The clear skies and minimal light pollution in my part of Muskoka, Ontario (Barkway-Lewisham near Gravenhurst) is ideal for stargazing and night photography. This is a view of the northwest sky over my backyard pond. It was actually pitch black in the garden during the night I took photos. The extra light you see on the landscape and trees was provided by spotlighting moved around during the long exposure.
This part of the sky doesn’t produce the most or largest stars but it was the darkest and had a nice landscape to go with the sky. It is also where I expect to see northern lights during winter so I like to practice setting up shots in this area.
cheekiweeki
Fabulous shot of the sky Otter. To get your close surroundings so clear with your lighting, and yet have the background sky so dark and also clear is very clever. How did you do this?
Otter Boyd
Thanks, I had to set the camera up for a long exposure to capture the stars, but not so long that they will leave trails. During the exposure I painted light on the landscape with a spotlight. Then there is some work to do in the processing stage to bring up the image. Doing these shots require the fastest lens possible. I find that one of the trickiest things is getting the focus right while taking the shot. As it is so dark you can’t auto-focus on stars and it takes some time and care to get tack-sharp focus in manual. I try to set up a distant (in the infinity range on the lens) well lit object to manually focus on and then will use that setting on the stars. Quite a few times I’ve accidentally nudged the lens during set-up, lost focus, and had to start all over again!
Min
Overall effect is beautiful – also think the moonlight with day lilies was a great one too.
Otter Boyd
Thanks, it is nice to get some color into night shots. The greens and blues came out well here and in the day lily shot some warm tones came up.