Use the zoom in the night landscape

If you already have some classic long-exposure star streak shots in your portfolio, why not try something a little more ambitious, like this wonderful "blow-up" sky photo taken by Lincoln Harrison?

Although Photoshop was used to combine frames with each other, the effect itself was achieved in a very simple way, right when shooting a frame - it was enough to change the focal length of the lens during the exposure. Sounds simple, but to get stunning results, there is a trick that we will cover in a moment. “The sky image consists of four or five shots of different parts of the sky, taken at different scales (to get more streaks than if you took one photo), and they were combined using Photoshop's Lighter Blend Layer mode. “, says Lincoln. "I then overlaid the foreground photo onto this background image using an inverted mask."

Achieving smooth zooming in these types of photos requires a little more precision than usual.

Lincoln explains: “I set the shutter speed to 30 seconds and then sharpened the lens a bit before the exposure started. After about five seconds, I began to rotate the zoom ring, increasing the angle of view of the lens and restoring proper focus. The sharpening made one end of the stripes thicker, giving the impression that the stripes of stars radiate from a single point in the center of the image.

The biggest difficulty is keeping the camera position unchanged. I use a Gitzo Series 3 tripod, very stable but still a very difficult task. The same applies to rotating the focus and zoom rings at the appropriate speed. I usually repeat the whole process about 50 times to get four or five good shots.”

Start today...

• Shoot in manual mode and set your shutter speed to 30 seconds. To get a brighter or darker image, experiment with different ISO and aperture values.  
• Make sure your camera battery is fully charged and bring a spare battery with you if you have one; Constantly checking the results on the rear display at low temperatures drains the batteries quickly.
• If the enlarged star stripes are not straight, the tripod is most likely not stable enough. (Make sure the connectors on the feet are tight.) Also, try not to use too much force to rotate the rings on the lens.