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RE: Astrophotography - The Milky Way in the Mountains of Santa Barbara
Excellent photo, please provide some info on your equipment and exposure data, so that others can learn. Upvoted, resteemed & Daily Photo Selection.
Hey, thanks @photo-trail. This was actually a fairly simple shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, and a Canon 15mm Fisheye lens at f4. The lens goes down to f2.8 but I find I get a little sharper shot at f4 and it's worth the loss of light. The trade off is I needed ISO 4000, which the 5D can handle pretty well. It's always good to do some tests with your lens to find those trade offs. Since the lens is so wide I was able to do a 35 second exposure with a cable release locked down on a really solid tripod (even the wind is a problem trying to get good sharp points of light.) The sky was masked and color corrected to allow more detail and contrast in the Milky Way. Out of the camera, the night sky has a reddish brown color from scattered light, and filtering that out gives a more pleasing color and allows more contrast and detail in the sky.
The hard part of the photo as I eluded to in the description was the street lights and passing cars on the street to the left. I had to find just the right spot where the streetlights were blocked well by the trees. Even though they are out of the frame to the left, the glare would be terrible at these settings if they weren't well hidden.
Oh and all of the artificial lights both in the church and on the trees in the distance are very small security lights. Believe it or not... the main lights of the church were off. Think about how dim the sky is, if the lights in the church were all on the windows would just be blown out white. The lighting and everything in the scene was all very subtle, it took several minutes for my eyes to adjust after driving there to even begin to frame the composition.