How To Photograph The Milky Way & More | Landscape Photography Tips & Techniques

As a landscape photographer, the most important thing that has helped me to stay inspired and progress my art is variety. Every time I feel like I'm becoming a little bit complacent with my photography, I try something new. This has allowed me to keep challenging myself and keep growing as a photographer. So in this video, I'm going to take you on my most comprehensive photography trip yet where I show you how to shoot the Milky Way, ultrawides, intimate abstracts, and even a bit of aerial photography. I really hope you enjoy the adventure. I am in the Southwest and I'm capturing some buttes that are beautiful. Beautiful buttes. So I'm really, really excited to take you guys on this adventure because we are going to shoot a ton of stuff and, uh, yeah, the light's already looking pretty good. So I need to go find some foreground and, uh, yeah, let's get started. All right. So before we shoot some of those wide angle frames, I, uh, I couldn't help myself. I decided to pull out the telephoto lens because I saw some really interesting shapes. So let me show you kind of what these look like through the live view screen. All right. So this is at about 100 millimeters. It already looks pretty cool at 100 millimeters and there's just this really nice, soft, warm glow across the rocks here. Look at that. Just isolating the spiky pattern there, the highlights of the rock. So as far as my settings go, everything's out in infinity. So I don't have to worry too much about the F-stop and I'm on a tripod so I can go ahead and lower my ISO, do just a slight long exposure here and make sure the camera's in focus. One more thing I like to do when I'm doing long exposures with the telephoto lens, I find it really helpful to set a timer. It might be worth trying a vertical real quick. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so that I have room to crop later on. It's always a good idea, like take your composition and then just pull out ever so slightly so you have that room to crop later on. It's better to have the room to crop than to feel like you've shot it too tight. These telephoto detail shots are some of my favorite to shoot and I think there's a few reasons for that. The first is it's not very condition dependent. You can photograph these on a dull rainy day or on a clear one to use some direct light to highlight an area like this photograph or even in open shade when the sun has dipped behind a ridgeline. And the other reason I enjoy shooting these so much is the stories you're able to tell about the landscape when you zoom in a little further and focus on the details. Suddenly you can take something like a butte or a rock or a tree and transform it into something completely different. For example, this image right here, sure it's just some dirt and rocks, but in this image I see faces in the rocks up top, almost like a group of figures standing there. All right, I think I found our cracks down here. These are really nice. They're just really clean. If you're having trouble finding a composition, like a wide angle composition, the best thing I can recommend is really to not use the tripod right away. Just walk around with your wide angle lens, just kind of move around and look at the live view screen and see how moving changes the composition. And as you can see, I'm standing right now and we've got a lot of mid ground right here. But if I go ahead and get closer to the ground, we remove a lot of that mid ground and we get closer to these tiles, making them really stand out. You know, if you want to include more mid ground and have more of that leading line, you know, stay up a little higher. But if the most interesting thing you're shooting is right in front of you and everything in the mid ground is maybe more distracting, you can remove a lot of that by getting lower. When we are this close to the subject, like a foot off the ground, it's a really good idea to do a focus stack. I try to make the focus stack as easy as possible by shifting over to F16. That way, more is in focus than if I shot it at F5.6 or 7.1. As far as the software that I use, you can use Photoshop, Helicon Focus is probably the best focus stacking software that I've found so far, and Luminar also has an amazing, simple focus stacking. So just to show you an example of how I'm doing that focus stack, so tap on there to get a shot at infinity, then just kind of tap around here. We're just moving closer to that foreground, right to the bottom edge of the screen. There's no way I'm going to need all these photos, but you know, it's just nice to have them either way. All right, so here's that image I was just working on. And sure enough, I only needed about three images from the stack to make this sharp. But again, I always feel like it's a good idea to shoot a little bit extra just in case you need it. Really love the textures here and that beautiful soft sunset glow. So here's a shot taken while we still had some gorgeous sunlight hitting the Butte, and I love the larger jigsaw look to the tiles here. Check out how cool these tiles are. These are awesome. I kind of wish I found them earlier, but what I'm going to do here is I'm going to shoot these tiles with the Butte in the background. And as you can see, it's after sunset, so there's not a lot of texture in the sky. But I'm going to wait until the