Sparkling Twilight

Yes, another photograph from sparks lake. I was sitting around the campfire when I noticed the cool lenticular clouds over South Sister so I forced myself to take a few long exposures. Im not too good at them and I made some mistakes. The shot is slightly out of focus, it was underexposed so when I upped the exposure in ACR noise was a problem.

I stil liked how it looked so I thought I would share it.


30D, 17-40L, "cheap tripod" and cable released. Exposure of maybe 80-100 seconds.

Thanks for looking

I think it looks great, especially the stars reflecting in the water.

Thats pretty cool! Just for future reference...you'll have to keep the exposures under 30 seconds to avoid star trails.

Thanks for the tip Eric. So I assume I would either have to get a lens with a larger aperture or increase the ISO to get it exposed correctly and without star movement?

That would be correct. I like the image as-is, minus a few noise issues being apparent. I would add that you really can't avoid star movement in all situations, if desired. Depends on what the light levels are, really. Noise would be too big of an issue above ISO 200 or so, and cancel out any benifits offered by the shorter exposure.

Very cool image Khristian! Besides the visible noise, this is a killer shot. I don't mind the star movement, they show up more prominently this way.

Nice image

I like it with the trails myself. Kind of looks like a million shooting stars. yeah, I suppose the noise ain't helpin' any, but it's still a really nice image.