We went to Cloudland Canyon to do some stargazing, capture some star trails and do some portraits under the stars. We arrived late so that it would not take long before the stars came out. Armed with only a flashlight we went out to the outlook, to get a view of the canyon and the neighboring mountains. When we turned off the flashlight, it was pitch black, you couldn’t even see a few feet in front of you. In order to get a photo of the outlook, the camera was set at f5.6, ISO 400 and a shutter speed of 5 minutes! That’s equivalent to 10 minutes at base ISO and it was still dark.

Note: If the following photos look too dark, it could be your browser not rendering all the colors. Feel free to download the photos and view them in an image editor.

Cloudland Overlook

From there we went to start the star trails and these were also taken with a 5 minute shutter speed, meaning it took 5 minutes to take the picture.

Cloudland Star Trails

As you can see in the above photo, the clouds starting to roll in and clouds block stars. In conclusion; this can be considered a test run and we will finish the portraits at a later time, weather permitting.