Shooting the stars
Well hello folks and welcome back to the website. I, like many others have spent some time under the stars the past week as we have had a rare occurance of clear skies at night here in the UK, coinciding with a lack of the giant cheese ball that is our moon! Which means one thing……no sleep! Well, and a clear view of the Milky Way core too.
As a full time slave I rarely get the oppurtunity or the desire to get out and photograph the night skies when they are more interesting. I usually make a special effort during the Perseids in August and of course if we get the Northern lights too, but generally speaking I rarely venture out now after sunset…..I am almost like a Vampire in reverse nowadays!
However last Tuesday was looking very juicy for perfectly clear skies and I had the bonus of being off the following day to catch up on sleep so I thought “why not?” I decided to sacrifice my knee and lungs and settled on Durdle Dor as my shoot location for the night and put up a little story on Instagram to see if anyone was around who might like to join me. I had several responses from various friends saying good luck but couldnt make it but I got a surprise when none other than Jack Lodge and Ben Kapur messaged to let me know they were in fact going as well and I was welcome to join them. Great! We arranged to meet up around 2am……yup, you read that right, and I pootled off to bed around 7pm setting my alarm for 12.45am (these number all seemed jumbled up).
The drive down was uneventful apart from a couple of badgers blocking the road near Sherborne, which caused me a small delay while they ambled out of my way. I arrived at the entrance to the campsite at the top of the cliffs just after 2am where I bumped into a couple of ladies who were also heading to the Dor. It looked like it would be quite a busy night! I geared up, drew a deep breath and headed down to the cliffs above the dor, about a 25 minute walk in total for me. I had brought my daughters camera with a 40mm f2 mounted to it to do a long timelapse and I had my Zf with the very capable Viltrox 16mm f1.8 affixed. The 40mm would prove to be not wide enough sadly so I ended up binning that timelapse but I did manage to get a short one on the Zf
I was able to find Jack, Ben relatively easily and after a catch up chat I set the camera up ready for a great nights photography. For once the weather reports were pretty accurate and the skies stayed clear with just a hint of cloud on the horizon. The Milky way core started showing properly around 3am and showed well right up until the time I left at 4.45am. I had expected it to be a tad warmer on the night but the wind was pretty strong, cold and relentless and by about 3.30 I was really starting to lose the feeling in my fingers! But like a good little trooper I stuck it out and to be honest my mind was elsewhere most of the time just taking in the glorious sky before me. I had a great chat with both Jack and Ben and we were all oooing and ahhing the backs of our cameras as the images kept coming. Jack and Ben were both using the Nisi glow mist star filter with their setups which gave the brighter stars a nice halation around them, adding to the beauty of the night sky. It was really interesting to see a group of photographers all within 20 feet of each other all producing very different looking images. This is what I love about photography! All our cameras pretty much can produce the goods nowadays but using slightly different setups and inputs and then our own editing techniques produced very different looking images.
On a side note we were also treated to a higher than normal amount of meteors on the night and I was very lucky to capture one or two in my images. Both the photographs below are composites of two images one for the foreground and the other for the sky, blended together in photoshop to get the final result.
Falling Angel
Galactic view
We packed up around 4.45am, a very happy trio of photographers and I said my goodbyes to Jack and Ben who headed home. I wanted to get a shot of Man ‘o War bay though before I left but I must have knocked my focus as the two images I took were both blurry, my fault for not checking at the time! Then came my least favourite part of the night….the climb back up. Carrying a camera bag and about 60lbs-conservative-of extra body up steep hills with my one good knee and a set of lungs that have the air capacity of a partty balloon due to years of smoking is never pleasant and this proved no exception! But I eventually managed to stagger to the top, sounding for all the world like some water dwelling monster struggling with its first steps on land. Thankfully no one was around to be terrified of the noises emanating from my body and I paused for a few minutes to get some much need oxygen back into my body, whilst my knee was gently tapping my pain receptors reminding me what an idiot I was being!
I also managed to get lost heading back to my car, ending up several hundred metres up a grass track before I figured out I had taken a wrong turn! I dont know how I do it sometimes.
Overall I am very pleased with the results of my nights work and was also glad to see Jack and Ben both getting some absolute belters too. I will hopefully be doing a lot more astropohotography this year, it really is a rewarding genre and also qauite humbling to view a clear night sky.
Toodles