Celestial Highway - The Story behind the Image

Photographs don't  just happen. They all require varying degrees of four decision-making processes.

1. Planning
2. Composition
3. Camera Settings
4. Post-processing

Put these together and you end up with the reason why most photographers say they "make" photographs, not just "take" photographs. In this post I'd like to outline the process I used to make the "Celestial Highway" image below. 

This image is made from 12 separate photographs. It is 8000 x 7000 pixels with the final Photoshop file coming in at a whopping 1.02 GB.

Planning
When you look at this photograph you see a starry sky, car light trails and a few trees. As the photographer, I see weeks of planning, two nights in sub-zero weather and about two hours of post-processing. I've seen similar types of images and several weeks ago I had the idea to try one for myself. Several things needed to come together that would help in its creation. I needed a highway with a bit of an S-curve, an elevated position to shoot it from, very little light pollution, and of course, a clear starry night. 
I scouted out a few locations and decided on this section of highway about a 15-minute drive from my home. Now I just needed clear skies.

Composition
It is quite difficult to compose a shot in complete darkness. Even with my headlamp I couldn't tell if I was positioning the highway in the correct spot or if my horizon was level. Test shots were necessary. I was also aiming for a bottom-weighted image that would help show off the expanse of the night sky. (The stars at the top of the image were right above my head!)

On the first night I went out at 9 p.m. in -23 Celsius cold. I parked my vehicle on the nearest side road and hiked through the snow to the location I had scouted out. I took several photos, played with camera settings and then waited. I waited, and waited, and waited. I waited for two hours and during that time only one car went by. Unfortunately my camera was processing a long exposure shot I had just taken so I missed it. A few swear words later I pulled my tripod out of the snow and decided to try again the next night.

This time I went out a bit earlier and didn't have to wait long before I was able to capture the lights of a car heading down the highway. The photograph below shows that image.    

The critical shot. I could hear the car coming from quite a distance and just had to release the shutter as it passed me.

I was using my Olympus 12-40mm PRO lens, which is a great lens for landscapes, but I wasn't capturing the expanse of sky that I wanted. From my experiments the night before, I knew that a larger panorama would be needed. I began taking shots in a grid formation. 

Camera Settings
In a future post I will talk more about camera settings for night photography, but for now, here is a rundown of the important settings used for this image:

• Camera - Olympus OMD E-M1
• Lens - Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO
• Manual focus - positioned to infinity
• ISO 1250
• Shutter Speed - 25 seconds
• Aperture - f/2.8
• Noise Reduction - Standard
• White Balance - Incandescent

Post-processing
The final image was a combination of 12 separate photographs. Before trying to create the panorama  each image was fine-tuned in Lightroom. The sky was brightened to bring out the colours of the Milky Way and a Curves adjustment was added to accentuate each pinpoint of starlight. 

Putting together a large-scale panorama can be a challenge. Photoshop can do this automatically but I have had mixed results when I leave it completely up to the program. For this image I imported all 12 photos into one file and began manually aligning each overlapped area as best as I could. Then Photoshop did the blending to eliminate harsh edges between each image. 

Finally I cropped the image to eliminate the uneven edges and tweaked the overall exposure.

One of several photos that ended up being used for the final image.

 My fingers have now thawed out to the point that I can get back out there and do some more night shots.

A border was added to each photo to illustrate how the panorama was put together.