Fun With Long Exposures

(click for larger image with star trails)

So I was at the Radiant Vista web site and I found that they also have tutorials there, including one on shooting pictures at night (55MB .mov file), which is cool since I have been thinking a lot about that sort of thing of late. The tutorial had a bunch of good ideas and inspired me to dig out my tripod and see what effect the sodium lights on my my street have on a really long exposure. This one was a tad over seven minutes long and sure shows up the accumulated pinkish light from the street lights. I used a tungsten white balance to cool things a tad. If you drop the temperature to 2000, the sky actually gets blue, although the foreground is still unnaturally yellow. Guess the remote shutter was a good purchase after all. If you look at the larger image you can see the stars tracking across the sky.