From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Correcting night skies

Correcting night skies

From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Correcting night skies

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If you're shooting a night sky and you want star trails, you are always going to have a problem with the background of the sky, the ambient section of the sky, brightening up a lot. Here are two images that I shot in Eureka Valley, part of Death Valley National Park. Here's what I did without star trails, and then I did a 30-minute exposure with star trails. This one in the left here is about a one-minute-long exposure. And you can see that in addition to having a long enough exposure to capture wonderful smeary stars, it also really brightened up the background of the sky. And so it makes the star trails less impressive. They are kind of washed out by the ambient light in the sky, and a lot of that light is coming from the fact that the sun had set over here. You can see it right here. Just in case you're wondering, these streaks through this part of the image are airplanes that were flying by at the time. And notice here you can see the Milky Way. The Milky Way even shows up over…

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