After a fantastic evening spent watching and photographing the 2015 fireworks display at Llandudno on the North Wales coast, my wife Liz and I were making our way back home along the A55 coast road when we decided to have one last look at the seaside at Llanddulas.
Parking up right at the edge of the beach gave us a somewhat murky view out to sea over the Colwyn Bay wind farm, above which I could just make out a faint trace of the milky way, lost in the orange glow of heavy light pollution coming off the coastal strip.
Conditions were not good for photographing stars, but I'd recently been reading a tutorial about astrophotography in heavily light polluted areas by Ian Norman, so I thought I'd give his technique a try.
Well, I'm glad I made the effort as, although the original RAW file out of the camera looked awful, with some heavy post processing in Adobe Lightroom I was able to produce this image, with the milky way now clearly visible over the lights of Colwyn Bay.
By the way, that patch of light on the sea in the bottom right hand corner of the frame is another parked car's headlights shining on the sea, nicely blurred by a 30 second exposure.
Filename - milky way 02.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 14mm prime
Exposure - 30 secs @ f2.8, ISO6400
Location - Colwyn Bay, North Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - High ISO used to capture faint detail
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