On my first night of this particular trip to Romania last summer I got excited. As we were driving to my girlfriend's dad's house (personally I'd call it a farm), I looked out of the car window and saw stars. Not just a few like you get in London, but hundreds and hundreds of them; maybe a couple of thousand. And stretching out across the heavens, as clear as day, was the Milky Way. This wasn't the first time I'd seen it; I'd seen the galactic disc in lots of different places around the world and I've even been able to see it in the UK a few times; but this time I knew that I was going to be here for a couple of weeks and there should be plenty of opportunities to get some good pictures. I was excited.
One night when I had a spare hour or two I took the camera out onto the road beside the farm, I knew there wouldn't be traffic any time soon, and started taking a few tester pictures. First of all I decided to try and get a shot of stars with the landscape included for perspective. There were trees and a few farm buildings across the way. It wasn't easy as there was the odd streetlight here and there that made the exposure difficult to get right. The results weren't great but I wasn't too bothered as I knew this was just the preamble to the Milky Way shots I was going to get later.
Having got a fairly mediocre picture I moved round to the side of the farm where it was even darker and there were fewer lampposts. Now I was aiming almost directly up in the air to try and get a picture of just the Milky Way with nothing terrestrial in frame. The first few attempts were promising and not too long later I had the shot I had been waiting for. It looked great. The galaxy was clearly defined arcing right through the middle of the frame, the stars were bright and pin sharp and I knew I had a keeper. I was excited to think how it would look once I'd processed it a little to make it even clearer once I got back to Blighty. You can see the finished result below.
Pardon? What's that you say? You can't see anything? Am I sure I uploaded the right picture? Yes, I'm sure. Hmmmmm.... The problem seems to be that what I saw on the back of my camera that night was not representative of the data the camera captured. I can't really explain what went wrong but it goes without saying that once I got home I was very disappointed to see the result as, as you can see, it's rubbish. There is basically nothing there. I tried to process it every way I knew how but it seemed beyond rescue. I was gutted. I have posted it here anyway mostly just as a warning, I suppose. You can't always trust exactly what you see in camera. My advice would be to make sure you always check the histogram, especially if you're working in extreme light conditions, as this should give an unbiased account of the data you've captured; and keep taking pictures, even if you think you've got 'the one'. I hope you have more luck than I did.
One night when I had a spare hour or two I took the camera out onto the road beside the farm, I knew there wouldn't be traffic any time soon, and started taking a few tester pictures. First of all I decided to try and get a shot of stars with the landscape included for perspective. There were trees and a few farm buildings across the way. It wasn't easy as there was the odd streetlight here and there that made the exposure difficult to get right. The results weren't great but I wasn't too bothered as I knew this was just the preamble to the Milky Way shots I was going to get later.
Having got a fairly mediocre picture I moved round to the side of the farm where it was even darker and there were fewer lampposts. Now I was aiming almost directly up in the air to try and get a picture of just the Milky Way with nothing terrestrial in frame. The first few attempts were promising and not too long later I had the shot I had been waiting for. It looked great. The galaxy was clearly defined arcing right through the middle of the frame, the stars were bright and pin sharp and I knew I had a keeper. I was excited to think how it would look once I'd processed it a little to make it even clearer once I got back to Blighty. You can see the finished result below.
Pardon? What's that you say? You can't see anything? Am I sure I uploaded the right picture? Yes, I'm sure. Hmmmmm.... The problem seems to be that what I saw on the back of my camera that night was not representative of the data the camera captured. I can't really explain what went wrong but it goes without saying that once I got home I was very disappointed to see the result as, as you can see, it's rubbish. There is basically nothing there. I tried to process it every way I knew how but it seemed beyond rescue. I was gutted. I have posted it here anyway mostly just as a warning, I suppose. You can't always trust exactly what you see in camera. My advice would be to make sure you always check the histogram, especially if you're working in extreme light conditions, as this should give an unbiased account of the data you've captured; and keep taking pictures, even if you think you've got 'the one'. I hope you have more luck than I did.
