Moke

It was pitch black, and I mean pitch black when I drove up the gravel road to reach this lake. Mountains cradle three sides of this place and if it weren't for the headlights of my car, I would've driven right into the lake. I couldn't see anything. I setup my tripod randomly to take a test shot and see what I had to work with.  I couldn't see the mountains on the other side of the lake.  I could only see a few stars and their reflections off the water. It wasn't until I took a 30 second shot that I could see the outline of the mountains beyond.  I also realized that I randomly had set up in a pretty good spot and it looked like the star trails could be really good in this area if I were to shoot a really long exposure.  Long exposures for star trails are really difficult to capture in one frame, but I decided to test my skills. I shot this one with an ISO of 100 at f2.8 with a 14mm lens for just over 15 minutes. Apparently, those were the right settings, because it came out phenomenally!  You can see the clouds in the sky that were passing were of varying thicknesses but the stars behind shone through nicely!