Creative Nightscapes (Patreon)

In 2015, when I released my first Milky Way NightScapes eBook, there were very few astro-landscape photographers in the world. Back then, nightscape photography was considered quite difficult to do: Just getting a decent exposure was seen by some as a major accomplishment because of the extremely high dynamic range in starry night-sky images.

As cameras and lenses improved and more accessories became available to help make nightscapes easier to create, higher-quality astro-landscapes began to flood social media, and the early visual impact or novelty of nightscapes began to fade.

To keep their images in the limelight, some photographers started to ramp up the technical side of their imaging. More complicated stacking, tracking, blending, panoramas, and even compositing procedures began to be the norm.

Good composition and creative vision began giving way to a focus on technical prowess.

Don't get me wrong: All of these modern improvements have increased the quality of nightscape photography. I use every one of them myself.

But we may be allowing technique to overshadow creativity and running a risk of becoming jaded with what attracted us to night photography in the first place: the pure joy that comes from just soaking in the beauty of the universe and seeing the stars magically appear on the camera's LCD.

Roaming in the Night

Before I go any further with this article, let me establish my definition of a nightscape: It is a starry night sky, typically taken during the darkest period of the night (astronomical dusk), with a landscape feature that is often light-enhanced for better recognition.

This light enhancement can come from starlight, moonlight, twilight, light pollution, or even artistic artificial lighting. In very dark-sky areas, plain silhouettes of the foreground landscape can be quite dramatic, and even preferable over any type of light enhancement to the foreground. Simple is often better.

I take one of two approaches to my nightscapes. The first is with a well-laid plan for an idea that I want to realize. The second relies more on serendipity: I have only a vague idea in the back of my mind, and I use feedback from my environment to help drive my vision and creativity.

Even when I have a plan, I enjoy moving around the general location that I have chosen and allowing the landscape to speak to me. I like to take a wide variety of unplanned compositions and review them on the back of the camera to see which ones resonate with my creative sensibilities. Once I have done my initial discovery with these single exposures, I then concentrate, during the rest of my time at that location, on refining one or two perspectives and compositions that inspire me.

I began to explore locations in this way after I found that many of my early images had become my favorites not because they were inspired and creative compositions, but because I had invested a lot of time and effort into their technical development.

I realized these were images that never would be truly great, no matter how hard I worked them over with technique and processing tweaks.

Now, once I've refined my vision into one or two strong compositions, only then do I decide what techniques may add to the quality of my nightscape. Some of these are field techniques, some are processing techniques; some involve field techniques that enable certain processing options.

Where Technology Comes In

A single-exposure recipe that has been used by astro-landscape photographers for more than a decade is to expose for 30 seconds at f/2.8, using an ISO of 6400. This winning combination looks amazing — until you enlarge the image and discover that the stars are trailing: Because of the earth's rotation, they've moved during the exposure by about three times their diameter. Also, the digital noise at that high ISO is quite significant!

Of course, these problems don't matter if you're displaying your images only on social media via handheld devices.

However, if you have bigger plans for your photographs, some of the new noise reduction tools, like AI-powered Denoise in Lightroom and Denoise AI from Topaz Labs, do an incredible job!

Other ways to manage the challenges of noise and star trails are through your gear. If you have the money to invest in one of the newer and faster f/1.4 lenses that are corrected for coma aberration, it will allow you to shoot at faster shutter speeds —10 or 15 seconds — and reduce your ISO.

Another equipment change you can make for increased image quality is to have your camera's sensor astro-modified. Either the full-spectrum or the more popular visible + H-alpha sensor modification will allow you to obtain more red in the nebulae of the night sky.

Rather than have a primary camera modified, most astrophotographers use an older camera body or buy a used one for this purpose.

Tracking, Stacking, and Stitching

A more complicated field technique for increasing nightscape image quality is by tracking the sky with an equatorial mount. When polar-aligned, a tracker completely eliminates any star movement and allows using lower ISOs and smaller lens apertures.

Some of the modern trackers are quite small and very portable, cost only a few hundred dollars, and can be easily aligned with the use of a laser pointer rather than with a more complicated and time-consuming optical alignment. Even so, tracking requires making two exposures — one exposure with the tracker clock mechanism on (for the sky) and a second with the tracker off (for the foreground) — and later blending them in processing.

Other solutions for digital noise and star movement don't depend on special gear. Instead, they involve making multiple exposures in the field and later using software to create a final image.

One of the simplest of these techniques is stacking. Because every frame has a unique noise pattern, the blending of two or more will average and reduce some of that noise. Average eight to twelve exposures with stacking software, and the noise is significantly reduced.

