This month’s Boston.com raw was “Motion”.   Admittedly, I had a lot of problems with coming up with something that was “Motion” – I tried several different things (slow shutter with moving objects), but they just didn’t work out and I was getting frustrated.

I’ve been reading Shutterbug magazine, it has some pretty cool articles, and I’m learning lots.   In reading one article about Astrophotography – I got my idea for this month’s theme:

Star trails!! It’s the ultimate motion shot.

What’s really neat is that this is a composite shot – made up of nine, four-minute shots at f7.1 ISO 200.

In researching how to do star trails, I found out that I can’t leave my shutter open long enough to capture star trails (most tell you to leave your shutter open for an hour or more).   I tested out my new Nikon D90 and it seems that the maximum shutter time is 20 minutes.

That being said, I read several articles and they ranged from four to six minute exposures.     I settled on four minutes, just because it was COLD out and I was impatient!

The post was done in Photoshop CS3 using Stacks, Smart Objects, and so forth.

I’m pretty happy with the result!   Let’s see if I make it into the top 50.

More to come!