Star Trails at the Sugar Hill Lupine Festival

On Saturday, I went to Sugar Hill, NH to teach a workshop on night photography. Members of the South Shore Camera Club spent the weekend in Sugar Hill, photographing the beautiful Lupine Festival.

The focus of the night photography workshop was flashlight painting and star trails. We spent some time in the afternoon discussing various techniques and tips. In the evening, we applied the techniques in the field.

I was able to make a few images during the workshop. The star trail image is a composite of more than one hundred 30 second images. I had shot 3 hours worth of images, but clouds moved in for the last hour and a half, covering up the star trails in the lower half of the sky. So in the end, I only used an hour of images to make this photo.

I also blended the foreground flowers from one image on top of the composite, because there was a very slight breeze that forced the lupine to sway, making them appear out of focus in the composite. All told, this image took about ten hours of work, but I had a lot of fun making it!

The other image is an example of flashlight painting. As a team, we lit up the scene before us, with multiple flashlights for a single 30 second exposure. Flashlight painting is one of my favorite techniques. It is a lot of fun and you can easily make unique and beautiful images by painting with your flashlight. I'd like to thank the SSCC and my friend Carol for arranging to have me teach this workshop. I truly enjoyed meeting and working with everyone!