Milkyway in the Oregon High Desert: D850 + Stack and Blend
Written and Photographed by Daniel Gomez
Artist
Spending the last 6 years in Oregon with a camera is a dream for those with a sense of adventure.
When I moved to this mostly gloriously green state I had no idea what to do with a camera other than to take it along and document all the beautiful places I began to find. Early on I quickly found that I had a great connection with Oregon’s High Desert. My wife and I had begun to explore these areas as they were less populated, had amazing geological formations, and very few full campgrounds! Since then, I have become most enamored with Astrophotography and prefer the night sky to a beautiful sunrise/set, especially if I’m in the high deserts of Oregon.
To check out more of my work, find me on Instagram or check out my website www.dreamcapturedimages.com
About the Shot
I often shoot in complete darkness and the only way I can really pull details out of photos is by working with lenses that have very wide apertures (F 1.4, F 1.8) and a camera that can really perform under high ISO’s. Using the Nikon D850 and the Nikkor 20mm F1.8 allows me to have no fear of ISO and crank it to 10000 to get both a well-exposed sky and foreground with more detail. I set my aperture to 2.5 because on most lenses you will find that there is lens coma (where the stars appear to trail at the edges and no longer look circular) when you shoot wide open on a wide-angle lens. Stopping down a full stop (3 clicks of the wheel) will render you both a sharper overall image and will drastically reduce coma. For shutter speed, 20 seconds is the absolute longest I can shoot without seeing stars trail/move at the 20mm focal length.
For this shot, I knew I wanted the milky way to line up over the southern bend of the river which began at exactly 5am on the 20th of March, 2020. Arriving 2-3 hours is key to making sure you have plenty of time for dialing in focus, making sure your composition is perfect and just being relaxed when it's actually time to get the shot. When we arrived we were hoping to get low down in the valley of this canyon only to realize that the lower we went, the more the bend in the river was cut off from our view. Luckily, we had arrived early and only wasted about 1 hour of time trying to get lower and quickly booked it back out of the canyon closer to the rim. When we got to the top of the rim I put my camera in interval mode and let it fire away until the lineup of the milky way was perfect and shot a few more frames as it passed.
The reason that I took images after the lineup, during, and before is due to the editing process. Shooting this way allows editing to go smoother because I stack sequential images of the milky way and foreground to drastically reduce noise. In this image, I brought 9 sequential TIFF files into Sequator (a free windows/mac program for star stacking) and stacked them all. The final result was a beautiful, almost noise free TIFF that I pulled into Adobe Photoshop.
Most of my editing style for night photos breaks down to adding as much natural color and sky glow that is already in the photo, while providing a balance of high contrast yet preserving shadows, and to add a bit of a fantastical touch with an Orton effect.
One tip I highly recommend for powerful editing control is to become familiar with the Curves tool as it helps add contrast, can darken and brighten areas, and can be further refined using layer masks to add the change only where you want it in the photo. Thank you all for reading this and I hope it piques your interest in visiting a desert near you.
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