I recently returned from California on a photo trip.

One of the stops was at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forrest, near Bishop, CA, where I captured this 30 second exposure.

To get this photo, I set up my camera while there was still light from the sun. Then captured a few test shots to see how the framing was, locked the tripod down and ate my dinner.

This is one of the test shots for framing. It is also a 30 second exposure.

Getting the Milky Way next to the tree was due to being prepared. I use an app called Star Walk on my iPhone. There are others, but this is the one I use. Since the app doesn’t need a data connection, only location info, it was able to tell me where the Milky Way was before the sun went down. I then both guessed and advanced the clock on the app to see about where the Milky Way would be in an hour after it was dark. This gave me enough information to line up the frame to get the capture I wanted.

I like the results. The first image only has about 20 seconds of edits in LightRoom, and could use quite a bit more. There is a lot of junk in the frame from other trees in the area. Normally, I would climb the hill to get the right perspective, but, the hill was made of loose shale rock and it was raining. It was not safe enough to take the risk to avoid 20-30 minutes in Photoshop.

So anyways, here is a Work In Progress from a recent trip. I’ll probably have the photos from the trip finished in a few months.

-M