# Rocky Mountain Milky way



## kalgra (Jul 15, 2018)

I made my way up to Rocky Mountain Nation Park Friday night after work to see if I could take advantage of the new moon and get a nice shot of the milky way. My plan was to get there early enough to have lots of time to scout out a shot and get some blue hour shots for the foreground and mountains then hang out and wait for the milk way to rise.. Originally I went to Sprague lake but didn't find any shots I was happy with so after about an hour I moved on to Bear Lake which I have tried shooting the milk way many times but never really got lucky with clear skys.

I thought Id try a different vantage point this time and I started making my way up the hillside. Lets just say it got really steep and I was not finding a good clearing in the trees that allowed a view of the lake below. After about an hour of fighting may way through some really thick trees. I finally came upon the spot where I made this shot. I was not totally thrilled with the clearing and there are some trees I wish were not there but alas I had begun to run out of light and just decided to go with it.

This image is made from two shots, I used a Canon 5DmkIV with a 25mm Zeiss Distagon f/2.0
Foreground and mountains shot about 9:15PM about 40 minutes after sunset f/8.0, 20 sec, ISO 100.
The sky was shot from the same location at about 11:00PM f/2.0, 15 sec, ISO 3200.
I manually blended the shots in Photoshop,




LongsPeakMilkyWay-1600px by Kristian Algra, on Flickr


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## blurred45 (Jul 15, 2018)

That's a breath-taking photo! Awesome shot


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## Jeff G (Jul 15, 2018)

Very, very, Nice!


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## SquarePeg (Jul 15, 2018)

Beautiful!  Nominated for POTM.


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## bulldurham (Jul 15, 2018)

Good un!


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## WesternGuy (Jul 16, 2018)

Very nice image.  You did a very good job of blending your shots.

WesternGuy


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## Jeff15 (Jul 16, 2018)

Very good image....


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## zombiesniper (Jul 16, 2018)

Great image.

A well deserved nomination.


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## smoke665 (Jul 16, 2018)

kalgra said:


> Foreground and mountains shot about 9:15PM about 40 minutes after sunset f/8.0, 20 sec, ISO 100.
> The sky was shot from the same



Very nice shot worth of the POTM nomination. Thank you for sharing how you took the shot. I'm curious how you compensated for movement during the roughly 2 hr interval between the shots. A little background on the PS process?


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## Compaq (Jul 16, 2018)

I like the composition, and the sky is lovely, but in my opinion the foreground really needs to be brighter. The trees, lake, and snowy mountains make for a really nice foreground, but they are mostly black in this photo. The "wow" factor of the milky way alone does not make this POTM material for me, but it would be if the foreground simply was a bit brighter.


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## Peeb (Jul 16, 2018)

Compaq said:


> I like the composition, and the sky is lovely, but in my opinion the foreground really needs to be brighter. The trees, lake, and snowy mountains make for a really nice foreground, but they are mostly black in this photo. The "wow" factor of the milky way alone does not make this POTM material for me, but it would be if the foreground simply was a bit brighter.


Respectfully disagree.

Brightening the foreground to make it look like daytime would certainly yield more data, but aesthetically you lose the sense that this was actually taken at night.  At 11:00pm in the middle of a mountain forest, things get (as my ol' Pappy used to say) "Darker than the inside of a cow".  

I've seen and taken shots processed in the manner you propose, but this wasn't what the OP was after here.  The submitted image is a VERY worthy POTM image, in my opinion.


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## Compaq (Jul 16, 2018)

Peeb said:


> Compaq said:
> 
> 
> > I like the composition, and the sky is lovely, but in my opinion the foreground really needs to be brighter. The trees, lake, and snowy mountains make for a really nice foreground, but they are mostly black in this photo. The "wow" factor of the milky way alone does not make this POTM material for me, but it would be if the foreground simply was a bit brighter.
> ...



After 30 minutes under the night sky with no moon I can definitely make out more detail than what is in this foreground. And the Milky Way is not as detailed as here. But none of that matter, because realism is not the point. I don't mean it should look like it was taken at noon, but just being able to make out some of the shadow detail in the trees at least would make able to enjoy the entire image. I want to travel through the image, from the foreground to the sky, but to me the journey is quite uninteresting half of the way.  But then again there is no right and wrong in art.


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## kalgra (Jul 16, 2018)

Compaq said:


> I like the composition, and the sky is lovely, but in my opinion the foreground really needs to be brighter. The trees, lake, and snowy mountains make for a really nice foreground, but they are mostly black in this photo. The "wow" factor of the milky way alone does not make this POTM material for me, but it would be if the foreground simply was a bit brighter.



I can agree with what your saying to a degree but I think it depends on the brightness and other setting of your monitor, or perhaps the same could be said for my monitor. On the mac I processed this on I did not completely crush the blacks in the foreground so if you are seeing absolutely black trees with not hint of detail at all that was not my intent. I dropped the shadows of the base image just to the point where there is only the faintest amount of detail. However as I viewed the image on several other devices I noticed for example on my Ipad that the trees were too dark as you mentioned.  Im not really ever sure how to get around this for posting on the web. haha first world problems.

I thought about this very thing quite a lot. Of course milky way images never look as we see them in real life and so in that regard as you point out realism isn't the goal. On the other hand I struggled with having the foreground brighter for three very different reasons but mainly I just felt the image started to take on too much of an HDR look and I did fear that it was going to look over cooked. There were other good reasons (in my mind) I chose to keep the foreground darker, the trees where just not pretty and were very chaotic. Lots of dead limbs and busy details that I felt drew the eye away from the central point of the image. I actually cloned out many of the small dead limbs because they still popped out too much. I also tried to use the darkened V like framing of the trees to direct the eye upward from the lake to the mountain and then the sky. Weather or not I accomplished this is probably very debatable. In any case I appreciate your feedback!


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## kalgra (Jul 16, 2018)

smoke665 said:


> kalgra said:
> 
> 
> > Foreground and mountains shot about 9:15PM about 40 minutes after sunset f/8.0, 20 sec, ISO 100.
> ...



Thanks!
To be honest i'm not 100% sure what you mean when you say "how you compensated for movement during the roughly 2 hr interval between the shots". I didn't have any movement to contend with over that period i was just waiting for the milky way during that time. The only movement I was dealing with was sitting on pointy rock and trying not to slide down the 40 deg inline into my tripod for 2 hours. Again first world problems lol.

 The sky was masked from the horizon line up and everything below that was just the foreground. I suppose even with the foreground being at 20 secs I could have gotten some movement in the trees but luckily there was no wind. Honestly the biggest issue I had to contend with was the top of the tree at the left poking up into the sky. When I refocused and opened my aperture all the way for the milky way the foreground became pretty blurry as did those limbs poking up into the horizon. Masking the base image for that took some work but I was able to use some refined luminosity masking to cut around it and blend it pretty well.

For you and those interested here is my PS layer stack. I'll start this off by saying I am no PS pro and my workflow is probably less than ideal in the eyes of a real pro. None the less Ill try to describe whats going on here starting from the bottom up. 
Oh first things first., I should mention that I first open the selected frames in camera raw where I do basic color and exposure adjustments then I export all selected frames into PS as Smart Objects.
-The first layer is just the frame with the milky way sky.
-Then my base foreground image with a mask applied to cut out the sky at the horizon. I used luminosity making techniques to make my mask.
-Then I created a cloning layer to get rid of anything I didn't want. Dead branches, airplane trails, etc.
-Next I did some noise management for the sky. Again using luminosity masks to preserve detail in my stars and added a group layer with the horizon line mask from below inverted so as not to apply any noise reduction to the foreground.
-The stamp layer just flattens all previous layers into a single layer. I don't recall why thats there. I probably only temporarily created it to make a new mask and forgot to delete it.
-Next is all my dodge and burn layers sorted into a folder to selectively add definition to the mountains and just brush the tops of the trees in the distance with some light. Again I used luminosity mask to constrain my adjustments.
-The Lake reflections layer is a vertically inverted sky frame from the bottom that has the highlights cranked up and a Gaussian blue effect added as an overlay then masked for the lake and opacity dropped to 15% just to add a slight glow and a touch of sky color to the lake.
-Sky fix was jus a booboo I made some where along the way where my horizon line got messed up and I needed to fix it.
-Start bursts are just some custom brushes I made to add little twinkle effect to selective stars. Some people like this others don't (my wife being one that doesn't lol)
-Finally I just added some sharpening to the foreground.

