How I create my images
Taking landscape photographs at night requires a lot of planning and preparation to get it right, especially when incorporating the night sky or stars. With some patience, technique, and a little luck, a beautiful image can be created.
Windswept Pines image with focus on the night sky, prior to “light-painting”.
Milky Way.
Many of my photos feature the Milky Way Galaxy. To the naked eye, the Milky Way appears as a strip of faint white across the sky, even with a dark sky, far away from city lights. With the right settings on a digital camera set up on a tripod, much more detail in the stars and the Milky Way can be captured that the eye cannot see. The Milky Way appears almost as a cloud in most images, differing in colour and appearance depending on camera settings, amount of light pollution, atmosphere conditions, etc.
Using lighting techniques on the pines creates an image with colour and texture.
Light Painting.
Photography is all about capturing light to create an image. At night time, when there’s little-to-no light, even the most advanced cameras just can’t “see” the scene the same way it can in daylight. By light painting - using a variety of lighting techniques - the camera is assisted in “seeing” more and giving us more detailed and interesting images.
Planning.
Getting images of the night sky requires a lot of planning. To capture images of the stars you need clear skies with no clouds. The moon, although beautiful in it’s own right and offers opportunities for good photos (see above), makes many stars hard to see as it is too bright. So you need a cloudless night, at the right time of the month when there’s no moon. Once you’re on location, you then need to know which direction you need to shoot if you want to capture certain elements in the sky, such as the Milky Way or planetary conjunctions (planets appearing side-by-side). This can affect or limit your image composition.