Bonsai Trails

*Bonsai Trails* The past few days where pretty awesome. It started Saturday with a night workshop in Bodie Ghost Town with +Jeff Sullivan. Then I car camped just outside of Bodie to go back in morning when they opened. From there I decided to head to Lake Tahoe to go to Bonsai Rock, which has long been on my bucket list. I got there around 5:30 so I had plenty of time to kill. I still can't believe I carried my 4 bags, at once, down the steep hill to here! Was well worth it. So after kicking back and having a few beers I decided to set up. I shot sunset, which was decent and then waited for it to get a bit darker to start some more timelapses and do this star stack. *About This Shot* Canon 5D MK III Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L II ISO 3200 f/2.8 25 Second Shots +Induro CT214 Tripod Getting a shot like this take lots of time and patience. In total it is 180 images stacked which mean it took around 126 minutes or 2 hours and 6 minutes. I then also took a 127 second shot to get a better foreground. Which still could be better in my opinion, next time! *Processing* I processed one of frames in Lightroom 5 and synced them all together. I then exported them as jpg's to a folder. I use a free program called StarStax (http://bit.ly/11f5YAT) I dragged the images to to program and clicked go. BUT WAIT, what about all those pesky plane trails! Alright this part sucked. I went into my folder of images and went through every single frame and highlighted it if I saw a plane trail, even meteors. Like this for example (http://cl.ly/image/3f0B1o1c2k28) This takes a bit of time but it was well worth it for the end result. After an hour of so of that nonsense, I re did the stack and was a lot happier. Now you probably have a shot with decent trails but a terrible foreground. I brought that 127 second shot I took, the new star trail shot and masked them together using photoshop. Then a few minor adjusted and it was time to post! #photography #googleplusphotos #plusphotoextract #starrynights #startrails #stars #laketahoe