Ever since my first visit to the wonderful Cregennan Lakes, at the foot of Cader Idris in the Snowdonia National Park, I've been thinking that this would be a fantastic spot to photograph the milky way.
And one night in early June, everything came together for me and I was able to realise my dream.
But photographing the milky way isn't a simple exersize, and you can't just make a spur of the moment decision to go out and take a photo at night in the hope of capturing this spectacle at its best.
No doubt I'll be proved wrong one day, but all my 'decent' photos of the milky way so far have been carefully planned.
So how did I get this shot? I'll go through the steps I took to give an idea.
The northern hemisphere isn't the best place to see the milky way from, as the milky way's bright and colourful galatic centre (the best bit) is only visible in the summer months, whereas in the southern hemisphere the galatic centre is visible all year round and is much higher in the sky.
Indeed, at the latitide of 53 degrees north where I'm based, the galatic centre only just pops above the horizon for a few weeks either side of the midsummer solstice, so from a timing point of view I've really only got from the beginning of June to halfway through July to capture the milky way at its best.
However, shooting the night sky close to midsummer poses a different problem, as there's no astronomical twilight at this time of year, so the sky, especially to the north where the sun sets and rises, never actually gets dark.
This excess of light poses a few technical challenges which I'll talk about later on.
One thing that seriously hampers night time star photography (apart from not having a camera!) is light pollution from towns and cities.
There are technical ways to get round this issue, but much better to avoid the problem in the first place and go somewhere with dark skies.
I'm very blessed by living within striking distance of the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales, one of only 10 dark sky reserves in the world, so it was a no brainer for me to look for a suitable shooting location within the park.
Another important consideration is the direction you point your camera.
The milky way galatic centre appears over the horizon to the south in the early hours of the morning, so obviously you need to point your camera southwards to capture it.
But if you also want something interesting in the foreground to set the milky way against then its time to get out the Ordinace Survey or fire up google maps to find a viewpoint with an interesting foreground that you can photograph looking south.
Hence Cregennan Lakes.
This location ticked all the boxes, with dark skies and an interesting foreground of the two lakes, backed by the well known mountain, Cader Idris, looking to the south.
There's no point in trying to photograph stars if the weather isn't playing ball.
A few wispy clouds can be tolerated, even welcomed, but anything heavier than that will just blot out the stars you want to photograph.
Also, you don't want to be stuck halfway up a welsh mountainside in the middle of the night if it's windy, cold or wet - not unless you're Bear Grylls that is!
So a spell of settled, high pressure, cloud free weather is what's required, which is a rare phenomena in North Wales, where depressions coming in off the Altlantic are the normal condition.
It's in the taking of technically challenging photos that relatively expensive high end DSLRs and lenses actually pay for themselves.
I use a Canon 6D full frame DSLR, that I purchased primarily for its impressive performance in extremely low light situations such as star photography.
Fitted to the camera was a 14mm f2.8 prime lens from Samyang. Not the most expensive optic on the block, but ideally suited to photographing large swathes of the night sky, gathering as much of the available light as possible.
With long exposures the order of the day (or night in this case), a sturdy but light tripod is essential, and my Manfrotto carbon fibre 'pod fills that bill nicely.
One very important piece of kit is something to keep the camera lens warm to prevent dew form forming on the front element and ruining your shoot.
This is especially true if you're shooting a time lapse sequence, as I was when I took this particular image, and I used a home made battery powered lens warmer wrapped around the body of my Samyang to keep the dew at bay.
By the time I'd finished the shoot there was a film of condensation on every bit of my equipment except the lens, so I'm really glad I used the heater.
Finally I used a remote release to fire the camera's shutter, both from the point of view of shooting multiple timed exposures for my time lapse video, and to prevent camera movement from pressing the shutter release button.
Well, that's the shooting side of things sorted out, but as I was going to be sitting on the side of a welsh mountain overnight I needed sorting out as well, with a survival bag containing food and drink, together with many extra layers of clothes to don as the temperature dipped.
There's no way you can photograph anything to the best of your ability if you're shivering!
The camera setting I use for this type of photography aren't designed to make a pretty picture on the camera's monitor, but rather to capture as much useful information as possible to allow for post-processing enhancements in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.
To that end, it's necessary to capture as much light in an individual exposure as possible, without overexposing the brightest parts of the image.
This means that the image on the camera's monitor looks way too bright compared with the scene in front of your eyes, but you have to overcome the temptation to make the image look right in camera, and go for maximum data capture instead.
Also, you can forget capturing JPEGs for this type of photography. Uou need all the data you can get, which means sticking solely with RAW files.
As I mentioned previously, I used using a Canon 6D camera to take this shot, which I know from past experience can be wound up to an ISO of 6400 and still produce an acceptably clean RAW file for further processing, so that's just what I did.
Also, from previous experimentation, I knew that my Samyang lens could be used wide open at f2.8 and still give acceptable sharp stars, so I set the lens' aperture wide open to capture as much light as possible.
The shutter speed for this frame I set to 20 seconds, short enough to avoid any streaking of the stars casued by the earth's rotation, but long enough to give me the maximum amount of exposure the camera's sensor could handle, judged by looking at the three colour histogram on the camera's monitor and avoiding over exposing any of the red, green, or blue colour channels.
Suffice to say that the original RAW file, straight out of the camera, looked nothing like this final version!
A plethora of exposure, contrast and colour enhancements were carried out in Adobe Lightroom to make this final image, which was only possible because I'd made the effort to capture as much quality data as possible while taking the original photo.
A lot of effort to go to, but worth it when I saw the final result!
Filename - cregennan lakes milky way 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 14mm prime
Exposure - 20 secs @ f2.8, ISO6400
Location - Cregennan Lakes, Snowdonia National Park, Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - This image is one of over 1,000 taken to make a time lapse video
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