stars come out here and do a twilight blend. So basically a twilight blend is taking either a starry night shot or a Milky Way shot and blending it in with an image taken during blue hour because you get the soft light similar to what you would get at night. They're a little challenging to make work, but the reason why I like them for shots like this is because having to do a focus stack at night like this would be really tricky. It would be super noisy. It's hard to get enough light in here. So I feel like twilight blends for scenes where you have to do a lot of focus stacking are a really nice way to do it. I wish the Milky Way lined up with it. Unfortunately, it doesn't. So all we're really going to see up there are a few stars, but I really feel like those stars are going to add some nice texture to the sky. But then after I shoot this, I'm going to go ahead and drive to the next spot, which is where I have my Milky Way compositions picked out. So after waiting around for a while and capturing my star image above this Butte, here's my final result. I love capturing an area throughout the evening and really observing how that light changes the landscape. It was also really key to wander around and look for some different foregrounds to play with. But now I'd love to hear from you. Which one of these Butte shots do you enjoy the most? Please let me know in the comments. Really is amazing out here. I have scouted this position where the Milky Way will be diagonal across these really spectacular badlands and also I can do a nice Milky Way panorama to show the whole arc of the Milky Way going across the scene. So this is going to be about 180 degrees and I'm going to have to stitch a bunch of shots together to make that work. I'm mainly sticking to a 20 second exposure. I've got f2.8. It's not showing up here because I'm using a manual lens and then ISO 12,800. If you're using another camera that doesn't have really high ISO capabilities, I recommend starting at 3200 and then kind of working your way from there. One thing I get asked all the time is how in the world do I focus at night? This is something I get asked all the time and basically what I do is I use live view here and then I zoom in and then I just find a star to focus on. You see that little white dot and I just twist this until the star is as sharp as possible. Click to zoom out and there we go. We are in focus. You basically just have to take a test shot, see how it looks and then make really minor increments from there. So take the shot, if it looks a little too low, maybe raise up the camera or tilt it to the left or the right. Honestly, it usually takes me a few tries before I get the composition that I want. So here's my first test shot with a few basic edits in Lightroom and I just think it's amazing how much detail you can pull from these single exposures. A shot like this back in 2010 as a single exposure would be almost unthinkable but with new camera sensors and the help of some Lightroom Denoise, I was pretty impressed with the results here. So after shooting this test shot, I decided to do another single exposure but this time a vertical including some of the foreground and here it is. Even though I'm going to cover a bunch of techniques for reducing noise, stacking and even panoramas, I think it's important never to underestimate the power of a good single exposure because honestly, it had been a while since I've shot Milky Way photography and I was pretty blown away with the results here. I think I'm going to try a composition now at about 24mm and I may even do a bit of a panorama so shooting one image for the sky here and then tilting the camera down and then tilting the camera even a little bit further down and I guess the benefit to this is you get a little bit more resolution and quality out of your photos. Now if you want to go even further with that, you can use a method called stacking, leaving it on this composition and taking a time lapse of about 5-10 images and then you blend them together in post-processing to reduce noise. This is another great technique for getting a little bit more quality out of your night sky photos. When it comes to night sky photography, I like to do a bunch of different techniques and then later on when I'm sitting at the computer and I'm staring at Lightroom, I can decide which technique worked best for the scene. Alright, so here is the photograph that I was just working on and this is both a panorama and an image stack. So this took 10 images total, a stack of 5 for the foreground area and then a stack of 5 for the sky. I used a program called Starry Landscape Stacker which allows you to stack out all of the noise while still tracking and aligning the Milky Way section of the images. There's also another great alternative called Sequitur. To make this final image after stacking both sections, I then created the panorama using Lightroom. So I think it's time to do a panorama now. So I usually do horizontal shots and I do two rows. So usually like one row for the sky, going one photo, two photos, three photos, four photos, maybe five. And then I'll aim the camera down to get more foreground and then do 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, depending on how high the Milky Way is. I'm going to start here, get a little bit of that foreground, make sure we're on 14mm and then I'll move right about there with the 14mm lens, make