Move Shoot Move and Olympus E-M1 Mk III

Milky Way season is upon us and so last weekend I headed out to the hills with fellow photographer Matthias Tannert to try to grab some astro shots in the mountains above Mittenwald, Bavaria. I had some new equipment that I was keen to put through its paces and an ambitious photograph that I was keen to pull off: a panorama of the whole visible Milky Way in the night sky.

The best I could make of it. My first Milky Way panorama

The trip was a mixed success, I got some cracking shots of the evening and early morning on the Kranzberg, but unfortunately the astro session was not as successful. There was a lot more cloud around as well as a lot more wind than was forecast and it was bitingly cold, leading me to give up my attempts at photography not long after midnight and seek shelter in the summit refuge.

I'll make the presentable shots the subject of another post, this one is going to be all about the technology, so if you're interested in the Move Shoot Move star tracker or astrophotography using the Olympus E-M1 Mk III, stick around. If not, I suggest you check back later in the week to see the other shots.

Setting up the MSM - Preparation

I spent a lot of time preparing for the trip last week, trying to get as much information as I could about setting up the MSM and establishing the best settings for the camera. Fortunately a lot of this information can be found in the same place as the American photographer Alex McGregor has an excellent YouTube channel (and website) called Chasing Luminance. 

One of the videos deals with calibrating the laser to make sure it's pointing straight. It's just as well I did this as my first attempts over a distance of about 2.5 m gave me a spread of around 10 cm top to bottom and left to right as I span the laser in its dedicated holder. Part of the problem is that there seems to be quite a bit of play room at the back of the laser and each time I tightened the locking screw the sighting seemed to shift a little. I've tried to partially overcome this by lining the back end of the laser holder with some thin card and there's now significantly less wiggle-room.

I ended up shrinking my target of error from about 10 cm to around 2.5 cm (4" to 1" if you haven't joined the 21st century yet 😉). There was a recent post in the MSM Facebook group from Andrew Larkin detailing how important getting the accuracy was in terms of length of exposure, varying from about a minute if you're 10° out up to 4 minutes at 2.5° or even 20 minutes at 0.5°, so setting up the laser is important. My university-aged kids assure me that a 10 cm spread over 2.5 m is approximately 2.5° - so we're already in a reasonably good place. A 2.5 cm spread is already 0.6°. Actually both of those should be half that since 10 cm and 2.5 cm were the diameter of the error field rather than the radius. So even better.

Setting up the MSM - In the Field

I have a relatively sturdy Tiltall carbon fibre tripod that I set up relatively low on the mountainside so that I could operate the camera whilst seated on the ground. I paid attention to making sure that the top of the tripod was horizontal before attaching my geared head. The MSM was attached to this and the camera to the MSM via the original Tiltall ball-head. 

I would really recommend doing a dry run at home to make sure all the knobs and levers are in the right positions before you head out to the field. Once you've established your spot, set up early if you can. If you take foreground images in the blue hour like we did, you're not going to be able to get too many compositions from just the one tripod spot, so be warned.

Setting up the MSM with my Olympus

If you're going to shoot panoramas, slipping a V- or Z-plate between the MSM and the top ball-head will add a ton of flexibility, in fact mine's in the post. This will mean that I can put the assembly on the ball-head and elevate the geared-head to the top layer for better panorama assembly. If I'd assembled it with the geared head on top, the gears would not be in a position to allow horizontal and vertical adjustment.

Sighting on Polaris was gratifyingly easy. I'd already set the elevation to about 47.5° (approx. 1° per ° of latitude) and pointed it north, I wanted to have that laser on for the shortest possible time. Then it was a case of twiddling the geared head so that the tracker was pointing absolutely dead on. The laser is really very visible to the naked eye.

Waiting for night to fall and the clouds to bugger off

Once it got dark and the worst of the cloud had gone I managed to fire off a couple of test shots simply to test trailing. My standard astro exposure with the Olympus using my Panasonic Leica f/2.8 8-18 mm is 25 s, f/2.8 ISO 6400, 8 mm (that's 16 mm to you full-frame types). I tried my first test-shot for 60 s using ISO 3200. 

8 mm (m43), 60 s,  ISO 3200 

Then I dropped to ISO 1600 and went up to 120 s.

