Alright, well we’ve spent the last couple of weeks in the dark and we’ll spend several more there. This week, however, I am starting a series of images that I’ve been playing around with over the winter. I’ve commented many times that I really dislike the winter because I just find it hard to get motivated to go shoot (unless of course it snows… which is rare here in East Tennessee). That said, since I’ve finished my Camaro project (check it out here) it has become somewhat of a photography muse for me (I do drive it… but I also enjoy taking pictures of it!), so I spent some time developing the concept of the shot above. The Milky Way is finally back in the night sky, so a couple weeks ago I was able to put all the pieces together.
One thing I’ve learned from shooting Milky Way landscapes and scenes with anything in the foreground is that it turns out WAY better if you shoot it in two parts. One part of basically just the sky and maybe far off objects, and then whatever you want in the foreground. Typically I will simply side-step whatever is in the foreground, and get the image(s) of the night sky, then go back and recompose for the foreground, and then add the nice sky back in during post processing. This insures the sky is astronomically correct (meaning everything is where it is supposed to be, in relation to the foreground objects), and that’s how I did the image above, as well as next week’s image. The last week’s image, however, is something I dreamed up altogether. I’ll talk more about that then!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson