Milky Way Photography - Overcoming Lighting Challenges

Hello guys, welcome back. Another episode here in Tasmania. Now, I've been driving around looking for subject matter to shoot, but I already knew about this one. I'm very excited to be in this little village. It's right on the main highway, but just off the road. This gorgeous old church. Now let me show you what it looks like. Just have a look at that. Isn't that just absolutely amazing? It's this old church that's been renovated. Now, I was speaking to the owners of this place a while back, and it's not a church anymore. What they're doing, they're doing it up to be a place of interest for people to come to. I guess a tourist attraction. But they also own the local winery, which is across the road. I'm going to have a look over there in a minute. So it's been beautifully restored, nicely painted. I don't think I can get inside, but I'll have a look through the window and just see what it looks like there. But the best thing about this place is that the Milky Way Galactic Core comes right over the top. And so from anywhere around this part, I reckon I'll be able to get a great composition. It doesn't matter which angle you get on, this place looks absolutely fantastic. It'll reflect light. Now, I think there's a street light right down there somewhere, but it's in town, but I'd hardly call this town. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's just a village, if you like. And yeah, because of the color of it, but it stands out. The good thing about it is it doesn't have any big trees behind it on this side, which means I'll be able to easily compose and get a big sky behind, which is perfect for Milky Way photography. Okay, now I'm just at the back looking through the window, and I've noticed there's a light on inside. That's interesting. I'm not quite sure if that's going to be on tonight, and if it is on, I'm not quite sure if it's going to be a problem. It's a very white, cool light, which is typically not what I would light inside a building, but it's not going to be, I don't think, directly in the lens. So I might be able to get away with it, even if that light stays on tonight. Now, there is a house over just behind here. You can see it behind the car there. It's pretty close to this building, so I just went in and knocked on the door, just to sort of let them know that I was going to be coming back here. I mean, it's open at the front here. It's not as if it's private or anything. No one enters the door, so I'm not sure anyone's home. So I'll just have to be very, very careful. But yeah, I'm on my own. I don't think I'll be making too much noise. It's just the filming of the video. That's the problem. Talking to the camera might appear a bit weird to people who are in the house next door. So I'll just have to keep it very, very soft when I'm here tonight. Now, just down the road from that building, the old church, is this gorgeous little, well, it's an old house, I guess, but it's now a winery. And there's all sorts of sheds and things up the back here. I want to show you, because I want to come back here later and shoot some of that. And I've just been speaking to the lady, the owner, inside. It's okay to come back here. It's just on the side of the road, really easy to get to. Let's go and have a look up there. Well, I reckon I've hit the jackpot here. Have a look at this old baby. It is fantastic. It's a Rover of some sort, English vehicle. Rover 75, it says on the front. Weather beaten, rusty, just the way I like them. Now, I do have a slight problem here, because on the road outside, there is a street light. I hate street lights. Anyway, it's directly in line with this angle. So Milky Bay Galactic Core comes right over the front or over the top of this old car in that sky. And that is where the street light is. So either I get the camera really, really low down and hide the street light behind the car, which I might have to do, or I perhaps move over this way a bit further. Oh, look, I don't know. I'm going to have to try a few things when I get on location. I don't know how bright the light is, and I don't know how obtrusive. There's also a pole down there. You can probably see it. I might have to clone that out. I'm happy to clone out light poles out of my photos. But apart from that, this looks like a really, really dark sky location. I'd be guessing it's a Bordal 2, maybe even better, because there's no big towns anywhere in that direction. Anyway, we'll have a look later on and see what we can come up with. Well, wow, I think I've just hit the jackpot. I've been driving up and down the roads here, and I'm looking at the countryside, thinking, where am I going to camp tonight? I found this winery. What is it? Craigie No Vineyard, and it says camping sites up there. So I had a look around there, walked in there, spoke to the owner of the place. He said, don't worry about it, mate. You can stay there, no charge. It's just a big paddock. But hey, there's a bonus here. Look over there behind me. Look at this truck. There's an old truck. He's just placed there, I guess, as a garden ornament out the front of the winery. And you know what he said to me? I only put it there yesterday. So here I am, rolled up here tonight. No truck yesterday. It's here today. That is fantastic. Look at the sky, blue in every direction. This is going to be fantastic. All right, well, I've made my way to the campsite. Now you guys might well ask, where is the campsite? I've got about three or four acre paddock here. This is the campsite. This is a winery, right? So they have events here. And when they have big events, they have car parking up here in this big paddock. So consequently, here I am, on my