8 mm (m43), 120 s,  ISO 1600

And lastly ISO 800 and 240 s.

8 mm (m43), 240 s,  ISO 800

It was quite windy, so there may have been a little blur due to tripod, but I find these images to have a perfectly acceptable level of star trailing. I have not stacked the images or performed any noise reduction on these images, they are single images processed in ON1 Photo Raw 2021 where I have simply tweaked the contrast up 13 points after applying the lens profile. The crops are of the area around Antares (?) top left - approximately 1/3 of the full screen in each dimension.

Olympus E-M1 Mk III

I want to start by pointing out that the images presented here are for technical purposes only. I have not done any significant editing and they're not images I'd want to be judged by. I started my astrophotography path in 2020 using my E-M1 Mk II. This time I was eager to take the Mk III for a test drive with all its astrophotography bells and whistles.

Starry Sky AF

First up is the star focus function on the Mk III. This is a game-changer for me as my manual focus can be a bit hit and miss, even with focus magnification at max. My eyesight is no longer 20/20 and getting those fuzzy little balls of fire as tight as possible with atmospheric movement and camera movement due to fiddling with the focus ring was always a trial of patience. And don't even talk to me about accidentally hitting the ring in the dark when you move the camera. All those frustrations are a thing of the past. Select accuracy (menu A4) and then Starry Sky AF under the focus options and hit the AEL/AEF button on the back of the camera. Works!

HHHR

The E-M1 Mk III has a magic high-res mode that can generate a 50 (or even 80) MP image using a 20 MP sensor. You can choose to do this hand held (HHHR) or in tripod mode. The former samples 16 images which it interpolates in camera, the latter 8 images. According to McGregor, it should be possible to use the HHHR mode to shoot stars and the THR mode to shoot foregrounds (video 1 and 2). There are two theoretical advantages to shooting in high res mode, you get a bigger image (duh!) and the camera performs about 2 stops of ISO-related noise reduction when it interpolates the images. But it does require a tracker.

There are some limits, maximum photo length is 60 s (giving a 16 minute exposure + processing time) and the maximum ISO in THR is 1600.

Tracked HHR for the Stars

This is my attempt at track in HHHR. Something has gone wrong here. Although Antares only appears once, the smaller stars all appear as dotted tracks. Alex, if you happen to read this, what did I do wrong here? You can still see the beginning of the Milky Way bottom left over the mountains, but this isn't an image that I can use. Maybe there's too much ground in the picture for the Olympus to process the stars properly, but the bigger stars have no trails.

MSM-Tracked, HHHR image 8 mm (m43) 60 s, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 50 MP 

Stationary HHHR for the foreground

I turned the tracker off and switched into THR, reduced the ISO and tried a couple of foreground shots. This works really well, but has left me with some unsightly pixel artefacts. Cloning them out will be straightforward, but they're there. The image quality is perfectly acceptable for the foreground image though. I know it doesn't look too hot in the blown-up parts of the image, but a lot of that can be rescued, if by nothing else than reducing the resolution of the image to a useable level.

Untracked, THR image 8 mm (m43) 60 s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50 MP 

Untracked, THR image 8 mm (m43) 20 s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50 MP

Lessons Learned

• Don't go on a 5 h hike with the missus on a day you plan to do astrophotography - it saps necessary energy
• The MSM is a game changer for Milky Way photography. Although I didn't show any shots without it here, anything that lets me reduce ISO and achieve the low noise levels I have here is a great advantage.
• I need a wedge for the MSM
• Starry Sky AF is a huge win for astro with the Olympus
• High res mode needs further investigation in both hand-held and tripod modes

Thanks for dropping by.

In Seach of the Milky Way - From Dusk 'Til Dawn in the Allgäu

At the end of May I scouted a possible location for an astro shoot in the Allgäu mountains come next new moon. A good milky way photos lives and dies by the foreground and I wanted somewhere with a good view over the alps. The middle of June arrived and the forecast for Friday and Saturday was awful; clouds, rain, the lot. Nothing doing. The next weather window was going to be Tuesday night. To make matters worse, the initiator of the whole idea - my friend Matthias - couldn't make it as he was stuck up at work in northern Bavaria. But an old school friend who happens to live in Munich was interested enough to bite when I announced my intentions on Facebook and so Martin and I ended up heading down to Fischen im Allgäu early Tuesday evening to see what we could see. Meteorologically we were on a rising tide - there were still some clouds around but the weather was definitely clearing from the north and so we were optimistic.

