LockDown StarTrails

… has been an extraordinary time.  Unprecedented, universal, and yet unique, I suspect, for each one of us. 

The gravity of the pandemic is pretty clear.  And yet the reality is anything but: at a personal level, no one can really know the effect the virus may have specifically on them, their loved ones, or their friends. And at a professional level, the threat is existential, and very real.  In many lines of work, including our own, no one knows when or how, or even if, their workplaces will reopen, or how they might earn a living until they do.

And yet. And yet.  For someone who spends so much of their professional life travelling, the joy of being able, in fact forced, not to work and to stay at home with your loved ones has been in many ways an absolute blessing.

This kind of time is rare.  A chance to sit down and reflect, and concentrate on what you have.  As a good friend of mine has said : “We all need to pause.  And when we pause, things change.”

So.  This project came from a pause.  Enforced maybe, but a pause nevertheless.  Starved of contact with the natural world, apart from 45 mins or so exercise each day with our kids in our local park, I found myself instead making a connection with the only other natural phenomena within reach.   I made the film below using the inbuilt “StarStream” feature that’s part of pretty much all recent Pentax Cameras, which essentially blends together a bucketload of stills into one seamless HD stream.  If you can’t go out, go up.