds.  The star trail is formed by 188 registered thirty second images which have been stacked and merged along with the first image using Startrail 2.3 software The total exposure time was one hour forty minutes,  I love the challenge of producing an interesting image in such dark conditions and in this particular image the aim was to seek out the northern pole star so as to place the axis point over the top of Wheal Prosper chimney stack. There is a crank in the star trail registration as I had to wipe away early morning due collecting on my 14-24mm wide angle lens optics part way through the exercise but I can live with that  rather than a fogged image  It is now 3.45am and way past time I was in bed   Good Night!