Hello everyone!
About a month ago I bought my first wide angle lens and couldn’t wait to use it for some astrophotography on the last new moon we had. I had not done astrophotography before but not successfully because I only knew the basics but not the technical part of photographing the stars.
In the past I’ve had issues having good focus and finding a good spot to take photographs away from all the light pollution. But this time my girlfriend and I decided to take a good 2 hour trip away from the El Paso, TX area to the McDonald observatory south of I-10. When I got there I couldn’t believe the things I could see in the sky. I thought I had seen a good portion of the stars all my life when traveling at night on the road and that you could only see the milky way through pictures when the camera could absorb the light, but being able to see the milky way with the naked eye and so many shooting stars was amazing. Truly a great experience even when things did not go as planned.
After a long day of celebrating my birthday with family we started falling behind schedule and my initial plan was to get there when there was about half an hour of daylight left to familiarize myself with the are and know where to walk. But when things do not go accordingly you may fall 4 hours behind schedule and get there in the dead of night when it is pitch black and get freaked out by every sound nearby so we only allocated ourselves in the parking lot. We didn’t know the area and we did not know how high in the mountain it was so we were trying to be weary of steep hills, through the night we kept seeing bats fly around us, heard coyotes in the distance, a random window lit up with someone overlooking the parking lit far in the distance, and someone yelling uncontrollably in another far direction. I got really creepy to take photographs..
But regardless I took a good amount of photographs! I also wanted to build up to the excitement of using the wide angle lens by starting with my other lenses and the 18-55 mm did an awesome job but when it was time to get started on the wide angle lens, clouds started approaching the area and it got difficult to capture the stars when the 14mm lens was up for its debut. So I technically did not use it as much as I wanted to.
Something also seems to have happened to my camera from the last time I did night photography. It’s been three years since the last session and I know all the basic and the whole set up; aperture, ISO, focus, tripod, exposure, but it seems the my camera’s ISO has stopped working or it was not interacting well. I wasn’t sure if it was because we were in a really dark area but I thought the stars would compensate, but no matter what I would do for the first hour, the pictures kept coming out really dark, so in order to take good photographs, I bumped the ISO and the exposure time with not so perfect results, resulting in a lot of noise and star trails but better than all my other times.
I have a feeling I may need a new camera even though it still does great, since I’ve also had it since 2011. But regardless, I think this trip and pictures turned out well. A little bit of star trailing, but I am still learning, especially since I have only done this 4 times. I tested out the 50mm for the sake of the aperture and I gotta say, I can tell they would look really good if it wasn’t for the depth of field. Though everything was out of focus I can tell It can absorb a tremendous amount of light, so I’ll aim for a bigger aperture lens next time since the 14mm was mostly a trial and error and a learning experience. I’ll post more pictures but I say these were my best ones after being edited.
I’ll keep teaching myself more and try to do more of these trips. Thanks for reading all of this, if you lasted this long.
