Milky Way Lighthouse
Little shot near Wellington City. I like the blend to night sky. Quite a bit of light pollution around and a lot of traffic.
This was the only ph...
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Little shot near Wellington City. I like the blend to night sky. Quite a bit of light pollution around and a lot of traffic.
This was the only photo I got without a car lighting it up.
Read less
This was the only photo I got without a car lighting it up.
Read less
Aug, 2016Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This was taken near my house in Wellington, New Zealand. The city is pretty small so you get a good mix of dark skies and light. It's not overly light polluted so you can go another 5 mins down the road and get completely dark skies. The lighthouse was in a suburb 2 mins from the city centre.Time
Shot this around 8pm. We are just coming out of winter here and the skies get pretty dark early on. At this time of the year, the milky way is pretty high in the sky too so you've only got a short window to get your shots. Got lucky here, it's a popular park and look out.Lighting
I didn't light this up at all. There was enough light from the city to get me this effect. Unless you are in complete darkness, it isn't worth lighting up objects. It will only affect the over all image.Equipment
I shot this on an Olympus Em5 MK II with a 8mm f3.5 Rokinon Fisheye. Lens is awesome, fully manual. I also had a heavy tripod but the Em5 has amazing stabilisation. It's a micro four thirds camera so I was really pushing it to it's limits, in terms of field of view. The 2x crop is quit restrictive when it comes to doing these wide shots. I tried this on a 12mm f2 but I could barely get the lighthouse in the shot. This was a pretty low ISO - 800 possibly but you can go all the way to 6400 and get great results.Inspiration
I'm not from New Zealand. I'm from Ireland and pretty much everything here inspires you. There is lots of spots around for night photography and I wanted to shoot a lighthouse. Turns out, this was a few mins from my house. It's always good to get something interesting in your star shots. It's a nice way to show the vastness. In general, I love trying to capture stars.Editing
Yeah, you have to with these photos. The white balance was in the cold range (3700k) so an adjustment to this to bring back the orange glow from the street lamps. Bringing the exposure up and adding some clarity to the milky way itself. Best thing for me is to just play around in light room, adding more whites, reducing blacks and increasing highlights. The brush tool is pretty handy for this too but I tried to keep to a min here. I've also done some lens correction as it's a fisheye.In my camera bag
I travel light at the moment. Olympus EM5 MK II, Rokinon Fish Eye 8mm f3.5. Olympus 14 - 150, F4 and an Olympus 30mm F2.8. Advantage of MFT is, the lens are super light, the body is light. You aren't hauling around a big camera bag. I'll throw in a good torch for night time shoots too. You'll want one when you can't see the path or the camera.Feedback
Figure out where the milky way is going to be at certain times of the year, certain times of day and when the new moon is. Cold clear days are best. Always try get something else in the shot with you. My example being the lighthouse but hills, people are good examples. Have a lot of patience and take as many shots as possible with different settings. You'll be surprised about the data you can capture once in lightroom.
