Shooting star trails?

Alright so we had some decent weather this weekend and decided to go out and just muck around with the camera and try out this star trails thing considering i don't have a guided scope or anything cool like that yet

So the advice i got from some one off the board was to do about 40 mins using my 1D 17-40 at 17mm shooting at F4 ISO 1600..

so i did this, came up after my timer went off and found a WHITE FRAME!.. lol Yea.. i thought he was on crack when he suggested it but he has done some great shots.

So then i thought i would try and shoot the big dipper again he suggested the same settings above expect to shoot at 30 second shots and then stack the images, again at 30seconds i have almost completely white shots!

WHAT do you guys recommend to start at for doing this kind of work?

Dark Skies and lower ISO. No need for 1600 when going for star trails in excess of 30 minutes, 200 will do. Most of us are dealing with a lot of light pollution so you have to shoot within those constraints. Even desert southwest skies have some sky glow(although not anything to complain about). I don't even bother from home anymore. I drive to darker skies, still not what I would consider ideal but manageable.

I can go for about 3 or 4 minutes at my site at ISO1600 before everything gets quite pale looking. Are you saying you were still getting completely white shots at 30s though? If so then you must have some terrible light-pollution where you are. (Check out A.S.I.G.N.'s Light Pollution Thread, as he'd probably like you to submit to it.)

With my 50mm f/1.8 I get very white shots at 30s, but it's got a massive aperture. My 10mm wide open is f/3.5 and have you seen my timelapse video? That's made up of 30s images at 10mm f/3.5.

What I guess you want to do really is start with some test shots. Shoot for 5s, then 10s, then 15s, etc etc, and when you find an image that shows nice stars with not too much white-noise, set the camera on burst mode, then lock your remote shutter down and leave it for 30 or 40 minutes. It'll take loads of photos, then you can either put them into animation software for a timelapse video, or something like startrails.de to make them into a star trails shot.

Hope that helps.