Star Trails: Yosemite NP

For my birthday I decided I wanted to spend the weekend camping in Yosemite National Park. It's what I did last year, and I find that communing with nature, drinking beer and smelling like a campfire are just the things to ease the sting of becoming another year older. 

This year specifically I was looking forward to trying my hand at photographing star trails. They are basically just photos where you leave the shutter open for a really long time, so the stars produce "trails" as they move across the sky. (Well, actually it's us that are moving, but you get what I mean.)It's hard to do in the city because the ambient light gets in the way, but nighttime in high Sierra is perfect!

 It took quite a bit of preparation to get everything ready. I had to buy a special clicker that plugs into my camera and allows me to snap photo's without touching the actual camera and shaking it. I had to do quite a bit of research on line about the settings for my specific camera, and I had to stay up late to actually take the photos. Finally, and this was the most trying of all, I had to be PATIENT, while I waited to see if all my effort worked! I took a total of 6 photos,but only two came out. Two didn't work because I was too impatient. One was because I didn't have the right setting, and one was because some other campers walked right in front of my camera while I was in the middle of a photograph and their flashlight washed the whole thing out. But I am so pleased with the couple I got that I don't really mind the rest. And maybe that's how photographing star trails goes? Anyway, here they are!

(The light on the trees is from all the camp fires that were scattered all around.)