Lavender Blue

The Valensole Plateau is a stunning place. A beautiful landscape, full of flowers and fragrance, but unfortunately also overrun by tourism. This June was different though. I visited the region with benjaminbarakat shortly after the total lockdown in France was lifted and we only met local visitors.

 

We quickly found our suspicions from our off-site planning confirmed: Most well known daylight spots do not align with the summer Milky Way and many of the awesome nightscapes you find on social media are undeclared composites.

 

Instead of choosing the lazy solution by repeating these "too good to be true" photo collages, we embarked on some serious scouting. Driving the lesser visited farm roads was fun, even though our cars would probably disagree. After a while, we found this gently rising lavender field with solitary olive trees at its end and lines that align nicely with the Milky Way core. The perfect spot for our first stop of the night.

 

Prints available: ralf-rohner.pixels.com

 

EXIF

Canon EOS 6D astro modified

Sigma 35mm f/1.4 ART

iOptron SkyTracker Pro

Sky:

2 panel panorama, each a stack of 6 x 50s @ ISO1600 f/2.8

Foreground:

Stack of 6 x 60s @ ISO3200 f/4

Done