Morocco Photo Tour

August 29 - September 10, 2023

Focus

I think the hardest part about shooting the Milky Way is focusing on the night sky. The bottom line is that your camera won’t be able to focus on such a wide expanse that offers virtually no contrast for a meter to lock on to.

Many photographers think if you focus a lens to infinity, that takes care of the issue. It doesn’t. Some lenses are designed such that when they are focused all the way to infinity, distant elements won’t be sharp. This is done to accommodate the minute expansion and contraction of metal and glass as temperature changes.

Therefore, the only way to focus the lens to infinity is to find a distant light, such as street lamp or a security light above the garage in a distant house, and focus on it. If there are no lights near you, turn a flashlight on (always carry with you a flashlight for night photography) and either place it on the ground or have a friend hold it for you. Move at least 30 feet (10 meters) away and then manually focus on the light. Any lens 24mm or wider will then be set to capture the night sky. The only thing you have to remember is to not touch the focus ring on the lens once you establish the correct focus. If you do, you’ll have to repeat the focus exercise.

Painting with light

Including ground-based elements in front of a Milky Way background adds interest and depth to night sky photography. I did this with the abandoned bus, above (unfortunately it has since been removed from this location in the Palouse area of Washington) and with the barn and old truck on page 6. Once you establish what the composition will be, the next thing you have to do is experiment with the exposure.

Painting with light makes determining the perfect exposure a challenge. You can’t use the light meter in the camera, so in essence you have to use trial and error to figure it out. Even after 55 years in photography, I have to do the same thing because there are too many variables that can’t be quantified, such as the flashlight-subject distance, the lumens of light output by the flashlight, the reflectivity of the foreground elements, the length of time the light is directed to the foreground elements, etc.

Therefore, the procedure is this: 1) First determine the length of time the shutter is open for a good exposure on the Milky Way, 2) using a tripod, open the shutter and paint the foreground elements with the flashlight. Keep the light constantly moving -- this is important -- because if it lingers over one place in the composition, that area will ‘burn out’, i.e. become overexposed. After each test, study the LCD screen on the back of your camera to see where improvements could be made, if any. Is the foreground too light or too dark, is the lighting uneven, is one area overexposed, and so on. It may take three or four attempts (or more) to get it just right.

I typically use tungsten white balance (i.e. indoors or incandescent) to produce the colors I like. A daylight white balance makes the sky and the Milky Way too brownish for my taste. I prefer a blue color theme that you can see in each of the images that accompany this article, and that happened because I used the tungsten white balance.

Timing has to be right

It’s helpful to know when the Milky Way is visible if you want to take pictures of it. In the Northern Hemisphere, from November to January it disappears from view on planet Earth From about the middle of February to June, it is seen in the early morning before dawn. In July and August, it is visible during the middle of the night, and in September and October you can find it in the evening.

The smartphone app Photopills is very usefull in locating the Milky Way at any particular time. For example, if it is visible only on the other side world at noon in New York, the app shows you its current position. In this way, you can plan the timing of your night shoot.

Post-processing

In order to make your images of the Milky

Way really pop, the images have to be agresively processed in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. By this I mean you have exaggerate the files to go beyond what you see. For all of my night sky images involving the Milky Way, I use the following important sliders:

Contrast

Vibrance

Clarity

And sometimes I add:

Whites

Highlights

Shadows

Saturation

Exposure

How much you tweak the images is an artistic and personal decision. §