Starry Night, Take Two

After playing around with some star trails a while back, I actually really liked it and wanted to do it more often. But as you can see in my previous photo, the stars were very dim, that was because my lens just wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the starlight. It turns out, though, that you can get lenses that are good enough for next to nothing. So here we are, one very cheap and surprisingly good lens later.

This picture what shot while I was staying in Sofia earlier this year. Nikolay convinced me to take him to this cute chapel he knew about, only about 25km away, in the small village of Plana. Unfortunately distance isn’t everything and the ride still took us about 45 minutes, but it was worth it!

We spend about half an hour setting up and two hours shooting. I ended up with about 170 photos of which roughly 140 were good enough. While our cameras were shooting, we waited in the warmth of the car. Even though the temperature outside was only a few degrees below freezing, it still felt cold after a while.

At one point we turned on the car to run the heating for a few minutes, and this alone already ruined two of my shots. It turns on that when you turn on a car, the lights go on as well… When you look carefully you can even see the gap those shots left after taking them out of the series.

Once we noticed the sun was getting up, our cameras had already been shooting the sunrise for about 10 minutes, another 20 shots that were unusable… That is actually the white glow you see at the horizon.

Another thing that, luckily, is not very visible is that the photos are actually a fraction out of focus. This was my first time trying a manual focus lens and it takes some finessing to get it right. This is the reason some of them stars look a bit bigger than they are supposed to be…

I hope you enjoy my photos as much as I do. If you do, why not follow me on Instagram: @jackoleenders. It will help me out greatly!