Normally I wouldn't blog about what I consider to be one of my failures but not everything is bad about what I attempted here.

On the last night of my vacation I was graciously allowed to stay on the property of an old friend. I had planned to do a star trail shot sometime during the trip since I'm not away from big city lights too often but I wimped out during the actual camping because of mosquito attacks. In Keremeos, however, the climate is dry and there happened to be quite a wind storm kicking up so I thought nothing about going a few steps from the cabin and setting up a long exposure.

An advantage of taking only manual cameras with me is that all of them could work without batteries and so I could leave them on indefinitely if I wanted to. Also the two 35mm cameras are not worth a sniff so I don't think anything about leaving them out at night alone while I go back inside to finish off a good book. Setting up a night exposure is also easy in theory. You frame the shot with a wide angle, focus to infinity, anchor the tripod and start the exposure. Come back when you feel like it. So then, what didn't work?

Remote shutter release fail

One of my first challenges was technical. I had purchased a remote with lock for the expressed purpose of doing a long exposure but it promptly came apart once connected to the camera (I'll be returning that in pieces to Leo's). Fortunately, I had a backup one that I had thought would be too flimsy but turned out to do an admirable job. After wasting two frames because the first shutter release failed, I was able to make use of the final two frames of the roll.

Cloudy skies begone!

My second challenge was that a quickly moving weather pattern had obscured the sky when night fell. I was super bummed at this at first and decided I would just take pictures of my girlfriend as she fell asleep but then an hour after becoming bored I went outside and voila, stars! So challenge three overcome.

Wind challenge

Third challenge, however, came with the weather system. A rather loud wind storm had begun to shake the trailer we were staying in. Outside the weather vane was rattling and bits of junk were being thrown about the side of the building. Could a camera with a tripod withstand that?

Again, I decided that my cheap camera was worth sacrificing if I could get one or two shots out of it. First thing was to properly anchor my tripod. The Benro tripod that I bought this spring to replace my Slik sticks has so far proven to be a good buy. One of the features that helped me out this night was a hook on the underside of its center column that you can hang heavy objects on. So to anchor the tripod I hung my camera bag filled with stuff. Then I counted on the length of the exposure to even out any jitters that might shake the shot. When you leave the shutter open for more than an hour, any little shake will not amount to anything.

Aperture, grain, depth of field

With these early challenges overcome I then had time to set up two exposures. I decided I didn't want to leave it open all night since I didn't want to have to wake up in the middle of the night to shut it off so I decided on two shorter exposures.

My first exposure I left open for around fifty minutes. I'm not showing it here because -- as it turns out -- I didn't open up the aperture wide enough in that length of time to show much of anything besides the side of the building. I had set it at f/8 because in my head, f/8 has deep depth of field and I didn't want to leave out any details. I should really have given my own head a shake because, hello, I'm shooting with a Zenitar 16mm fisheye lens and it hardly matters, everything is in focus.

The second exposure that I show up top is f/8 for 1.5 hours. I also by accident managed to get the north star into it (my astro sense is very poor) and both sides of the valley. With the longer exposure I was able to get in some nice rotation in the star trails but this certainly does not match what was in my head.

For one, f/8 really didn't show as much of the stars as I wanted. Even so, I could have left it on for more time and gotten more rotation, but then the noise of the Sensia 200 would become more intolerable. As I already wrote before, I really do not like the noise that Sensia 200 has; something that is compounded by the length of the exposure. In the future, I will choose a much lower ISO film (since speed is not important for long exposures) and certainly not expired film.

So, some mixed results but a valuable learning lesson.

I'm leaving the best until last for my next post: medium format and the wonders of Ektar 100.

Update

I got much better results here with Fuji T64 tungsten film.