Milky Way.
I couldn’t remember the last time I took a milky way photograph, though I think it’s been about 15 - 16 months. I think I was in Bandon, Oregon and woke up very early (though not on purpose.) So I thought to myself then, “why not see about a capture?”
The result of that is below. Not the best capture, but still something I could call “okay.”
Not too bad of a capture at 5 am in the morning. I also shot this at f/4 on my 16mm. Not sure why I did that when I had my 14mm f/2.8 with me. Or so I think. I’m too sure at this point.
So fast forward to June of 2020, a Monday to be exact. I had taken a nap in the late afternoon (I had been working on rebuilding a desk top - not a computer but an actual desk top) after doing some work around the house. And since it was summer, I figured that I had earned a bit of a rest and a nap, since I normally wouldn’t during the school year (though that would be fun - I do miss nap times).
Now, I didn’t plan on sleeping for an hour or so during a nap, but hey, it happens.
It was around 4:30 in the afternoon so I set an alarm for around 4:55. What I didn’t realize was all my alarms were set for the “am” so I set it without checking the “am” part. So at around 6-ish, I woke up, stretched, groaned and moaned with each cracking of my wearied joints. I mean, some of it sounded like marbles rolling around in a felt bag (still does). Despite all of that, I will admit I was feeling pretty refreshed after waking up. Of course, I also silently cursed myself for sleeping that long, knowing that I’d be up all night.
But, I thought it was a good time to take advantage of that error.
Roll with the punches. Go with the flow. Be like water.
So at around 10:00 pm, I packed my camera and gear, thought about making coffee, but was already pretty wide awake, grabbed my water bottle and off I went. I also figured that social distancing at 11:00 pm at Lake Tahoe wouldn’t be too much of an issue, especially as it was a Monday going into Tuesday.
I parked at the pullout before Hidden Beach (plenty of parking obviously), got my headlamp on, slung my backpack around my arms and off I went. The night was crisp, but it wasn’t unbearably cold. In fact, it was calm and rather pleasant, filled with stars and . . .
. . . bugs.
Lots of bugs. Bugs that wanted to use my headlamp as an opportunity to zoom around right in front of me. At first I thought it was just dust and dirt lingering like clouds in front of me, but I came to realization that some of the wispy, darting specks of white were actually tiny insects floating and flying about on my artificial light.
It wasn’t too bothersome, but I made sure to watch myself and my breathing.
I made my way to Hidden Beach, traversing several newly spun webs (my apologies arachnids!) as I saw a few lights on the beach. People were already there, just hanging out and watching the stars. Awesome place to do it, honestly. It’s the reason I was there too.
So I found a deserted part of the beach and set-up near the water’s edge. I decided to use my 14mm (haven’t been using that lately) since it does have a fast aperture of f/2.8. At first, there was cloud cover as I snapped a few test shots (one of which is the picture you see to the right. This is actually a blend of both beach and night sky).
Now, I also realized how much out of practice I was with Milky Way photography. Thinking about composition, thinking about foreground, what elements needed to be in the picture, all that jazz. Should I use my headlamp for some light painting? Should I just get a super long exposure for that?
I opted for the super long exposure for the foreground elements, though even then, I don’t think I did it long enough. I also wanted a relatively clean shot/silhouette of the mountains, not wanting a light trail from the cars to intrude within the frame. That was tough to do, especially if I were to leave my shutter open for a long time. The image I did get still had some light from people chilling along the shoreline of Tahoe, but that’s okay. I was thinking about cloning out that section, but decided to leave it. The Milky Way itself, I stacked around 6 pictures for that (using Sequator) and I’m actually okay with that part of the image.
So to the picture itself, here’s the picture once I blended the stacked photos of the Milky Way and the foreground picture as well, which I did in Photoshop.
So here’s the first Milky Way capture of the season.
Beach and Rocks - 14mm - 75 seconds | ISO - 3200 | f/2.8
Milky Way (6 images stacked using Sequator) - 14mm - 20 seconds | ISO - 3200 | f/2.8
Looking back at this, I definitely want to use a lower ISO (1600 maybe) and maybe do a bit of light painting for the foreground next time. We’ll see though!
