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Celestial Forces

Posted by
Darkelf Photography (Perth, Australia) on 12 March 2018 in Lifestyle & Culture.

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Another photo from the archives that I processed recently. It comes from the sand dunes near town of Cervantes in Western Australia, where we spent an evening shooting the dunes at sunset and dusk.

The exif settings you see here come from the base exposure for the foreground dunes. I took it about 15-20 minutes before it got dark enough to be able to catch some of the stars over the landscape. At home I combined the two exposures together to present this image.

I have not done much work in astro-photography and it is still a relatively new concept to me. This was an evening of experimentation and learning more than anything else. I spent most of the late afternoon hours scouting around for possible compositions. I wanted to find an interesting foreground and also kept checking my smartphone app for milky way and star alignment to ensure that the location I chose would have sufficient stars present for the concept to work.

The sand dunes are by no means remote and they are fairly easily accessible. We were lucky enough though to be there only by ourselves for the evening. Despite a little bit of city glow just over the horizon (even though Perth is situated around 180km to the south) the stars were beautifully clear once the last of the daylight glow started to fade.

In moments like this, as one gazes at the stars away from civilisation, it is hard not to think of our existence on this planet and in the universe at large. At the time I was trying to imagine what celestial forces shaped the life and universe as we know it and standing under the starry sky really emphasised to me how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

Canon EOS 5D Mark IV 30 seconds F/8.0 ISO 400 16 mm

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