own, because there's no event on, in the paddock. I've got about three acres. Perfect for me. Nice flat horizons all around the place. There's old junk everywhere laying around. There's old car bodies. Some of it's not that old, but anyway. So this is a great place for me. I'm just going to have a cuppa right now. Have a rest. I've got to rest up because I've got a big job tonight. Lots of subjects to shoot, but I'm looking forward to it. Okay, so what do we have here? Well, you guys know me. I love a bit of old junk. Now this is a Nissan engine. It's been thrown here at the back of the paddock. I found it and I reckon this might make a good foreground subject for a time-lapse. I've got to do a bit of gardening. There's grass everywhere and it's a little bit windy. Now I'm going to put my camera down, right down low to the ground. And why am I doing that? Two reasons. One, because I want to get a upward view of the sky as the Milky Way rises in the is what I have here with me. I just want to show you the other thing. I mean, I always love to get things down really low to the ground. I've talked to you at length about this. Let me just illustrate. All right, so here we have the engine. Now you can see it's pretty junky. There's an old door, there's all sorts of the seats, tires. I think the whole car's up here somewhere. Get down where the camera is and you'll see exactly what I am seeing. Have a look at that. Now isn't that a much better view? It makes the engine really stand out and look really quite amazing compared to all that junk that's in the background. The junk disappears. So my camera is going to be here. There you can see it, the 14mm lens. So it's a very wide angle. And right here we have the view in PhotoPills. So you can see there as we go through time, the Milky Way comes up over the top of the engine and comes over this way onto the left-hand side and it goes up quite high in the sky. But that's why I've got the 14mm lens because it'll chase it up into the sky there and have enough field of view. So I think this composition should work beautifully. Now this is a small tripod, so I'm putting rocks here to balance down onto it to stop it from moving if the wind gets up. I don't expect it to be too windy tonight but it's better to be safe than sorry. I can tell you now that baby's going nowhere with all of those rocks there. All right, back to boiling water again. Okay, well here we go. I've got Campbell's Real Soup Beef and Vegetables tonight. So yeah, I've got to keep stirring otherwise it sticks to the bottom of the pot. Okay, this is good. I've done it again. Very enjoyable. So it's almost six o'clock. I've got a little bit of time to go, although it is, well, it's dark enough for me to see a heap of stars out there. It is absolutely clear. It's 360 degrees. So I've got a fair bit to do tonight. So once I get finished here, I'll be straight into it. All right, so I'm just setting up this camera and look, I am closer than, well, let's say a one meter between camera and the actual engine. So what I'm doing here, I'm shooting this with a 14 millimeter lens. So I'm focusing just here on the engine and that means the stars are going to be slightly defocused. So if anyone asks, I'm going for the artistic look. Okay, now the next thing, I'm going to put a lens warmer on this because even though it's not all that cold, I just saw a touch of dew then and the wind has dropped right back, which is good. But you know, I've been bitten too many times to not do this. I've got the lens warmer here, so I'm just going to put it on and then we'll get started. We're up and running. I've set it to take 600 photos with a 15 second shutter speed. So it's got five seconds between each shot. Now I didn't show you how I lit this. So I've got two lights, one over there on a very, very low level on a light stand, another one over here. So typical of what I normally do, I'm cross lighting the scene. So yeah, and you can see the subject in the middle. So the lighting is about 90 degrees off from the angle that the camera is. It's doing its job. I've got my lens heater. You can see there, by the way, a little blue light and a green light. Now the green light's coming behind the camera, so it's not shining on the subject and the blue light is also coming behind. I made sure it wasn't facing forward, but I don't think it'd be such a problem here anyway, simply because I've got lighting on the scene. So a lot of people have trouble with lights coming off ancillary stuff like this, and that's typically when it's completely dark, no light at all. But because I've got these quite bright lights shining and lighting up the subject, I don't think it'd be a problem anyway. Okay, so it's dark. Sky's looking fantastic. I'm off. I've got to close things up here and we're heading off to our target, the old church. Okay, well, here I am back at the church in Houston. We have a slight problem. Have a look at the inside of it. It's lit up like a Christmas tree. I'm gonna have to deal with that somehow. Now I have to talk very quietly because there's a few houses around here and I don't want to upset anyone. So I'll walk through this as quickly as I can and as easily as I can. I'll try and explain what I'm doing. Number one is you right there. Oh man, that was so intensely frustrating. I've just spent so much time here trying to shoot this church. I've done all sorts of different techniques to try and alleviate those bright lights, but it's really, really tricky. So I did a big panorama as well because I had to get right off to the side over there so that the lights weren't coming straight out at the camera. It helped a little bit, but oh man, I'm pulling my hair out. I've had enough. I'm moving