Two popular stacking apps, Sequator (Windows) and Starry Landscape Stacker (Mac), can align the stars photographed in successive exposures made at the same settings, as well as greatly reduce the noise between the stars.

What's more, the software will produce two stacks to solve the problem of the stars' seeming movement relative to the rotating Earth: one stack for the sky portion of your image, with the stars aligned, and another for the foreground. Finally, the software will combine the sky and foreground stacks into one image.

The same software can allow using faster shutter speeds in the field to make the stars appear to quit trailing. With more exposures to stack — say, 20 — you can reduce exposure times from 30 seconds to 15 or even 10, and eliminate the resulting noise in processing.

Another simple multiple-exposure technique to improve nightscape image quality is through panorama stitching: combining several overlapping exposures of the same scene, not to produce a wider or panoramic version, but an image with the same aspect ratio as a single exposure (usually 3:2 or 2:3).

For instance, four or five overlapping vertical (portrait) exposures with a 24 mm lens can be stitched together via Photoshop or Lightroom to produce an image that has the same field of view and aspect ratio (when trimmed) as a single frame made with a 14 mm lens — plus, it will have 50 percent more resolution. This difference in resolution hides both noise and star movement. Similar results can be obtained by stitching exposures from a 50 mm lens to obtain the same field of view as a 24 mm lens.

A vertical image can be created in the same way by stitching horizontal (landscape) exposures.

More nerdy photographers will combine techniques, such as always using an astro-modified camera along with tracking and stacking, or making panos with tracking.

The Artful Foreground

With all of the technology available to improve the quality of your nightscapes, it may be more important to enhance their aesthetic quality by artistically adding more detail to your foregrounds. While a black or silhouetted foreground against a starry night sky can be quite dramatic, the land portion of an astro-landscape has the power to tell a more interesting story if its features are visible.

Here are four popular ways to add more detail to a night foreground:

• 1. Photograph in a more light- polluted location, which, unfortunately, is getting much easier to do each year. The darkest skies in the US — those rated 1, 2, and 3 on the Bortle scale of night-sky brightness — are typically found only in national parks in the Rocky Mountains and farther west. Even in these pristine locations, local light pollution from nearby small towns can actually give beautiful shading and character to your foreground landscape. The starry night skies from these locations will require more processing, but the foregrounds will be more detailed.

• 2. Make one exposure for the starry sky and make a second using twilight or starlight to reveal detail in the foreground, then blend them in Photoshop. Twilight blends are more dramatic, but starlight blends are more natural looking.

• 3. Use moonlight. Photograph the night sky when light from a crescent moon is present. Although the starry sky will have less contrast than it does without the moon, the effect on the foreground can be quite painterly. To preserve the contrast in the Milky Way, you can do a moonlight blend using two exposures from the same tripod position at different times: one with and one without the moon present.

• 4. Use artificial lighting. One approach, light painting, involves moving a light source over a scene during a long exposure. An alternative, called Low Level Lighting (also called Low Level Landscape Lighting, or simply "LLL"), uses constant, very dim light from stationary LED panels. There are many online resources that discuss light painting techniques.

Our Most Powerful Technique

Near the end of a long and productive evening a few years ago in Grand Teton National Park, my weary workshop group pushed on to visit a final spot: the Jackson Lake marina. It was a good decision: This last location had some of the most incredible red and green airglow I have ever seen over the lake — it was the closest thing to an aurora borealis light show!

That night, as I looked into the core of the Milky Way galaxy above the Tetons and the lake, I instinctively composed my image and took a single exposure. Everything came together in that one shot. No light enhancement for better foreground recognition. No stacking, tracking, blending, or other quality-enhancing techniques seemed necessary — nor did I want them to interfere with this moment of creation. Sometimes you just know that simple is best.

The desire to create is the most powerful driving force in the photographer's quest for artistic satisfaction. No gadget or technique can substitute for it. And nights like that one in the Tetons prove that nothing can replace just getting out and being on location with the night sky and the earthly landscape. The more we go out, the greater our chances of creating something wonderful.

Pushing ourselves fuels the desire that ultimately produces the satisfaction of creation. It's a cycle that must simply be fed.

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Written by Royce Bair

This has been the "short story" version of my new "Milky Way NightScapes" eBook Version 2.0," — told with a moral to the story: No technique is more powerful than the desire to create.

However, there are a lot of useful techniques and tutorials in my new eBook to get you on the right path and to improve your nightscape skills, including the expertise of 33 featured "Guest Artists."

If you are a supporting member of my Patreon, you already have a copy of my new eBook (if not, you can become a supporting member for only $3/month AND get the eBook included).

If you do not like the "subscription" support model, you can purchase my eBook all by itself (a one-time purchase). Either way, I hope you'll consider becoming a FREE member so you can get notice of articles like this.