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Over the Christmas break I went out shooting to build on my major project for my last year at university. This was my first attempt at photographing the stars against an urban landscape compared to natural and vast rural areas commonly used to compliment a starry skyscape. I recently went to the Astronomy Photographers of the Year Award exhibition in Greenwich, London, and there was an image of a housing estate with the Milky-way above it; I thought the contrast between an urbanised area and the art of the night sky was fascinating. Unfortunately, when I first went out to shoot in the early hours of the morning, it clouded over; the second time I went out, the sky was only going to be clear while the street lights were still on

This weekend I went to Essex to photograph the Milky Way as a part of my final major project at university. As you may have seen in my post Starry Night Sky that I posted a couple of years ago, this isn’t my first time shooting the stars, but it has not been a subject I have deeply focused on until now. During a lecture recently, we were told to try out the software Capture One as a way of organising photos, shoots, and do basic adjustments to pics. Therefore, I tethered my laptop to the camera and using Capture One I could see the photos I was taking almost immediately; this really helped with checking the focus, exposure and noise to get the best photos possible!

One of the goals for the holiday was to get some good long exposure pics in daylight, specifically playing with the movement of water; so throughout the week we picked some walks which we thought would  have some good waterfalls. The rain on my lens was also very apparent in most of my photos, a mix of rain and water spray is not a cameras best friend, but I tried to maintain the dryness of my lens as much as I could before my legs cramped from crouching down so much! We found a perfect spot along a dead-end where all but one little spot was deprived of light, so naturally we spent an obsessive amount of time snapping, swapping lenses and shuffling around to get as many variations as we could! Another goal of the holiday was to explore astrophotography as Wales has very little air and light pollution, if it hadn’t been cloudy all week the conditions would have been perfect.

Animal and nature photography has been an interest of mine since I first started getting into the art, but so far I have yet to get the hang of photographing animals unless they are slow, asleep, or in many cases so far, dead. Until now, my little project has tried to avoid the dark connotations of death, but after finding a semi-decomposed frog, there’s no escaping the gruesome reality of what happens after death. However, among the gloomy and rotting body, the frog’s eyes were clouded over, almost pearly white; altogether creating an almost mystical idea which brings it back to being less weird and gross and more fantasy like. Unfortunately, my macro lens couldn’t focus in that far, so I decided to flip my lens around and use the reverse lens method to create a very zoomed in image