This Sunday I spent the night above Lake Tahoe getting some Milky Way shots. It's always fun to be out there alone with Mother Nature and in this case, it was a very productive night.
I had done my homework and according to my favorite sunrise/sunset predictor app (My Sunset) the chances of having nice color in the sky during those times was good. I had also checked my favorite Milky Way seeker app (Plan It) so I knew the moon would be setting around 3am, and the Milky Way would be lining up right over a favorite wavey shorline area of Lake Tahoe. My homework paid off, and I ended up with this shot!
This was photographed on a Canon 5Dsr, with a 16-35mm lens set at 16mm. The ISO was set to 2000, a very light sensitive setting. I can go higher with the ISO but with my particular camera, a great deal of digital noise (the grainy look) starts to show up at higher settings. The aperture was f2.8, wide open for this lens so I could let in as much light as possible. The shutter speed was 20 seconds, about as long as I could go before the stars started to look like little streaks instead of little dots (due to the rotation of our planet). The camera was on a tripod and a shutter release cable was used so there was no camera movement or shake.
I normally like to light up my foregrounds in images like this with a headlamp but my headlamp was too bright for this scene. My solution was to use a little led ring light that I purchased for helping me with my vlogging in low light. It worked perfect for providing a little light to the boulder and trees. The image was edited in Adobe Photoshop's RAW image editing feature. Full disclosure: the Milky Way was brought out a bit more in processing and is more visible in this shot than it was to the naked eye. The yellow color on the right is from light pollution of Sacramento. I don't mind a little bit of light pollution and the colors it can create.
The making of this image can be seen in my latest @DTube video that I posted yesterday. You can find this particular shot at the 13:20 mark in the video:
Lake Tahoe Overnight Photo Adventure - Video
If you have any questions about this shot, please feel free to ask me in the comments below or you can ask in the @dynamicsteemians Discord where they have set up a little channel for me to answer photography questions: https://discord.gg/wXch4tp
Thank you for looking, reading, and watching!
Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
