Prettyboy Nightscape
Open Edition
This was one of my surprise photographs. At the time I understood the basics of what I was doing but I had yet to try and capture a star trails image. So late one very cold winter night I set out for the darkest place I could think of close to home and ended up in the Prettyboy Reservoir in Baltimore County, Maryland. I set the camera up the best I knew how and pointed it north which just so happened to also be the direction of a bridge. For this shot I decided to take it as a single exposure. I left the shutter open for 21 minutes. During that time I danced around to try and stay warm, stared at the skies which were much darker then at my home in Timonium, and wondered how long to leave the shutter open for. When I closed the shutter and the picture showed up on my screen, I could not believe it! Not only did I have star trails, but the foreground was properly exposed too! I was too cold to try again for longer, and longer would have overexposed the foreground, so I happily packed up and headed back to the warmth of my car. This picture is one of the very early on images I captured and helped to solidify my love of photography. It also taught me to play with my camera and experiment which has really helped me out along the way.