You’ve seen photos of star trails, and time-lapse videos of stars, but how about a combination of the two? Olivier Martel created this beautiful 18-second video using a technique we’ve never seen before: stacking star trail photos into a time-lapse video showing the trails forming.

After capturing roughly 500 photos (25s, f/3.5, ISO1600) from midnight to 5am in Quebec, Canada, he used a popular star trail stacking program called Starstax. In addition to stacking all the images into one, he had the program save the intermediate images at each step. He then turned those images into the stunning video seen above. The finished (and fully stacked) image can be seen here.

Surf gear company Rip Curl recently teamed up with Time-Slice Films to make a video showing surfers in “bullet time“. Rather than use a giant DSLR rig, they decided to make a portable rig composed of 30 GoPro cameras.
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Photographer Lincoln Harrison captures jaw-dropping photographs of star trails. Shooting from the Australian outback, he spends up to 15 hours creating each image of the night sky. Shooting with a Nikon D7000, Nikon D3100, and a wide assortment of lenses, Harrison captures a large number of exposures of the foreground and stars separately. He then combines the images (sometimes hundreds of them) into amazing photographs showing the sky dominated by colorful star trails.
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Sophie Windsor Clive was canoeing on the River Shannon in Ireland when she came across one of nature’s most beautiful phenomenon: a murmuration of starlings. This is when vast numbers of starlings fly together in giant, cloud-like formations. Luckily for Sophie, she had her camera handy.
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This amazing photograph by Ricardo Mohr shows the volcano Puyehue-Cordón Caulle in southern Chile erupting this past June. After being submitted to National Geographic’s My Shot photo community, the photograph was selected as one of the magazine’s “Pictures We Love: Best of October.” You can download a high-res version to use as a wallpaper here.

Chile Ash Cloud (via Boing Boing via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Photograph by Ricardo Mohr

German photographer Heinz Maier only started doing photography last year, but his stunning photographs of water drop splashes are already taking the Internet by storm. By using a macro lens and colored filters, Maier makes tiny splashes of liquid look like intricate glass sculptures.
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Tumwater, Washington resident Nick Lippert captured this amazing photograph of Mt. Rainier casting a long shadow across low hanging clouds. It was shot at 7:40 in the morning using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3. Talk about being in the right place at the right time…

Check out the full-res version here (it makes for a great wallpaper). KOMO News also has a gallery containing more photos from this particular morning.

(via KOMO News via Discover via Coudal)

Photographer Samuel Cockedey spent a year photographing the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, Japan using his Canon 5D Mark II, and then created a time-lapse video set to music from the sci-fi film Blade Runner. Titled “Android Dreams”, the time-lapse is both a fitting tribute to Blade Runner and a beautiful portrait of Tokyo at night.

(via Laughing Squid)

Night photographer Ben Canales made this image by stacking together roughly 50 different exposures in order to show all of the star trails across the sky. Regarding the color seen in the stars, Canales writes,

The different colors of the star streaks are from the “temperature” of light that the stars burn at. Just like a candle gives and orange light, and a gas stove burns blue- the stars in our sky shine all different sorts of colored light.

A while back, we featured a video tutorial by Canales on how to photograph the night sky. Give that video a look, find a still lake on a clear night, and you can make one of these photographs yourself!

The “midnight sun” is a natural phenomenon that occurs in summer months near the Earth’s poles where the sun doesn’t set and is visible 24 hours a day. During these times, the sun travels horizontally across the horizon throughout the night, causing the landscape to be bathed in an extended “golden hour” light.

Back in June, photographer Joe Capra traveled across Iceland for 17 days, covering some 2,900 miles and capturing 38,000 photographs using two Canon 5D Mark IIs and a Canon 7D. He then combined the stills into this time-lapse video showing the beauty of that country during the midnight sun.

(via planet5D)