This is an image that I’ve had in mind for a while but hadn’t actually remembered to go shoot.

The trick with this is that you can’t just open the shutter for a long period of time, like 30 minutes. If you were to do that, the light pollution from the city would eventually over power the stars and you’d have nothing but a glow of city light and very few stars.

So how do we do this? Well to start you’re going to need either a body capable of interval shooting or a cable release with a shutter lock. Once you’ve got one of those, you’re going to need to shoot a LOT of images, all at the same settings, over the course of 20-30minutes (or longer really, longer the better).

Once you’ve got your 100 or so images, each a long exposure, you’ll be combining them in Photoshop to form one image, like the one below.

The spinning stars above the city of St. John's

This image is made from 95 images, each 30 seconds in length at f/2.8 ISO200. Body: Nikon D3 and 24-70 lens, cropped to 8×10, shot from Cape Spear, Newfoundland

In this photo you can see the stars which make up the big dipper, planes landing at St. John’s International Airport (CYYT), a boat going out to sea, the car lights from Signal Hill, Fort Amherst and the East End of St. John’s.