Conventional wisdom for photographing the milky way calls for a dark sky with minimal light pollution or moonlight, so that the contrast between the black sky and bright stars is as high as possible.
Great in theory, but a really dark sky is getting harder and harder to find.
I'm fortunate in living in North Wales, as the population density is low, but even so there are some quite bright areas, such as the coastal strip comprising the seaside resorts of Prestatyn, Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and so on westwards.
So as an experiment I decided to try and photograph this time lapse of the milky way in less than optimal light conditions, from the slopes of Moel Famau looking north out over the Vale of Clwyd towards the coast and all that light pollution.
Also, in addition to the man-made light, a half moon had risen an hour before I started shooting, which threw even more light into the sky and further compromised the clarity of the stars and milky way.
Challenging conditions to say the least.
To achieve any sort of result I pushed the exposure of the still RAW images as far as I could, until the lights on the coast were just burning out, knowing I could dial the exposure back in post-processing to reduce noise and introduce some extra contrast and clarity into the sky.
This technique of maximising the exposure of the RAW files in camera, and then pulling the exposure back again in Adobe Lightroom seemed to work pretty well, and I could now see the milky way clearly in the sky, when it was all but invisible to my naked eye while I was out photographing.
Something else I didn't see in 'real time' while out shooting was the band of moonlight racing across the landscape towards me as the moon rose behind me, eventually cresting the ridge to the east and bathing the entire scene in ghostly luminance.
A nice extra bonus that I wasn't expecting to see in this video - watch out for it.
Filename - milky way timelapse_02
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 14mm prime
Exposure (start of sequence)
15 secs @ f2.8, ISO6400
Exposure (end of sequence)
15 secs @ f2.8, ISO6400
Capture interval - 15 secs
Location - Loggerheads Country Park, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
Clip duration - 21 seconds
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.