Jake Barac
A spontaneous astrophotography session yields a magical result
JAKE sa ys: I was on a truck drive up to North West Australia, with a total of 1,600km to drive. It was around 11pm in the middle of nowhere when we encountered some technical difficulties with the vehicle we were in. We parked at an overnight parking ground next to a closed roadhouse. I decided to spend the whole night shooting some astrophotography, as there was zero light pollution where we were.
The moon rose the minute we got out of the truck, but I still tried my best to play with its natural light. I found a composition in the pitch-black with a decent torch and shot this small gumtree with the Milky Way above it.
It was taken on a Canon 6D with a 16-35mm f/4 L IS USM lens at 16mm. The exposure was 25 sec at f/4 and ISO 6,400.
Andrew sa ys: I love this kind of shot, where you can get a sense of the vastness of the universe – and I know that they’re not as easy to shoot as you make it sound, Jake. Working in the pitch-black is a tricky old business: you really need to know your camera arrangements and settings, even if you do have a torch to help you.
It looks to me like you’ve got everything right. I can see no movement in the stars, so the shutter speed was short enough – helped, of course, by that whopping ISO, which was important to suck in enough light from the night sky to allow us to see the Milky Way so clearly. Despite that high ISO, your image is relatively noise-free too. Working with zero light pollution is a real bonus, and I envy that. I like the central gumtree and the way the Milky Way seems to flow out of it, but I would like to see the base of the tree on the ground.