Goose Island Camping

Here are a few photos from camping at Goose Island in La Crosse, Wisconsin back in June.

Mississippi River

Sweet Emerson 

Becca's Fire Ring 

Star Trails

This star trail photo is a combination of two 11 minute exposures.  I was looking for a program on the internet that combines multiple star trail photos to create longer streaks, but actually found that doing it in Photoshop is really simple.  You just copy all of your shots into one and change the blending mode to Lighten--so simple!.  If you look closely you can see a small space between each star trail (especially the really bright one right by the trees.)  Of course I wish the space wasn't there, but I'm glad I was able to figure out where it came from--the space is a result of using long exposure noise reduction on my camera.  The camera took an 11 minute "blank" exposure after each actual exposure to reduce the noise you get with exposure times this long.  I'm not sure which is worse--excess noise or spaces between the star trails... guess it's something I can put on my to do list.  I shot in RAW+JPEG fine mode and used the RAW files, so I was able to reduce what noise I did find in CameraRAW.  Another thing I encountered with these shots is the awful purple corners I seem to get whenever I do long exposures.  I had heard this before, but looked it up to confirm--they're caused because your sensor gets hot during long exposures.  Not sure how to prevent it, but a little work with curves, layer masks, and vignetting made it a little better.  If you know of a better way to shoot or edit to solve this problem I'd love to hear about it.  By the way, the orange glow on the right was from a campfire across the road.  Not sure what they were putting in their fire, but it was HUGE!