Milky Way Center

This shot was a long time coming for me.  I had tried to get a nice shot of the Milky Way Center a few times already but admittedly I had no idea what I was doing so I was relying on trial and error.  I did some research and went out on the night of a new moon which was also perfectly clear save a few clouds off in the distance and shot the night sky for several hours.  The result turned out amazing.  I shot this at a very high ISO (8000) because my lens is only f/4, but the D600 handles the noise amazingly well.  

I was also a little timid with how to process this image, but I intimately just employed some contrast and exposure adjustments in Lightroom before editing in Photoshop using my normal color balancing workflow with curves and selective color.  I tried taking some time-lapse on this evening as well, but processing that to look anything decent is going to take some time going frame by frame editing in Photoshop.  

I know have a huge amount of respect to those who shoot and edit night time-lapse footage as there is a massive amount of time and effort into getting the footage and then editing it together.  I may try to do some more time-lapse in the future, but it’s not as instant a gratification as still shots are.

Processing:

Nikon D600 | Nikon 16-35mm f/4 @ 35mm | 15s | Lightroom | Photoshop

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Abundance Gone