New Year’s Star Trails

I wanted to see how fireworks would affect a star trails shoot, so I set up both my cameras in my backyard on NYE, facing opposite directions. So these were captured half in 2024/half in 2025.

Firework on star trails facing towards Polaris

Firework on star trails facing south-ish

Things I learned:
1 ) If you keep all the fireworks shots in your star trails stack… it will likely just blow out the image. Although one angle wasn’t as bad as the other.

Image with all fireworks layered in from the session

Image with all fireworks layered in from the session

2 ) Making a timelapse out of it really wasn’t that great of an effect. Ideally, you’d shoot more frames at shorter exposures for better timelapsing of fireworks… and slow that part down.

3 ) This took way too long to process everything, and I should have used my second week of PTO doing… literally anything else. 😅