Milky Way

Went to shoot Milky Way shots over a lighthouse but the mosquitoes were horrid and no amount of repellant worked, so we moved up to shoot over the savannah. Warm weather and up here we were virtually bug free.

Specific Feedback Requested

It wasn’t rally bright enough to get much detail in the foreground and I guess in hindsight I could have done some light painting - though there were others shooting and it might have ruined a shot or two. Trying to bump up the detail just caused an overabundance of noise. Is what I have enough, or is there someone out there who can get the foreground detail without the noise?

Technical Details

Is this a composite: No
D850, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 15sec. ,14-24 @14mm

In ACR just moved the slider more toward blue even though I shot it at 4000K, it wasn’t enough. A lights 1 and darks 1 modified gave me the depth I needed at the core in Photoshop. Had to clone out several aircraft trails as this is a heavily traveled corridor from Tallahassee to Tampa or Miami.

I like the colors! Why f/8? (I don’t know the lens – some issue with it?) Excellent job on the core! The clouds are a nice touch.

Another half hour or so and it might have lined up with the road…

My approach is to minimize noise in raw conversion, with slight tweaks to the NR tools available there, and pulling down sharpening to 0. That helps get rid of small stars, too, which can look like noise. Then in PS, Topaz DeNoise does an excellent job. Then after that I can often get away with a little more lightening of dark areas.

Left out the 2…it should have read 2.8…ooops!

The processing of the sky looks good, I like bluer night skies myself. And you have done a good job of processing contrast in the core.

With this composition, the foreground is so dark that this almost becomes a milky way portrait. The tree silhouettes are not large enough to be an interesting foreground IMO. And one of the trees is somewhat awkwardly cut off by the right frame edge. While the sky looks great, the foreground is underwhelming.