Embrace and Embark

I first start with mentally visualizing the shot. i.e. How the couple will be posed and how to frame them with the Milky Way. In this case, I knew I wanted to have a light behind the couple to have a back lit effect and to create long shadows. I wanted the couple to be framed by the Milky Way bow which would mean capturing a multi-row panorama for a sufficiently wide field of view.

 

I set up a wirelessly triggered speedlight on a flash stand behind the couple and got them to stand in the desired position with their jackets on, not yet holding the pose. I programmed my Gigapan panorama mount to capture a 40 frame photosphere in a 8 x 5 grid pattern which would take a total of 17 minutes.

 

As the camera was capturing the sky during the first 8 minutes of the image, the couple had the chance to soak in the view of the Milky Way. When it was time to capture the foreground, I ran to the couple and collected their jackets and asked them to hold the pose for the next 3 frames and quickly returning their jackets upon completion of those frames.

 

After the shoot, the frames are prepared in Adobe Lightroom and stitched together in Autopano Giga. The final stitched images are usually in the range of 250 to 300 megapixels. They are then processed to my taste and cropped down to size in Photoshop.

 

EXIF:

Nikon D750

Nikon 20mm f1.8G

Gigapan Epic Pro

Optolong L-Pro filter

 

ISO3200

f2.2

20 seconds x 40 frames

Done