Starry Night Sky in Early Fall

Equipment Used: Nikon D750, Tamron 24-70 mm f2.8 G2 lense, Nikon SB-700 Speedlights, Vello Flash triggers Vanguard Abel Plus 363CT tripod, Lightroom & Photoshop CC

The next night after capturing the golf course images at night, the sky was clear again and stars bright so I headed to the Templeton barn and corn crib to capture the Milky Way one last time. A few weeks later, I was watching Seal Team when I got a text from two buddies saying you need to check out the sky. It was lightening in the east but yet the sky was mostly clear so I headed out again to capture the scene.

The workhorse D750 and the 24-70mm was put on the Vanguard tripod and I framed the image via liveview and shining my headlamp onto the crib and barn. An aperture of f2.8, RAW and ISO ranging from 1000 to 6400 were used. In general, I’ll use the 1000 ISO to expose the buildings and 3200 to 6400 for the sky. The SB-700 Speedlights on their stands were placed into the ground and while the camera was exposing between 8 to 12 seconds, I hit the flash trigger to throw quick bursts of light onto the buildings. The new ball head that I put on the tripod allowed me to rotate the camera to create images to later blend them into panoramic.

I processed the sky and buildings using different presets and radial filters in Lightroom. I like the ease of use of the radial filter over the graduated filter for local adjustments and can put multiple radial filters on top of each other with different adjustments. I created 3 panoramic images using LR by combining around 5 images into one.

To finalize the images, Photoshop was used to get rid of unwanted objects using the healing and clone brush tools. Airplane lights and cell phone tower lights were removed using these tools. Using layer masks, I combined images of the buildings that were taken with a lower ISO with the sky. The custom brush of the windmill head was then “stamped” on top of the windmill since it is no longer there in its current state.  

The last five images were a unique scene with what Mother Nature created that night with the combination of lightening and clear skies.  Thanks to my buddies for letting me know about the scene. 

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