Blandford Landscape Photographer – The Sky at night

Blandford Landscape Photographer

I love the variety of owning a photographic studio, one day it can be baby photography the next photographing commercially for some bottles of lotion. I like to do my ow personal project just for fun too. You may have seen some star trails photography I did last year. I’ve seen a few photographs of the milky way recently so thought I’d add this to my list of things to photograph come a clear starry night. So Last night i ventured out at 2am to get a photo of the night sky near me in Blandford, Dorset UK.

After a few test exposures I settled on my exposure of 78 seconds @ f/2.8. For this I had a sturdy manfrotto tripod, a ball head (RC2) and of course a cable release. The reason for the camera cable release is that you can’t set the camera for 78 seconds.. you have to hold the shutter open in bulb mode and time 78 seconds on your watch (or iPhone in this instance). So I aimed at the sky and the first thing I noticed was that i could focus on the stars as the are too hard to focus on. To solve this focus problem I entered live view and magnified a star and manually focussed on it (leaving the camera in Manual focus mode). I then aimed pretty much south and straight up (wide angle lens). I then exposed for 78 seconds and below is the result of the milky way photograph. I plan to repeat this when there is less cloud cover.. but it looks kinda cool I think. Not a bad first go I’m sure you’ll agree.

Please feel free to leave your comments below. If you’re local to me then drop me a line and next time I shoot the milky way i’ll drop you a line.

The milky way from Blandford Forum, Dorset.