One of my favorite places to take pictures is at the Cana Island lighthouse in Door County, WI and my favorite time to shoot there is at night when the stars are out.

Due to it’s low population, Door County offers a unique chance to clearly see the stars without so much of the light pollution that they rest of the state has is it is conveinently close to bigger cities such as Green Bay and Appleton. Because of this I try to go up there several times a year to get some night time pictures.

I recently purchased a new tripod with an additional arm on it that allows me to attach a phone to the tripod. This allows me to use the phone as a time lapse timer and take 100s of photos over the course of the night. With this ability, I can create time lapse images and also do star trail photos such as the one here.

Location

This photo was taken at the Cana Island Lighthouse near Baily’s Harbor in Door County, WI. I was up in Door County for the evening taking pictures for work so I decided to stop here on the way home since it was a clear night out. I didn’t run into any other photographers while here which was nice. The land bridge out to the island was covered in snow and ice so I didn’t get my feet wet heading out there either.

Composition

I just learned how to do star trail photos so the first thing to do is find the north star also known as Polaris. The best way to find this is to find the Big Dipper, then from the end of that constellation, it points towards the north star. Once you find that, you need to line it up with something interesting which in this case I used the lighthouse. The North Star is helpful as all other stars in that area of the sky rotate around it giving it this cool look. Originally I wanted to line the top of the lighthouse with this star, but I ran out of room to do so as there was a tree near me so I opted for this composition.

For this photo I took 100 exposures at a 25 second shutter speed with my Sigma 14mm f1.8 lens I just picked up this fall. I let it run for about an hour.

Post Processing

The nice thing with star trail photos I’m finding is they take a little less work for post processing than my normal Milky Way photo workflow. Those photos tend to take between 4-8 hours while these was closer to 4 hours. The hardest part I’m finding is making good selections in Photoshop. I’ve just started doing more Photoshop-only editing and am still figuring out how best to do things in there.

To start with this photo, I imported all the photos to Lightroom, exported them to Photoshop, stacked them on top of one another and then set their layer blending mode to ‘lighten’. This will magically make the light trail effect happen, it’s really that easy!

After that I started making selections between the sky, ground and lighthouse which was the hard part. After that I did a lot of tweaks to those regions of the photo with contrast, white balance and saturation.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Raya Pro

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

Focus Stacking

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