sure my camera is level and then basically just continuing all the way to right about here and then it's always a good idea to look at your shots to make sure you're getting enough room. As far as your overlap goes, as long as you're overlapping at least I would say 25% of each photo you're probably fine. I think any more than that's probably overkill and you're taking too many images. Now I'm doing this horizontally but you could do the exact same thing vertically as well. So here is my final result for that panorama. This unfortunately would not stitch using Lightroom or Photoshop so I used my go-to software PTGui, or at least I think that's how you pronounce it. I usually will start out with the Lightroom algorithm just to see if that works and then if all else fails I know that PTGui is going to do the trick. I really love the way this composition came out with that vivid Milky Way band arcing across the sky and those spectacular badlands down below. Now there's also a device called a star tracker which you might have heard of and this device allows you to take way longer exposures of the Milky Way giving you the ability to pick up more of that star detail. Now I do use them from time to time but unfortunately I didn't bring one on this trip because I wasn't even certain I was going to be doing any Milky Way photography here. But if you're getting deep into astrophotography it's something worth checking out. Over the next few days I hung out with my friends Cody, Ryan, and Kenny and we explored some various areas around the southwest including Capitol Reef National Park. And here's how some of those images turned out. This ended up being one of my favorites from the trip. Watching this spectacular storm cloud roll over the river bend made for the perfect lighting here. And even though I love a good sunset or sunrise shoot you might be surprised to learn that this was just captured right in the middle of the day. So if you're out there on a photo adventure make sure to explore a bit with some midday light and see what interesting things you can find. Especially when you get some stormy clouds rolling through. Alright so one thing that I don't feature enough in my videos is aerial photography. Now it's a little weird. There's a tiny bit of a disconnect because when you're flying a drone you're looking at this little screen. You've got this joystick. It feels like it feels a little bit more like playing a video game than it does photography. But I've been flying it all around these badlands in Utah and I think I've captured a few images that I'm really proud of. Now as far as tips go when it comes to aerial photography the biggest tip I can give you is to put thought into your photograph. I know that seems kind of obvious but really take the time to work on your composition and kind of think to yourself what is the purpose and story behind this aerial photograph. Because it's very easy to pop this drone in the sky and get a good image. And I think the reason for that is when you get above your subject and you get far away from all these distracting elements you can really simplify your shot. Taking a decent aerial shot doesn't mean it's a great photograph. There still has to be thought and purpose behind that image. So just think about that when you're taking your images. What is the story behind my photograph and why am I launching this drone above the landscape? And I think that'll help you to create more compelling aerial photography. So yeah here are some of my favorite aerial images that I've captured in Utah so far. Here's an image of these gorgeous badlands captured with my drone and I pointed the camera straight down to really highlight these otherworldly colors. I almost feel like this could be the surface of another planet like Jupiter. In general for these badlands I felt like having the drone up in the sky to really highlight these textures told a completely different story than when I'm capturing this landscape from the ground. Now of course aerial photography doesn't just have to be abstract you can also shoot some of those dramatic wide angles from above and here's one from my trip. We had some beautiful dark stormy clouds above this little river and I felt like it would make the perfect panoramic image. When flying your drone around it's important to kind of think of it just like another mirrorless camera or DSLR. You can still use the same techniques for creating panoramas or for exposure bracketing and it's really important to fine tune your compositions while you're in the sky. So for this shot I did a three image panorama starting facing down towards the river and then aiming up towards the sky. It's really amazing how much you can get out of a photo trip when you work with the conditions that you're given and you keep an open mind to the different possibilities within landscape photography. I think one of the most discouraging things about being an artist is when you feel like you're not progressing or you feel like you're stagnant and in my own experiences the best remedy for that has been to just try something new. So the next time you're out on an adventure try and challenge yourself a little bit and see what interesting things you can find. And with that I really hope you enjoyed this video and if you did enjoy it please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel for more and yeah I'll catch you in the next one.