I’ve been wanting to try and shoot the night sky and capture the brilliance of the stars. This is a challenging project as you have to figure out your shutter speed and use a very large ISO (how grainy the image becomes) and a long shutter speed to just get those stars. You also want to include something in the foreground to give it depth and oh yeah – you have to go somewhere that is close to pitch black. Light pollution (even the light in the cab of your car) can spill into the image since you are shooting exposures of up to 20-30 seconds.
So for a test, Elizabeth and I drove out to my Nephew Joel’s place near Media lake. He’s got a great small cottage wanted to try and get some pictures of the Milky way. I used the SkyGuide app on my iPhone to locate it and then plan to shoot it.
It was a challenge because even at 10:30pm – I was still getting some light pollution from houses in the area AND it was cloudy so I got some light bouncing off the thin clouds and there were these cell towers with Red lights too. I put my camera on my tripod, set my 16mm wide angle lens to F1.4, 20sec shutter speed and pushed the button. Was shooting in RAW format so I could enhance on my Mac and kinda they kinda came out okay – but at least I got to practice. See below – click on the images for a larger view.
Gilberto
