Stunning starscapes and timelapse

126 images of Mt Bromo in Indonesia

Malaysian photographer Grey Chow has a passion for night landscapes and a gift for capturing them.

Grey Chow’s work has been splashed over the BBC in recent days, so there’s a chance you might have already seen it. If so a) it’s worth looking at again b) it’s worth giving his own website a bit of traffic love by heading to his own galleries at http://greychow.com and c) it’s interesting the way he does it.

“I was making a timelapse photograph, with at least a two hour shoot,” he writes of the above pic. “Though I am actually framing the shoot with a star trail composition in mind, in the end I have a timelapse video and a star trail photo: one stone kill two birds.”

You can see what he means via the video below.

So, a Sony a7s II or something? Not a bit of it.

The image for the star trail is comprised of 120 photos taken with a Nikon D610, with each photo taken at 16mm focal length, ISO 4,000, f2.8 and 25 seconds shutter speed. For the foreground, he took 5 exposures bracketing at 16mm focal length, ISO 1,000, f4 and shutter speed from 4 seconds to 60 seconds. He also took another extra shot using 240 seconds shutter just for the light trail.

The star trail image is blended together in Photoshop, decreasing the opacity for each layer to get the ‘meteor’ effect. This is then merged with a pre-dawn ‘base layer’ photo, which also uses a -2 exposure to recover the overexposed area. There is then a lot of clean up work in post: the details which you can read here.