Photographing milky way hasn’t yet become my specialty.  But what can you do after a long day of 10-mile mountain hike, finally winding down your day in a hot tub in the middle of a 1000 acre ranch?  I didn’t find anything better to do than to enjoying the starry sky.  In fact, I had to jump out of the hot tub and pull out all my camera gears.

It was 12:01am, just past midnight.  I hardly could remember the last time I was so dazzled by the clear milky way and the thousands of stars right on the tip of my nose.  I had quite a bit of trial and error in order to capture the following, and here’s my camera setting.

Aperture priority.  f/10, 16mm, ISO8000, manual focus, 25 second exposure. 2.15+ stop exposure adjustment in Adobe Lightroom

Aperture priority.  f/6.3, 16mm, ISO6400, manual focus, 30 second exposure.  1.35+ stop exposure adjustment in Adobe Lightroom

Aperture priority.  f/6.3, 17mm, ISO3200, manual focus, 30 second exposure.  2.15+ stop exposure adjustment in Adobe Lightroom

As a matter of fact, I could totally use wide aperture 2.8 to capture the last image or even all of the above, since all the stars are of the same far distance from my camera, I could totally leave a shallow depth of field.  The above was an experiment, and I can’t wait to photograph the amazing starry sky again!

Composition was the major challenge. Perhaps next time I’ll be lucky to find a foreground to photograph with the milky way.

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