Let me know if you have any questions. Like I said Im no pro this is just my hobby. Im self taught from you tube sooo take that for whatever its worth.


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## smoke665 (Jul 16, 2018)

@kalgra thanks for the post steps. I'd assumed that you had masked foreground. I've just about given up luminosity masking since the latest improvements to refine edge in PS. Still a solid technique to know.


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## crimbfighter (Jul 16, 2018)

Very nice! Really good colors in the milky way!


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## AlanKlein (Jul 16, 2018)

Awesome shot.


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## naiku (Jul 17, 2018)

Love it.  Trying to incorporate some more foreground into my Milky Way shots, so it's great reading about other techniques used and seeing the results. Thanks for posting.


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## akboeckman (Jul 19, 2018)

I'm loving this photo, and I love the contrast of the brilliant starry sky with the darker foreground. It gives enough detail to see the trees, the lake, and then the mountains in the background having more detail. 

I know personally, when I've tried to take night sky photos, I always want the foreground as exposed as the sky and it feels a little fake. I think your approach makes it feel more "comfy." I know, that doesn't really make sense.


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## m40bravo (Jul 24, 2018)

kalgra said:


> I made my way up to Rocky Mountain Nation Park Friday night after work to see if I could take advantage of the new moon and get a nice shot of the milky way. My plan was to get there early enough to have lots of time to scout out a shot and get some blue hour shots for the foreground and mountains then hang out and wait for the milk way to rise.. Originally I went to Sprague lake but didn't find any shots I was happy with so after about an hour I moved on to Bear Lake which I have tried shooting the milk way many times but never really got lucky with clear skys.
> 
> I thought Id try a different vantage point this time and I started making my way up the hillside. Lets just say it got really steep and I was not finding a good clearing in the trees that allowed a view of the lake below. After about an hour of fighting may way through some really thick trees. I finally came upon the spot where I made this shot. I was not totally thrilled with the clearing and there are some trees I wish were not there but alas I had begun to run out of light and just decided to go with it.
> 
> ...


Amazing job and great composition. 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk


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## Wildlife_Nut (Jul 24, 2018)

kalgra said:


> I made my way up to Rocky Mountain Nation Park Friday night after work to see if I could take advantage of the new moon and get a nice shot of the milky way. My plan was to get there early enough to have lots of time to scout out a shot and get some blue hour shots for the foreground and mountains then hang out and wait for the milk way to rise.. Originally I went to Sprague lake but didn't find any shots I was happy with so after about an hour I moved on to Bear Lake which I have tried shooting the milk way many times but never really got lucky with clear skys.
> 
> I thought Id try a different vantage point this time and I started making my way up the hillside. Lets just say it got really steep and I was not finding a good clearing in the trees that allowed a view of the lake below. After about an hour of fighting may way through some really thick trees. I finally came upon the spot where I made this shot. I was not totally thrilled with the clearing and there are some trees I wish were not there but alas I had begun to run out of light and just decided to go with it.
> 
> ...


That really is a gorgeous shot! I think you nailed it!


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## dasdude (Jul 24, 2018)

Nice shot!


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## BananaRepublic (Jul 25, 2018)

Did you use night-vision googles getting down


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## kalgra (Jul 28, 2018)

BananaRepublic said:


> Did you use night-vision googles getting down



haha no I just used a head lamp and my trusty hiking poles which were a life saver. I never go out into the wilderness without them.
It was a little funny. There were some other photographers down at the shoreline of the lake right where I was climbing down. I must have startled one of them could I could vaguely here one say "Did you hear that? I think there something back there." I made sure to shine my light in their direction so they at least knew it was another human. After all the lake is called "Bear Lake".


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## Fujidave (Jul 28, 2018)

A stunningly beautiful image, an image to be proud of and maybe get framed.


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