I took this photo as part of an internal Carrick Camera Club competition – The theme was “Motion”.
I had experimented with a few different concepts but I thought the imposing and impressive Reginalds Tower might be a nice subject. I took 3 Bulb exposures each at about 45 seconds each. The exposures were -2 0 and +2 and were merged in Photoshop as a HDR.
Next, Star Trails… These were taken over a period of a few hours. Made up of something between 8 and 10 Bulb exposures taken at about 30 mins each thanks to a shutter release cable. The exposures were then merged into 1 image to create a star trail image.
Finally the 2 images, the HDR and the Star Trails were merged in Photoshop in 2 different layers. Cutting around the buildings with a bit of feathering (which in retrospect could have been done a bit better … but it was late) it looks like the star trails were captured at the same time as the trails from the cars.
The resultant image is shown above.