The Shoot

Waiting For The Moon To Set || Huawei P30 Pro

Dusk

Driving down there were still cloud remnants lurking in all the wrong places, but the northerly wind was driving them deeper into the alps and so we weren't too concerned. We set off from the car-park in the early evening light. Normally, like most people, I spend most of my time in the mountains during the day. Unless I'm staying in one of the mountain huts, I'm generally back down in the valley for dinner. This evening's experience may get me to revisit that schedule. There's a good reason why landscape photographers choose to shoot at the ends of the day; the light quality is very different. It's softer, gentler and less blue. Watching the pastel colours changing on the Vorarlberg mountains in the gathering dusk made me start rethinking how I plan my days in the Alps.

As the Sun Goes Down || Olympus f/7.1, 1/80 s, ISO 200

It was great to see that not all of the snow had disappeared in the intervening weeks; I find the last snowfields really make a photo like this and I don't shy back from exaggerating them in post-processing like  here (above).

The Pastel Colours of Evening || Olympus f/7.1, 1/160 s, ISO 200

All the Layers || Olympus f/7.1, 1/30 s, ISO 200

Moonset

I'd promised my school chum a relatively easy hike up to the first mountain top that I'd identified. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way and ended up about 100 m below the summit on a slight shoulder. The location was optimal for the first spectacle of the evening - the fresh new moon was due to set behind the peak above us and our location appeared to be optimal for that. My smartphone app (Sky View) was showing me where the moon should be in the sky, but for the life of me I couldn't find it. I was beginning to fret that either (a) the app was playing up, or (b) there wasn't going to be enough moon to see. As the sky darkened and I still couldn't see it Martin spotted it - why we hadn't seen it before was a complete mystery as it was so clear at this point.

Well It's Obvious Now! || Olympus f/8, 1/5 s, ISO 200

Setting Moon || Olympus 100 mm f/5.6, 0.6 s, ISO 400

Before we turned our attention to the stars that were beginning to appear in twos and threes there was one more dusk photo to grab before the technical stuff began:

When Purple Comes Out To Play || Olympus f/5.6, 40 s, ISO 200

As fun as it was to shoot the setting moon, it cost me my first milky way shots as I wasn't set up to get a good foreground photo during the blue hour that I could use to blend into the final image in post. The shot I ended up getting was ok, probably one of my better photos of the Milky Way per se, but the foreground is lacklustre. I don't know whether it would have been any better 100 m higher up either, but the lesson is that you need to be in position early, you need to get your foreground shots in in good time and you can only recon on about two good astro shots per night, one after the sun goes down and one before it rises, unless you're shooting with multiple cameras.

Collision Imminent || Olympus 300 mm f/5.6, 0.6 s, ISO 1600, Composite Image

Milky Way

The challenge with astrophography is the low light levels. You need an open aperture and relatively high ISO with a wide angle lens to get enough light to the sensor before the earth's rotation turns the star points into lines - the so-called star trails. As a rule of thumb, the maximum exposure time before this happens is 500/focal length* (400 if you're being conservative). So for my 16 mm equivalent wide angle lens, I can shoot for 25 s. In order to further increase light-sensitivity, we need to increase the ISO. Small sensor cameras (I shoot with an Olympus micro four-thirds crop sensor, technically a small sensor camera) are notorious for being sensitive to high ISO, the images tend to have a lot of unsightly noise - a random phenomenon that causes an unsightly buzz in the image. But being random, there's a solution: If you take multiple shots and then take the average of those shots, the noise is diminished. The challenge is that the software performing the calculations needs to take into account the fact that the stars are moving - if it didn't you'd end up with the trails again. All in all quite a technical feat, especially when there's a foreground involved. Fortunately the free Windows software Sequator can do all of this - it's what it was written for. It's not the most user-friendly app, but if you know what you're doing (or in my case if you know someone who knows what they're doing), it's extremely powerful. The trick seems to be not using too many of the features, but more of that below.

