Arches Night Sky Workshop

So, a couple weeks ago I went on a trip. Brad Goldpaint is a photographer who takes magnificent photos of the night sky and also holds workshops for people who want to learn. I've been obsessing over the night sky ever since I bought my DSLR camera a year and a half ago. Last summer I made multiple attempts at photographing the Milky Way and was largely unsuccessful. I had to waaaay over-expose the photos in Photoshop to bring out any detail at all. For this workshop, I rented a Canon 5D Mark III and when the Milky Way rose at about 1:30 am, I got it on the first try:


This one is a panorama at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands. I tried to take several panoroamas, and this is really the only one that actually worked out. I think it's probably the best out of all my pictures.

It is clear to me now: my "nice" camera is just not cut out for night sky photography. I've got the bug, and I'm going to have to upgrade! So anyway, here are some of my favorites from the workshop (all processed a bit in Photoshop):


So anyway. It was pretty fun. We ended up going out a day early because the weather wasn't looking great for the days scheduled during the workshop. It's good thing we went out that night--it was the ONLY good night we got. The next night we had to compete with the clouds, and then the last night we didn't go out at all because it rained. I was feeling pretty disappointed, so when I happened to wake up at 4am the next morning, I went outside, saw clear skies, and went charging off to Arches. I got about an hour of shooting in the first pulloff I came to. I have a bunch of Milky Way shots at 5am when the sky was just starting to get lighter and it looks super blue. In any case, I was pretty proud of myself for going out alone.
One of the things we learned how to do was light painting. I'd heard about it, looked it up on the Internet and tried it out with not great results, but now I get it. Basically, you set up a 30-sec exposure of the sky with something interesting in the foreground, and while the camera is running, you go off to the side and "paint" your foreground with an incandescent flashlight. You have to keep the flashlight moving, or you create hot spots in your photo. And it HAS to be incandescent light. Me and another one of the attendants were shooting together with a flashlight Brad gave us and we got curious about the incandescent vs LED light thing. I had my Dad-LED flashlight with me, so we swapped them out and got these results:

Incandescent Light

LED Light

In the LED image, you can see a pretty prominent plane trail. There were SO many planes in the sky that night. It's easy to get rid of them in Photoshop. I got rid of the plane trails, which tend to be red and have dashed trails. I kept the shooting stars, which are fainter, straight white lines. Back to light painting: one problem with it is accidentally being in the frame of your shot:
That's me! Whoops. You can see headlamp light from some of the other guys in our group off to the right. Also, if you were in the middle of a shot, and someone turned on their headlamp or walked in front of your camera:

I think I was trying to figure out if there were any stars visible through the clouds with this shot, and Brad walked past with his red light on in the middle of it. It's pitch black, which is why the camera only picked up his light and not the rest of him. Anyway. In this shot, Brad was using his green laser pointer for light painting instead of the flashlight. I think it's pretty cool.


We also practiced bracketing, which is when you take the same picture several times with different exposures and then put them together in photoshop, so the foreground and background both are correctly exposed. I have of those images left to process-it's kind of a pain--but here's one of them:



So that's about it. I'm all fired-up and ready to get out and take more pictures this summer!