Photographing Stars

Eons
Originally uploaded by thefatcat44

Firstly, this image is a composite. I don't mind composite images, as long as the photographer is up front about it.

My reason for using two shots for this image is that while my wife and I climbed up to The Old Man of Storr on Skye in the night in order to photograph the dawn, the position of the Milky Way was wrong.

So the shot of the Old Man was taken at night (early hours of the morning before sunrise). The Milky Way image was taken a few days before near Gairloch and I have combined them.

To photograph the stars I set the camera to f2.8 (depth of field is irrelevant when photographing stars so the wide aperture keeps the shutter speed as fast as possible.).

I upped the ISO to 800 - some noise is not really an issue as it makes the stars look denser.

I sed a wide angle lens to capture the sweep of the galaxy - 16mm in fact.

The shutter speed was 30 seconds - this was long enough to records the stars but fast enough so they haven't moved much. If you zoom in to 100% you can still see they have moved a fraction. But at 30 seconds on a tripod they still record as dots of light, not streaks.

I also tweaked the white balance to bring up some of the colour in the sky, deepened the blacks in Lightroom and used a screen blending mode in reduced its opacity in Photoshop to bring out the full glory of what I had witnessed.

If I had used the stars as they were in the actual shot it wouldn't have made such a good image and the light pollution from Portree spoiled it too.

Some will feel this makes the image invalid. Some will feel there is no problem with it. I have no issues with it, as I said, as long as the photographer is up front about it and doesn't claim to have captured something they haven't in order to boost their 'status' or whatever.