*25 mm equivalent, so with my micro four-thirds sensor I need to double my focal length

First Starlight - Stacked but Unprocessed || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s, ISO 6400, Stacked

We could just about make out the trail of the Milky Way in the Allgäu sky. From our vantage point I tried several series of shots, with and without my Haida Clear Light filter and Tiffen Fog filter and with the new 7Artisans 7.5 mm fish-eye. In the end I liked the unfiltered images through the Panasonic Leica 8-18 mm the best. The above image is stacked to reduce noise but otherwise unprocessed. The sheer clarity of the image just blows me away. The detail in the Milky Way is amazing. But I don't think this is a good Milky Way photo. It's a good photo of the Milky Way, but like I said earlier, a good Milky Way photo stands or falls by the foreground and I wasn't satisfied with what I was getting here, so after a cup of tea  and a pasty (thanks Martin, those were life-savers) I lay down for a 45 min shut-eye before heading up to the ridge, where I knew just the spot.

With Haido Clear Sky Filter, Unprocessed

7Artisans 7.5 mm Fish-eye Lens, Unprocessed

One of the greatest challenges with astro photography is finding infinity on the focus dial. Looking through the viewfinder you're confronted with an almost completely black image - finding something to focus on can be extremely difficult. If there's a bright light a couple of miles off this works relatively well, as at this distance there's effectively no focal change between 2 miles and infinity. It was quite a challenge in the dark though, and I had to hunt through the magnified viewfinder on the Olympus to locate Jupiter (bright spot in the middle of the images above) and twiddle the focus ring of the lens to render the tiny fuzzy light as tight and small as possible. Then it's shoot and hope. You can examine the images on the camera display, but you're never entirely sure whether your photo is sharp or not until you get the image on the computer screen.

Despite being pitch dark, it was easy enough to find my way by the light of my head-torch, having scouted the area less than a month before. I located the second spot relatively easily and set up the tripod again. A few ultra-high-ISO shots helped me frame the photo correctly. I also tried some low ISO long exposures with a bit of light painting so that I would have a foreground to go with it. This is a separate image that is blended with the processed astro image in post processing (see last image). This final photo here has to be my favourite image of the year so far. I didn't get a huge number of finished shots that I was happy with, but at the end of the day, if you come away with at least one, that's a win.

Milky Way Over The Allgäu || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s ISO 6400, Stacked

I carried on shooting for a while after this into the blue light of pre-dawn before giving up and catching a few more minutes sleep lent against my rucksack. It was a mild night with little wind and the ground was comfortable and dry beneath me, not a sound to be heard.

Birdsong and a yipping fox in the valley below alerted me to the coming dawn. By the light of the red band of cloud to the east I could just make out a small peat pond nearby that I'd just avoided in the dark. In retrospect I should have taken a lower vantage point for this shot. This is two images blended in ON1 Photo Raw, one for the sky, one for the foreground. I took the liberty of brightening the tufts of cotton grass to emphasise them in the pre-dawn light.

Mountain Tarn at Dawn || Olympus f/5.6, 1/6 s, ISO 200

Then it was down to find Martin and head down to the car. I found him warming himself over his camping stove and ready to return to the valley. As I waited for him to pack his things there was time for one last shot of the sun rising on the mountain escarpment opposite us. 

The Red Light Of Dawn || Olympus f/5.6, 1/30 s, ISO 200

Processing the Images

If you're not interested in the nitty-gritty of processing astro photography you can probably stop reading here and scan to the last images. It's very easy to over-process Milky Way photos: I spent two evenings working on this last shot only to have Sharon (correctly) tell me that it was too speckled and she didn't like the foreground. I've left this technical bit to the end for my techie friends who'll be interested in this stuff (hi Matthias!). 

Before the images can be 'stacked' (averaged), they need to be in tiff format. ON1 Photo Raw, my post-processing software can export tiffs, but they're the wrong format for my stacking software, Sequator. The images have to be opened in Olympus Workspace and exported as tiffs from there. For each image I used 10 star images and two control images with the lens cap on (lights and darks respectively).

