Over the winter period I have been wanting to use the long dark nights to get out and develop my Astro Photography skills. I’ve always had an attraction to the night sky, the stars and beyond so naturally I’ve been wanting to capture that in my photography.
Unfortunately the weather has scuppered my plans and I’ve only been able to get out twice so far when the skies have been clear enough.
Below are a couple of the finished photographs that I managed to capture when I was out.
This first image is of a full moon at the start of January, where it was a fairly cloudy evening, but fortunately there was a break in the clouds and I was able to get a nice shot of the moon with some moody clouds surrounding it.
The image wasn’t as easy as it looks to take though. There was a large dynamic range in the image with the moon being so bright and the clouds around it very dull. To the human eye you could make out all the detail of the moon and the clouds without any issues, but cameras unfortunately don’t see the same range of contrast that we do.
So what I had to do was to take an image exposing for the brightness of the moon and then a second image exposing for the sky surrounding it. After that I had to blend the two images into one in photoshop, so you have got the best detail from both photos.
This image was taken up at the Pepperpot in Silverdale one cold night. Before going to bed I had a quick look outside to see what the weather was like and on seeing that it was a cloudless starry night, which have been few and far between, I picked up my camera bag and went out into the cold, taking the dog along for some company.
I decided to do a bit of light painting on the Pepperpot in order to show off the foreground interest a little more. I started with an exposure for the sky to get the stars looking their best by using a fairly high ISO and a large aperture to collect as much light as possible on my 20mm f1.8 lens.
After that, I took several images of the same composition, but at a smaller aperture (f8) to get a larger depth of field and refocusing on the foreground. I then used my torch to ‘paint’ in the areas I wanted to highlight. It’s easier to use several different exposures with different angles of the torch lighting different things, so you have more options when you’re back in Photoshop. In this instance, I took six different exposures, but only used four of them and even then I only used part of these images.
Back in Photoshop, I used the sky as the background layer and the foreground images as layers on top, by using layer masks I selectively ‘painted’ in the foreground on top of the background layer to form the final image.
I attempted to make a star trail photo as well while I was out, but unfortunately half way through my lens started to fog up due to the cold conditions so this didn’t work out. Something to try another night!
So fingers crossed for some better weather and stargazing nights to come!