Milky Way

Last night I drove down to Swan Valley for my first ever Milky Way shoot. As I was getting setup, another photographer (Bob Seidel from Idaho Falls) arrived. Bob is an experienced Milky Way photographer so it was nice to have a knowledgeable person on hand. Bob's plan was to create some images that featured the schoolhouse along with others to feature the Milky Way and then composite them in Photoshop. Since I am not a Photoshop user, my plan was to take a single photo to process in Lightroom. Bob setup some lights for the evening inside the old schoolhouse. They were a bit too bright for my single image as you can see with the photo above. My resultant photos are pretty crude in my opinion. Other than the lighting problem mentioned above, the stars are not in focus. Clouds, at times covering the Milky Way, were a bit of a problem as well. We finished up around 2:30 AM. I wound up spending the night in my gasoline powered tent (my car) with the intention of taking some more photos the next morning. I also went to Fall Creek Falls and had breakfast at the South Fork Lodge before returning to Casa Budde West.