LET THERE BE LIGHT (2020) < Previous | Next >
Another image from one of my favorite locations to go to in North Carolina - Bodie Island Lighthouse. It was here that I first dabbled in Astrophotography many years ago. This location is a crowd favorite and very easily accessible, so it can get tough to get a composition here without stray lights or subjects in the frame. Add to that, a celestial event like a Comet being visible in the skies and a pandemic that’s all but severely limited travel options and you can imagine when I say it that this image was one of the hardest I’ve had to work on to get it to where I like the end result.
I did have luck on my side. Comet Neowise was in the Western Skies when I captured this image (looking east directly behind the lighthouse) - there was a whole melee of photographers trying to capture the Comet. I happened to turn around and noticed the nearly cloudless skies and the milky way resplendent in the sky. It had never occurred to me to try a panorama at this location before but on this night, something clicked and I decided to give it a whirl. It took me over 45 minutes to capture all the frames without any unnecessary artifact that I couldn’t remove later in post processing. Even then, stitching such disjointed frames together was a challenge in of itself but once the effort was put into it, the light did shine bright from this one.
No matter how old I get or how many times I see it, the sight of a star studded sky, with our home galaxy will always hold a special place in my heart.
Thank you for your support!
Technical Details: 14mm/f2.8/20 second/ISO 6400 exposures for the sky (About 8 of them) with a 30 second frame at f/5.6 for the lighthouse and foreground. Individual frames merged with Photoshop and then sized and resized to fit togehter.
