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Summer Milky Way and Reflection

For those of us in the Northern Hemipshere the bright, complex center of our Milky Way Galaxy rises highest in the night sky in the weeks close to the Summer solstice on June 22.  Here's a shot from early July, captures high in the Ansel Adams Wilderness at an elevation of 10,000 feet.

The image was captured in July 2010 on a Canon 5D Mark II, on a moonless night.  Here's a blog post on the process:

Producing Milky Way Images
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/05/25/producing-milky-way-images/

Milky Way near the Summer solstice

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44 thoughts on “Summer Milky Way and Reflection”

  17. Robb Walker
    Reply

    Beautiful shot! I have a question. Please don't take this as a criticism. I am merely curious and would like to be able to apply your technique to my own work. It is odd that reflection in the lake shows stars trailing yet the sky above does not. What process did you use to correct any trailing in the sky? Can that same process not be applied to the reflection? Thank you!

  31. Jeff Sullivan
    Reply

    The movement in the water is not the movement of the sky +Robb Walker, it shows that an exceptionally long exposure was used, and during that time, the reflecting surface moves.  The most common way to address that problem is to cut out the reflection and replace it with a Photoshop-mirrored one.  But that fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the scene: big lakes move.  Their surfaces breathe, moving up and down, water ebbing and flowing up shallow beaches to show that the atmosphere has subtle eddies and pressure differences over distance, even when we can't feel or see a local wind or the waves it creates.

    So instead of misrepresenting the scene, I'm thrilled to be able to show the lake for what it really is, an interface with the atmosphere which shows us how dynamic our surroundings are, even when we perceive them as utterly still.  

    Sitting by the lake you'd see that movement, as if the lake were breathing, its surface heaving slightly up and down, the reflections of the stars moving ever so slightly, like the tilt of a signal mirror, reflecting and sending the image of our galaxy back out towards space.  

    We could still try to hide the nature of the lake and freeze the movement of the water.  If we reject the Photoshop approach as unrealistic and both geometrically and ethically challenged, we'd need to change the parameters of the exposure.  The shutter speed was 30 seconds, so to hide the true nature of the lake we could cut the exposure down to 15, 8, 4, 2 then 1 second.  Five stops.  Either the sensitivity of 6400 ISO would have to be raised. or the aperture of f/2.8 made more open.  The focal length was ultra-wide: 16mm.  The widest lens I can get to open the aperture two stops to f/1.4 is only 24mm wide, so that's not a solution.  The only parameter left to change is the ISO sensitivity.  We'd have to bump the 6400 up to 12,800, 25,600, 51,200, 102,400, then 204,800.  Let's hope that Canon and Nikon are working on sensors which will bring us that capability soon.

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