If you’ve been following along on this blog for any length of time, it’s no surprise that I love night photography. It is just extremely rewarding for me, and it can be sufficiently challenging. Star trails got me really hooked, and I’ve since sort of moved on to having the Milky Way in my photos, rather than star trails (though, I still shoot them as well). However, capturing the Milky Way requires excellent conditions… and I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that I also need better equipment.
To get a good crisp Milky Way shot you have to be able to “stop the stars” (meaning have them not blur due to a long exposure time), which generally means for my setup, I need to have the shutter open no more than 15 seconds. Since time is limited because of the movement of the earth, photographers then have to rely on two other settings to get a brighter image; f-stop and ISO. The lenses I shoot with are all f/2.8… which is pretty bright, though you could go brighter for a lot more money. Then there is ISO… which also requires a lot more money (read: more expensive camera).
Turns out there is also one more variable, and that’s how you post process the image. I’m finding more and more that this plays as much a role as anything else… though you have to have a good starting point (which brings me back to wanting… no, needing… a new camera). With this particular image I “pushed” it a lot further than I typically do, and I was fairly happy with the result… thanks mostly to a wrecker! Turns out some poor sole’s vehicle had broken down in the loop, and the wrecker finally showed up around mid-night, and the headlights were just what the image needed to add something interesting to the foreground, and break up all that black around the tree. So, new camera… or a properly timed truck… either way, I’ll take it!
Quick side note, as part of its coverage of the Perseid meteor shower, WBIR used a few of my images in the broadcast (including this one). Super cool! You can see the spot by clicking here.
–Dan Thompson