Having spent the better part of the last 14 years between Montreal and Ottawa, I had yet to visit Algonquin park. That is, until this week-end. I badly needed to get out and do some snowshoeing/shooting, so I emailed a buddy of mine to head out there for the week-end. After a fairly unsuccessful day of shooting (not really the best of the year), Christoph and I had a surprisingly nice  dinner at the Mad Husker (also a good and cheap place to stay) and thought that we hadn’t had enough shooting so we headed back to the park to get some star trail shots. Earlier, I had spotted a nice little stream that could potentially serve as a decent foreground so we decided to go looking for it. Darkness being what it is, I couldn’t find the darn thing to save my life, but in the process had a really cool -though scary- encounter with moose cow! My first moose encounter in 13 years, couldn’t believe it. Christoph, who hails from South Africa and is used to huge mammals, had just been telling me that he wasn’t impressed with moose in general…but at the sight of this specimen, all he could scream was “holy cow, this is HUGE” (or some sort of variation on the theme- anyone notice how I like using parentheses? Well, if you haven’t, I really like parentheses…not sure why…anyhow…). So, no stream, near miss with a moose, what do we do? The ranger station at the entrance of the park had these sexy sodium lights in the parking lot, so I suggested we stop there and try to use that light to paint the trees a nice glowing orange. So there we were, two freaks standing in the middle of a freezing parking lot, seemingly shooting in the dark. It was fun to see Christoph use his bulb mode without a remote release…no gloves, minus too much, pressing on a button for minutes and minutes at a time! The funniest part was when after about 10 min, he realised he actually had just locked his mirror and not released his shutter at all!! It was really my first serious shot at star trails, and while there wasn’t a lot we could play with (we were essentially limited to one composition), I have a couple of shots I am pretty pleased with. I tried several parameters: iso3200, f/2.8, 30 seconds to iso200, f/8, 2067s (yes that’s about 35 min!). My favorite shot was somewhere in the middle at 720s, f5.6.