Here’s a picture from a couple months ago that I never finished after I took it. I took this during my outing in the Navarino State Wildlife Area. I had scouted this location ahead of time on Google Maps due to it being out in the country where there is little light pollution. My hope was there would not be any lights on at this place and I could shoot it in total darkness. Unfortunately there was a street light nearby that was overexposing my image. Because of this I had to spend a ton of time fixing the image which is why I sort of abandoned it a couple months ago. If I ever go again, I might rig up some contraption that I can put up in the air and cover the street light.

Location

The church has been out of commission since 1968 based on what I can find online. I often see astrophotography photos of abandoned buildings with the Milky Way behind them so I thought this would be a good place to try that. The Navarino area is one of the few areas nearby for me that has almost no light pollution based on a light pollution mapping service I use. Even with that, there is some clearly visible light pollution that showed up in my final image.

Composition

Using my Rokinon 14mm lens at f2.8, I set the shutter speed for 30 seconds and began shooting multiple shots so I could stack them later. In total I took 6 exposures and 1 darker one for the foreground. I was a bit limited where I could shoot as I wanted both the building and the Milky Way in the shot. I also didn’t want to walk around in the graveyard as there was a fence all around the property.

Post Processing

The image took a great deal of processing compared to most of my photos. Like I said earlier, my results in camera weren’t ideal due to the street light nearby. The first thing I did was manually align the 6 photos using exposure stacking. After that I overlayed the darker foreground photo and tried to manually align that image. I had to do a fair amount of white balance correction too since the original images was very green.

After that I made the rest of my changes in Lightroom which probably took 3-4 hours as well. I tend to make a ton of Adjustment Brush changes to specific areas of the image. I made so many this time that I brought Lightroom to a crawl and had to call it quits.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

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