If you’ve been a reader of my blog for any amount of time, you’ve likely heard me talk about – bemoan – light pollution. Generally speaking, when I shoot nightscapes I try to really minimize light pollution because I feel like it detracts from the sky, both in terms of final image quality, but also from a capture perspective. I mentioned this briefly last week, but what I did with last week’s image and this week’s image was try to illustrate the light pollution more realistically.
From an artistic point of view, that created some challenges with blending together the sky and the foreground portions of the image (I shoot my night scape images in halves), primarily because I wanted the scene to feel balanced. The problem though, is that the light pollution is SO bright compared to the night sky objects that this is a purely subjective process – there’s no making it “realistic”, because either the sky would be completely blown out, or the sky would be so dark you wouldn’t see the structures in the sky.
In any case, what I was trying to convey with last and this week’s image, is what we’re missing. To show how the light pollution essentially creates a barrier between us and the stars.
This week’s image is a bit of a different view of the Milky Way than I typically share. This is a more northern section of the Milky Way (as we see it here in the Northern Hemisphere), and in the case of the scene, a more north-eastern view. The whole thing is captured at 45mm, which is also a bit different, and subsequently makes the structure in the sky feel massive (it is, in reality!). Anyway, hopefully if the message of the image wasn’t clear just from viewing it, the images last week and this were at least nice to look at! 😉
More next week!
–Dan Thompson