Startrail at Misikaba, Eastern Cape, South Africa

I was planning to do a star trail photo this weekend, but the weather did not agree, so the closest I could get to star trail, was looking at some of my previous star trails.

This one specifically was quite a challenge to create, as I did it on the beach which is known to fog up the lens (with salt spray!). I checked the direction of the wind and as it was coming from the inland area, I decided to go ahead.

It is a 1-hour exposure (to be more precise, the EXIF data shows 3679 seconds). Doing such a long exposure photo, one needs to switch on the "long exposure noise reduction" in camera. This will add the same amount of time as the actual exposure time. Thus, for a photo like this one needs enough battery power for a two-hour photo. And my battery did not make it in this case. The end result was a very noisy photo. I had to do some serious noise reduction in post-processing and eventually reverted to a monochrome version as it looked a bit better.

This is my long exposure photo for the week.