Photography Project - photo 10

 I am quite proud of this one, not that you can see it properly when it is so little.
This is my first attempt at Astrophotography. I had read an article on how to photograph the Milky Way so I thought I would do it, i.e. photograph the Milky Way. I took my husband along to help - he is really into astronomy and takes some photos of the night sky himself.
I had the DSLR, tripod and remote timer. We went to dark sky (i.e. out the village). To be honest, the skies weren't great over the holidays however this was one of the better nights but there still were some clouds. I set the tripod up under this really cool Scots Pine with  a squiggly trunk and pointed the camera upwards.
The camera was set to bulb exposure, the lens was zoomed out as far as possible, ISO 3200, White balance was on auto, and f3.5. That was what the article had said and Peter agreed. It was on manual focus but as we were trying to get the tree we couldn't set it at infinity. We focussed by shining torch light on the tree. It is apparently notoriously difficult focussing in the dark! I think that is all the technical stuff. Then I pressed the switch on the remote, counted to 20 (it did beep to help me) then released. I did question why I was counting to 20 and not 19 as the article had said that if you expose for more than 19 seconds star trails begin to get visible, however I was overruled. But I think you can see little start trails in my photo!
It required a little editing. I increased the highlights, the contrast and the whites then I applied a pastel colour scheme, it was the one I thought worked best! I will be trying more of these.

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