Last year I retook a Milky Way photo from a place that’s close to home looking to improve on it. The picture I got was better, but there were still things I wanted to fix this year. I decided to make my way out to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to iterate on this shot one last time.

This was what I came away with last year.

Looking at it one year later, I wanted the Milky Way to stand out more as well as be in a slightly higher position in the frame. All I had to do to accomplish both these changes was take the picture one month later in the year. The other change I wanted to make had to do with the foreground. Every time I’ve composed this shot in the past I’ve had a problem with the fence post I’m standing at creeping into the frame, so I’ve had to crop it out and throw away part of the bottom of the composition. The solution to this was to extend my tripod all the way to position my camera high enough to shoot over the fence post. After I got everything lined up I took a sequence of 10 exposures.

I used these 10 shots to make a noise-reduction stack of the sky. Because I use such a high ISO setting (5000) to take the image of the sky the file is more fragile and I’m not able to push and pull the exposure as much as I like. Taking these 10 files, I feed them into a program on my computer and it puzzles together the cleanest parts of the sky and gives me a higher-quality image of the sky that I’m able to do more with, which is what you see below.

Once I had everything I needed to build a good image of the sky, I changed gears and focused on what I needed to do to show off the details in the foreground. With the ever-present wind on the vegetation in the canyon, the horizon line and certain features of this composition always look fuzzy. With that being said, I still wanted to do everything I could to get a good exposure of the landscape. I lowered my ISO to 400 and raised my shutter speed to 3 minutes, and 20 seconds to make up for the difference. This location isn’t very far away from a highway, and even in the middle of the night cars drive by and shine their headlight onto the scene. Getting a super-long exposure of this composition always takes more than one try. Surprisingly, this time it only took two attempts to get the landscape exposure.

Now I had all the ingredients I needed to put together the image I wanted. I blended them in Photoshop, did a little dodging and burning (watch this video if you want to see how I do that), and this is how the finished image turned out.

This is the best version of this composition that I’ve taken. Repeatedly iterating and improving on my astrophotography methods brought me to this point. This is probably my last attempt at this image, partly because I don’t want to just keep retaking the same picture every year, and partly because this location can be a bit creepy at night. If you’d like to come along with me on taking this photo then you should watch the video below. Until next time, bye for now.