I came across a Photoshop plug-in that looked very interesting, so I had a go with it.  The plug-in is called Flood and it is by Flaming Pear.    Using Flood it is possible to take a pretty nice picture of the moon and Venus in conjunction over a tree and turn it into a “wow” picture.

Flood allows you to control where the water horizon gets placed by percentage, the waveiness of the water, the angle/perspective, brilliance and other aspects of the picture.  It is a lot of fun and before long you will be flooding all sorts of subjects.  I included a few more samples below:

What is a star trail anyway?

Well, quite simply it is an effect that is shown on very long camera exposures at night where the stars form a line due to the rotation of the earth. Stars don’t stay in the same position all night, their apparent position changes due to the rotation of the earth and if you leave a camera shutter open long enough or take a series of images and “stack” them you will see the trails.

What equipment is needed?

• A tripod is a must.  You will need something to hold your camera steady for a long time (either single exposure or multiple stacked images)
• A camera is obvious, and a wide angle lens if possible
• A location to shoot.  Try to add foreground interest, shooting just the stars might turn out a bit boring.  If you are in the northern hemisphere try to aim towards Polaris (the north star), as it’s position remains constant even with the rotation of the earth
• A cable release.  You may need to shoot in bulb mode for a single very long exposure, or you may be able to shoot a series of images if you can put your camera in continuous shooting mode and lock the cable release.
• A battery grip or AC power supply.  On digital cameras the shutter is held open by power – so taking either a series of pictures or a single long exposure will chew through battery power.  An outlet to plug into if you go the AC power supply route – some people use AC adapters in their cars to plug into

What settings do I use?

I try to shoot with a wide open aperture and low ISO, what values this means depends on your model camera and lens.  As for shutter speed, that depends on how you are approaching the shot – will you take a single long exposure or take multiple images and stack them later?  If you are going to stack your images then you will probably want to go with a series of 20 second exposures – this is the maximum shutter speed for most cameras when using any mode other than bulb.  You don’t want to use the on camera flash and in most cases you won’t use any flash (sometimes people use flashes/strobes or even flashlights to light paint some object in the foreground (trees, grass, buildings, people, etc).

Once you have your settings set, your camera mounted on the tripod, your shot composed then use your cable release and you are off and running.  The picture above was 310 images stacked together using a program called Startrails (see http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html).  309 of the images were “light” frames – meaning they were exposed to the light.  The final image was a “dark” frame taken with the lens cap on at the end of the series.   Startrails will remove any hot pixels in the dark frame from the images (it save you time post processing).  Once you have the JPG out of Startrails then you can do any denoising or other adjustments needed using your post processing program.  The image above was edited using the GIMP and was denoised using the GREYstoration plugin.  I also made a levels adjustment to bring a bit more blue out in the sky.

Shooting star trails can be fun, give it a try and leave a comment with a link to your results or ask questions if this is unclear.

For my adventure I would travel to Peru and into the rain forest at Iquitos and travel down river to Manaus stopping frequently along the way to photograph the canopy of the rain forest, river life, wildlife and villages. I would also photograph logging and land clearing for agriculture to show the impact.

Deforestation of the rain forests is a major issue for our planet. Logging and the clearing of land for agriculture are two of the primary reasons for the deforestation. We all hear the stories on the news, but how much do we really pay attention? Since a picture says a thousand words my idea is to raise awareness using pictures. Estimates indicate that NINE THOUSAND species are going extinct each year, most of them due to the destruction of the rain forests.

I would like to publish the photographs as well as facts, figures, statistics on the Internet and in books. Hopefully I could include information or form a community to share information about what each of us can do to try to slow the destruction of the rain forests.

To vote for my idea please visit this site and click on the Pics link on the upper left or use the button below:

A few pictures from my previous trip to the rain forest are included below. Please forgive the quality, they were scanned in from prints.

•  
•  
•  
•  
•