Oscoda: Prime & Wide

We went up north last weekend for what might have been our last trip of the year. I decided to only shoot with the Canon 100mm f/2.8 during the day. Something that not only forced me to shoot prime, but also forced me to shoot something other than cannabis with my 100mm lens.

Once night fell, I threw the Sigma 10-20mm on to take a stab at photographing the Milky Way with my new Canon 70D for the first time. I had a few beers throughout the day, so I wasn’t in tip top shape to be walking around in the dark with my camera on the tripod. While I am happy with the outcome, I could have done better.

I also messed around with back button focusing, something that I found out about a week or so before the trip. I need to play around with it more, but for continuous focusing/panning situations, I like it a lot!

Shooting The Stars

Last August, I photographed the Milky Way galaxy while camping in Oscoda, MI. While the outcome was below what I consider a quality photo, I was still impressed for it being my first attempt.

We made it back up to Oscoda for the last camping trip of 2015, so I decided to take another stab at photographing the Milky Way using the information I gathered for improving the shot. Since it was almost a month later in the season compared the first attempt, the sun sets earlier which means the sky was “pitch black” faster.

At 9:36 PM Eastern, the sky was what I considered “black enough”, so I started snapping. This time around, I shot due South instead of straight up into the sky though, which resulted in a much better photo!

The yellowish/orange light you see just above the trees is light pollution from Tawas City and East Tawas, MI.

Below is a photo that I took while I was waiting for the sky to get darker. It was taken at 9:06 PM Eastern and captures the remaining light in the West/North West sky.

And yes, that is a distorted Big Dipper in the center slightly above the tree line.

I ended up getting recent photos of Nova and Kesyn, the two stars that Nicole and I created (see what I did there?), during the day too which is a plus.