Another idea I had was that I could show the effect of time in my images by using the most important tool I already had – my camera! The longest exposures I had done so far were those of about 5 seconds of the moving water in the last shoot, but I wanted to challenge myself even further by trying to capture the stars in the night sky. I knew that this would involve a much longer shutter speed and of course my tripod, and that maybe it was a big challenge with a chance of failing, but nevertheless I wanted to give it my best shot, and I had always aspired to take beautiful photographs of the stars and the wonders of nature!

I did my research before the shoot and found out that an exposure of around 20 seconds or more would be ideal to capture the light coming to earth from the stars. With this in mind as a starting point, I was then able to figure out the correct aperture and ISO based around this. I chose another local location called Tegg’s Nose, as I knew this would be the perfect place to access by car with a sturdy car park to place my tripod, and is probably the closest place to home away from the majority of light pollution and therefore safest to access in the early hours of the morning, when the sky would be the most clear and the majority of lights would be out as people slept. The biggest challenge I found during this shoot was focusing the camera; I experimented with both autofocus and manual focus, but it was impossible to find a star to focus on with my camera facing vertically upwards towards the sky, and the sky completely black on the viewfinder. To resolve this, I faced the camera towards the hills where I could still capture the night sky and the stars in the top half of the image, with some landscape and nature in the bottom half and the moon as my main focal point. This gave the images some foreground interest, adding depth and layers so there are more elements for the viewer to see and keep them intrigued. Although most of my images were out of focus, it was fun to keep experimenting and figuring out how to resolve the issues that I faced. I attempted to use the car headlights and the torch on my phone to find a focal point, but unfortunately these did not work. Next time I would take along a speed light to illuminate the elements in the foreground. I was also advised by Dave while editing and printing post-shutter that the gradual change in colour along the horizon line was in fact caused by light pollution from the nearby towns and city of Manchester, and that the reason the printed versions with an orange/red colour temperate were of poor quality with lots of noise, was because the red colour channel holds more noise. Whereas the prints with a blue colour temperate were a lot clearer with vastly reduced noise, because the blue colour channel does not hold noise in the same way. This was very useful knowledge to apply to the printing process and any future shoots of this nature.