from here. I've got to go down there while the Milky Way's in a good position. So I'm just going to go down there now. Hopefully one of the formulas I used here tonight will work out, but I won't know until a bit later on. So as you can see, I've made my way back to this rover and I can't believe it. I mean, look behind. There's two street lights. I only saw one of them earlier and not only that, over there there's a school or a public hall of some sort and there's this massive floodlight on it and it's shining all through here. So I parked my car over there to try and block that light from hitting this car here. I looked up on my phone. This is a Bortle 1 Sky. A Bortle 1 and they've got all these lights flying all around the place. Oh man. Anyway, I'll just have to get the camera down really low here to block those two street lights and light paint and hope I can get it all to work. All right, so here's my view. You can see what I'm confronted with. So I've got the camera here. I'm probably about 400 or 500 millimeters off the ground. If I have to, I'll go lower than that because behind me there, I've got to get the street light underneath the level of the car. There's also a telegraph pole down there which the street light is lighting up. So I might have to get really low down. It's not what I want to do, but I might just have to do it. Also, I think there's some shrubbery or something to the front of the car that the street light's that light over there is lighting up. Oh wow. This was pretty tough as well. I got the shot. The light painting's great. I think I'll just use a single background shot from one of the ones I took here. By the way, this is the Nikon Z6 Astro modded with a 20mm f1.8 lens. I had to get a blanket out of the car and physically hold it up just over here to stop the light. Two things. Firstly, the light hitting the lens and I had to position the car to do that. So it blocked the light on the camera here. And secondly, there's a bush over here, a tree over here. So I had to physically hold the blanket up over there, use the remote shutter release and come back and make sure it was okay. Oh man, the things you do. Now I'm consequently under the pump for time because that core's getting up quite high. So I've got to get moving. Oh, and by the way, I shot the foreground here at f8. So 10 seconds shutter speed f8. Background I was shooting at f2.8 and all I did was stop down the aperture. I did not refocus on the car. So I was probably about three and a half meters away. So at f2.8 the car is not in focus at infinity, but at f8 at infinity the car is in focus. So the reason I do that, there's a number of reasons, but one big one it alleviates focus breathing. If you've ever had that where you get a slight difference in focus or it zooms out or contracts the image depending on your lens when you focus. Now if you just stop down the aperture, you don't get focus breathing. Anyway, I'm going to move on. Okay, I can take my blanket, put it back in the car. I'll actually need that later. So, but did a good job of shielding that light. Man, I'm having a tough run tonight. Look, more light pollution. There are lights behind a big shed behind this truck and there's four wheel drives. I think they've been spotlighting all night. So it's all happening. Okay, well nothing complicated about this one. Standard fine art light painting, just the way I like it. The light pollution is gone now, so that's good. It's taken a while and Milky Way is getting up pretty high. What I'm going to do with this is I'm going to take a single tracked shot and the only reason I'm doing that is because the core is higher than I wanted it to be because I spent so much time back down there. So I'm just going to go and take a track shot now. I think it'll just be one single shot. There's a lot of beautiful air glow tonight and I want to get the tracker out and capture that because I think it'll come up really really well. So yeah, this by the way I shot similar to the other one. I was shooting at about f6.3 f8 particularly because it's a light color. So a lighter color like this reflects a lot of light and it's harder to get your lighting not blowing out. So if it was a rusty or brown color or something that wouldn't be a problem. Also got to watch out for windows because they often reflect light when you're light painting. I'm back here at the time lapse camera and everything worked. It looks like it worked perfectly. It's been stopped for a while because I've been doing all sorts of other things down there but yeah the lights are still going. Lens warmer worked. Camera stopped. Everything worked as it should have. Well I'm back in my paddock. I've got my cuppa and man I'm exhausted. Have a look behind me. You'll see about a half moon rising up so it's getting very late. I'm really tired. I'm going to have this cup. I have something to eat. Probably shouldn't be eating late at night but I've got to and I'm going to go to bed. This is my bedroom. This whole paddock acres and acres of it and it's a beautiful beautiful beautiful night. It's clear. It's a lot colder now of course. In fact I noticed my camera started, my other camera was fogging up a little bit at the end there. I think all the photos I took will be fine. Anyway that's another adventure here in Tasmania done and dusted. My adventures continue. I don't know what the weather's doing tomorrow and the next day. I think the weather forecast is for cloud but I have to say that these first two adventures I've had here have been absolutely magnificent. I took quite a few images here tonight including that time lapse. I'm going to show you all of those now. You guys have a great week. I'll see you in my travels shortly. you