The Monument - Warren House Inn 19th March 09

It has been a week or so since my last photo shoot when the snow had fallen on Dartmoor. Anyway for this shoot I decided to try another location near the Warren House Inn which featured an old cross carved into a Granite rock insitu, I considered the monument as a good composition for my star photography and headed up there on the evening of the 19th March to see what I could get.

I waited for night to fall and headed up to the location at around 9PM to set up my equipment and get ready for the very chilly night ahead as the temperature was expected to fall below freezing, but it didn't stop me in the search for an excellent photograph.

Unfortunately I do not have the original test shots I did for the composition but this diagram below gives an idea of how I composed the photograph:

I wanted the monument to point towards the stars above, but unfortunately when I got to the location, I realised that the cross detailing was facing West to East while the stone carving was very much a flat surface looking South to North which is the direction I need to face the rock and the stars above.

Due to the rock's close proximity to the main road, I had to compose the North Star to the right of the rock to try to avoid any lens flare from any oncoming headlamps, although I did expect the traffic flow to be minimal at this time of night.

Anyway as my composition was ready, but before starting a long exposure and after learning lessons from my previous shoot, I decided to run a few test shots and see how the photo would turn out by using higher ISO numbers.

The first test shot I did was at these settings:

Shutter Speed: 5 minutes
Aperture: f10
ISO: 1600

I do not currently have the sample image for this set-up but it did give me a good result, I could clearly see the stars above and they did begin to rotate around the monument within the five minutes the photo was taken for. From this example I decided to do the maths and set the camera up for a longer exposure this time, so here are the workings:

So I had a correctly exposed image at ISO 1600 for five minutes

ISO|Timescale
100 80 minutes
200 40 minutes
400 20 minutes
800 10 minutes
1600 5 minutes

With this information I could accurately choose an exposure time without the worry of it being over or under exposed, unless for an uncontrollable reason, the lighting changes, but for now I chose to go with ISO 200 for 40 minutes.

Why was this chosen?
I went with this option because the lower ISO number should result in less noise in the photograph and a much higher quality capture which is much clearer with longer star trails than the five minute exposure.

Noise can easily ruin a star trail photograph when shooting digitally as the camera tries to 'work out' the colour which is in dark areas of an image, although while doing this, the camera introduces patches of red, green and blue into areas that may have more light if shot on film, but should really be left as a dark patch in a digital file. However the effects of this can be reduced by shooting the image in a low ISO setting on the camera.

Anyway now it's time to see how the long term capture came out, here it is below:

Here is the result after 40 minutes of waiting, and here's my thoughts on the picture:

Lighting
The image itself is fairly under exposed but this can be rectified with a little bit of Photoshop work just to boost the exposure so the monument stands out but I also want the stars in the background to stand out with contrast bringing them out from the darkness of the sky behind.

Composition
I am happy with the composition in this image as it feeds the viewer's eye from the base of the monument up to the tip, which then points the viewer's eye towards the star trails and centre of the vortex.

I have given consideration to the composition as it is important for it to follow some form of rule rather than just feature stars and a foregorund subject, the two different parts of the picture need to link to each other and tell a story to the viewer.

I would have liked the monument to be facing the right way so the cross was evident, but this couldn't happen as the cross faces the wrong way and I could not move too far around the subject as the headlights in the photograph would have been too much of a distraction.

The car headlamps
These have been a basis for debate on this photograph as I have asked several people what their opinion is of having them in the photograph, in my own opinion I like the car headlamps in the photo as they show mans connection with the landscape, in both the car headlamps and also the stone carving which has been carved by man many years ago. But it also shows how we have almost no presence in outer space and that the sky above us is almost completely unknown to us, although we look up at it with familiarity in terms of seeing different constellations and the moon up there.

Development since the last photo shoot
Since the photo shoot on the 5th March near Hound Tor I have changed my approach to each photo shoot, I now make sure to shoot sample images initially as soon as I have composed the image I like, this then helps me to work out exactly how long a high quality exposure will take to expose.

I have also learned to take more care over the composition itself and make sure that my previous skill in daytime landscape photography come into this project to help me choose correct positioning for the foreground subject and the background, by using the 'Rule of Thirds' and also my own photograph skill.

The Rule of Thirds
A very simple photographic idea which basically means dividing up the composition into thirds, so you end up with two lines drawn horizontally and two vertically, evenly spaced, featuring parts of the images in each small portion. The important areas are where the lines cross as these areas signify good places to position subjects or lines/points of interest.