Milky Way And Autumn Aspens Above Lake Tahoe

This photo was a lot of fun to shoot. On Friday, my good friend Tony Spiker and I headed out to one of the best aspen groves in Tahoe to shoot some sunset and Milky Way scenes. Success! The Milky Way lined up where I thought it was going to and we ended up with some great photos. This one was my favorite:

click to view large

A "light painting" technique was used in order to light up the aspens and foreground. I usually use a bright LED headlamp when light painting but Tony had brought a Maglite that has an incandescent light bulb. What a difference! The LED produced a cool (blue) tone and the trees looked ok, but the incandescent bulb produced a warm (yellow) tone that made the aspen leaves pop with color. I think I'll be using an incandescent flashlight from now on when getting this type of shot in the fall...

Shot on a Canon 5DS R and a 16-35mm lens, with the lens set at 16mm. The ISO was 2000, a bit higher than I normally like to use but I wanted to try to keep the shutter speed at 20 seconds. 30-second exposures were getting a little too much movement/streaking to the stars. The aperture was f2.8, wide open for this lens in order to let in as much light as possible. No lens filters were used, a tripod and shutter release cable were used. A decent amount of work was done in Photoshop's Camera Raw feature in order to bring out the Milky Way and the highlights in the foreground a bit more.

How did I know where the Milky Way was going to be?

Over the years, I've used a few techniques and apps in order to find the Milky Way. Lately, my favorite app for this is PlanIt. PlanIt hasn't let me down yet, and it can also help you locate where the sun and moon will be rising and setting, it's also great for figuring out where rainbows might show up in a scene.

The photo adventure where I shot this can be seen on my latest Dtube video here: More Tahoe Fall Photo Fun This Weekend! (including a bit of "how-to")