and there's my hotel. The La Travere. Hi this is JP here I'm out in
the Mojave state preserve this is a little-known area between Vegas and Los
Angeles that's full of Joshua trees and just great interesting kind of rock
formations I decided to come here to shoot the Milky Way! I've been up all
night well I have been up all night but I would set up sleep for a couple hours
set up sleep for a couple of hours. I came here because the Milky Way in June
comes up and sits on that horizon out there and it sits there for almost eight
hours just a great time to shoot the Milky Way. So let's talk about how I
tracked the Milky Way. The camera settings I use and the last of all the battery
power you need to be able to shoot all night long. Indipro just released a new
Porta-Pak which is perfect for what I'm doing. It's a 98 watt battery that
has the ability to use dummy batteries for either Sony or for an LP battery for
Canon. #1 how do we find the Milky Way? Well first off the Milky Way
is only in the northern hemisphere in the summertime in the wintertime it's in
the southern hemisphere but how do you know where it's going to come up and
which way to look well first off is a thing called star
tracker and well there's several of them. There's star tracker there's stellarium
but the one I love the most is called sky guide the reason I like sky guide is
because it has a search option and I hit search on here and I just type in Milky
Way and it comes up when I orient the compass I can see okay it's gonna come
up at about nine o'clock last night it came up about nine o'clock but it was
way too low to do anything because there's still too much light so we had
to wait until it got up to about 10:30 or 11:00 that's when I started shooting.
Next thing to consider is the moon you don't want to shoot on the night of a
full moon because there's just too much light you'll never see the stars. So you
got to hit at the end of the month when there's no moon no full moon there's
just a small waning there small waxing moon just that little sliver that's when
you're gonna want to shoot. The reason that takes so long for ours is because
my settings are I go wide open f 2.8 I shoot a 20 second exposure so my shutter
speed is 20 seconds 2.8 aperture and I'm at 2,000 ISO and now I just I
shoot on manual and I shoot on daylight. I do all those things. Now I'm gonna
change that daylight into what I like when I get into Lightroom with it
because I have all the options I'm shooting in RAW. I don't want to shoot it
any other way I want to be in raw. So there are my settings and that really
gives me now 20 second exposure means I only get three frames per minute that
means in 60 minutes I only get a hundred and two and 180 frames so 180 frames
divided by 24 is roughly four five six seven point something seconds so I'm
only getting about seven seconds seven and a half seconds per hour. So if I do
four hours I'm barely getting a 30-second piece of that Milky Way coming
across the sky so that's why I need four hours and that's why I love using a
slide a little track it just a little slide with it so I can just pan and and
slide slightly with it in that four hours. I give myself a beginning
point in an out point so it just kind of moves with it slowly and the Milky
Way it may move a little bit in the frame across but at least I'm keeping it
in the frame. Another thing to consider is your focus. Turn your auto focus off
turn your vibration control off turn all that stuff off so that you just have
manual focus now sit up when you have daylight like today and aim your camera
at say distant object if you wanna use auto focus you can do that and focus
there several times so it's like as far away as possible, it's infinity it's as
far as it goes it's infinity. Then note we're on the infinity symbol that focus
point is it's sometimes you can go past that and it goes actually back out of
focus on lenses it's really a weird thing so you need to find infinity where
I'll give you a your distant focus. Now let's talk about the battery power I
mean I've got 3 LP batteries going here one for the slider one for the pan
device and one for the camera so that's a lot of batteries at 4 hours it
concerns me that they're not going to work that long and so I just have always
done time lapse with some kind of external battery source. This is new by indipro
the porta-paks. They're perfect because it's a little cage with a block you can
put underneath your camera you can plug your camera in now and I can do
time-lapse all night I mean I hardly used one bar it comes with a splitter so
you can run two of the dummy batteries I can run one to my slider and one to my
panning device. So it's just a great setup to be able to give you all the
battery that you need when you're out like this and I can't charge I've shot
all night and I can shoot all day now I don't have to worry about trying to
charge batteries I've got enough power to do whatever I need to and they're not
super heavy I've got one a little clamp on the side of the leg here and run the
two things for my slider and panning device and this one I love just sits
underneath the camera on top of the ball head is a perfect setup.
so there you have it shooting the milky way! How to find it, camera settings and
battery power to keep you going all night long in the end of the day! So keep
those cameras rollin keep on clickin!
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