Nightscapades
Active Member
Last weekend (8 & 9 September 2018) I drove down to my family’s holiday shack at Tuross Head, Australia, in the hope of grabbing some more nightscape photos. Saturday night started out with the sky covered in clouds, so I read for a while then tried for an early night.
A little after 11:15, I decided to have one last, but not hopeful, look outside before going to bed. The clouds were gone! I quickly changed into warm clothes & drove to a spot along the eastern shore of the lake, and set up my camera and tripod. What are those lights in the water, I wondered? Could it be…yes! Bioluminescence was making the tiny waves blue, and there were little pools of blue water along the sand left bare by the falling tide. Getting to shoot the Milky Way is always a joy for me. Getting my first photos of bioluminescence was an added bonus.
This image was shot when most of the Milky Way’s core region was in the hazy area of the sky below ten-degrees elevation. The planet Saturn was low in the west (about 1/3 in from the right of the shot), and you can see its reflection coming right across the lake to the sand in the foreground. I enhanced the glow of the bioluminescence by throwing and splashing water that I’d scooped from the shallows.
This photo is a single-frame image that I captured with a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.8, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400.
