Rodney Campbell's Blog

Staying on a farm property to the south of Bathurst gave me some pretty ideal conditions for some night time star shooting if the weather was willing. Being to the south of town I could face south with very little light pollution and thus have some pretty dark skies to work with. Our first night here and the weather was almost perfect with very few clouds in the sky and the moon was over the horizon.

After the kids had gone to bed I headed out around 9:45PM to capture the milky way whilst the conditions were still good.

I took some frames for a stitched panorama (which I’ll process at a later date) and then explored the hill behind our accomodation for some other compositions.

Here I’d revisited that cool rock in the grass that I shot during the day. The skies were nice and dark allowing me to shoot at ISO 6400 (and f/2.8) with the fabulous Samyang 14mm ultrawide lens.

Fallen Star

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 6400

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

At the top of the small hill there’s some water tanks and this feeding trough for the animals. I’ve tried using if for some foreground interest whilst adding a bit of light painting to lift it from the darkness.

Milk Trough

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 30 sec at f/2.8, ISO 4000

Then I headed back down to the bottom of the hill and setup on the side of this path through the paddock as a leading line into the image. This point was literally just ten metres from our cabin so I setup for some star trails.

I light painted a single frame to allow me to blend in the foreground into the final image. That done I setup for star trails mode (being dark skies I was able to shoot at ISO 1250) and let the intervalometer run. It was a quarter to eleven and I was already pretty tired after a long day. I let the sequence run for about 90 minutes and a quarter past midnight and 86 frames later I’d had enough – it was time for bed :).

Eye on Greener Pastures

NIKON D750 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 61 sec at f/2.8, ISO 1250 x 86 Frames

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