My visit to Cave Point County Park was one of my favorite photography trips I took this summer. I had visited Door County earlier that day as part of a working outing and my wife and I drove home in the afternoon. I then decided to do an impromptu trip 2 hours back to Door County that night as it seemed like it was going to be clear skies. Armed with my recently aquired 2Pac CD and a two hour drive, I headed out around 8 o’clock on a work night and didn’t get home until about 2am.

Location

Cave Point is located on the southwest side of Door County away from any large cities which makes it a great place to do some astrophotography. My plan for the night was to take some shots of both Cave Point and Cana Island. I visited Cave Point since it’s closest, grabbed about four groups of images and then headed to Cave Point. For this particular shot, I was standing on the top of of the main ‘cave’ looking across it. For another shot, I was actually at the water level which was pretty scary at night as I had no idea if a wave was going to come up and wash me away.

Composition

Like I mentioned earlier, I took about four compositions while at Cave Point. For this shot, I wanted to frame the tree to be pointing at the Milky Way. I did some light painting with a flashlight for this, but ended up not using those frames in the end as I liked the silhouette of the tree against the Milky Way.

Post Processing

Like all astrophotography pictures, this one took quite awhile, maybe 6 or 7 hours between a couple nights. Like all my other ones, I use Lonely Speck’s process of taking 6-8 shots, manually aligning them in Photoshop. Then turning the aligned images into smart objects and applying a median filter to reduce noise. If this isn’t done, it’s really hard to push the image in post processing without it getting crazy noisy. After that, I export the tif file back to Lightroom to do the rest of the edits.

Like a lot of my astrophotography images, I spend a lot of time on color in them. I really like Wayne Pinkston’s work so I usually spend a lot of time looking over his colors to see if I can come up with something similar.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking