Hey guys, first post!
I've been reading the forums for a little while and thought this would be a great place to try and find the solution to a problem I'm having.
I'm a student, doing a project on prisons. A photo I want to make is of the lights of the prison, to make them look like stars, but I want to do this in an experimental way, to give the photograph a look of the 'sublime'.
My idea at the moment is to print off a star chart from Stellarium (a planterium program) that shows the stars that would be viewed at a certain time from the exact location of the prison.
This would be printed onto a sheet of transparant plastic, and fixed into place on a sheet of photographic paper. I would then expose this paper at the exact time I entered into Stellarium to the lights of the prison, to turn the light pollution that the prisoners do see into the stars they can't.
What do you guys think of the idea? I've done some tests which have had varying degrees of success, but can't get the stars to be sharp on the paper at short exposures, and can't get enough tonal change in the 'sky' (I don't want an image on the paper, just a kind of black mass that looks like space, but with a tonal range - not solid black) at longer exposures.
Are there any types of paper you'd recommend? Or anything I could use to make the paper expose more slowly?
Do you think it will work? I'd really appreciate the thoughts of fellow photographers on this.
Thanks all.