Crop of main image

Unprocessed image OOC	Stacked in Sequator 10 Star images, 2 Noise images (with lens cap on), Align stars, Freeze ground, Sky region: Partial, otherwise all default settings	Processed in ON1 Photo Raw 2020 Develop: Contrast +24, Highlights +18, Midtones +15, Shadows -20, Whites +45, Temperature +40, Tint -3 Effects: Sharpening, Noise Reduction (Moderate), Tone Enhancer (Shadows Lighter on foreground; Midtone Contrast Boost, 50%), LUTs (1983, 35%), Sunshine (Sunglow, 50%), Curves (mild S-curve), Dynamic contrast on Milky Way

I also tried a blend of my favourite image with the light-painted foreground in ON1 Photo Raw. It's not perfect as I seem to have adjusted the camera between frames and had to stretch the resulting images to fit. I'd be interested to hear which image you prefer, this one with more detail in the foreground trees, or the original "Milky Way Over The Allgäu" above. My jury is still out on this one.

Milky Way Over The Allgäu II || Olympus 8 mm, f/2.8, 25 s ISO 6400, Stacked and Blended

Moonshots - Getting the Shot and Post-Processing

Who doesn't want to take cracking images of the moon, our closest celestial object? We've all seen startlingly bright photos of the craters and then perhaps gone out to try to make our own and come back disappointed with black photos containing a bright, blurry smear in the middle. With a little bit of know-how and a decent-length lens it's not too difficult to get images that will stun our friends. There are two important steps: getting the images in the camera and then processing the pictures on the PC. 

Moonrise over the Allgäu || Olympus f/8, 1/1250 s, ISO 200

Some phases of the moon are definitely more photogenic than others. When the sun hits the moon obliquely, like here at just after half moon, the shadows on the craters are longer and stand out more. At full moon the sun is full-on and the shadows shrink. This was one of those 'oh wow' moments that I knew I had to capitalise on. We were sitting outside at a restaurant in the mountains when one of the kids noticed the moon rising over the hillside. I had to dash to the car to grab my telephoto lens and was able to capture this image before the moon became too high above the hillside.

Getting the Images

All the images in this article were taken using my Panasonic Lumix 100-300 mm lens at the long end on my Olympus E-M1 Mk II, a micro four thirds camera, making this equivalent to a 200-600 mm lens in 35 mm terms. Without image stabilisation we need to watch out for the shutter speed / focal length rule (maximum shutter speed = 1/ focal length; for a 500 mm lens, for example, the max shutter speed should be 1/500 s). 

The next challenge is getting the exposure right. Most cameras are set to evaluate the exposure over the whole image, combine this with some intelligent guess-work and provide you with what your camera thinks is a suitably exposed image. So for an image of the moon your camera sees a bright spot - even at 600 mm FF equivalent we're talking about an area that probably takes up less than 5% of the image - against a dark background and will try to provide you with an images that balances the light and dark.

Exposure

So we have to trick the camera or even go to manual. If you know how to adjust your exposure with exposure value (EV) adjustment - experience tells me that setting your camera to -3 EV should give you a decently lit image. Alternatively, you can go manual. The night images were taken at 1/640 s at f/5.6 and ISO 200 on my Olympus. You could try starting from there and adjusting the exposure as needed.

Even though you can hand-hold these shots, there is one significant advantage to sticking your camera on a tripod; aligning your images in post will be much easier.

Focus

Sticking your camera on a tripod also makes focusing your shot easier, and I really would recommend slipping into manual focus for this to be on the safe side. If your camera allows you to magnify around the focus point then use this, in fact use every trick you can to get the image as sharp as you possibly can. Don't leave anything to chance. What you'll notice is that the moon won't stay still on your camera display. Don't worry, your camera isn't slipping on the tripod mount (well, it might be, but not necessarily). What you're seeing is the moon moving in relation to the earth.

Multiple Exposures

Why images and why align them? Because a single image isn't going to give you much of an picture. In fact, you're going to want to grab at least about 50 images. This will give you enough to generate a mean image in post (colloquially and mathematically) reducing noise and sharpening the image. The atmosphere is full of convection currents, particularly in the summer, which will muddy your image.

Processing the Images

Ok, so the fun part is over, now the work begins. First we need to do a little bit of basic editing in your post-processing software of choice. I make no apologies for using a slightly obscure programme for mine; ON1 Photo Raw 2020 instead of Lightroom or Photoshop for the same reason I make no apologies for shooting with an Olympus rather than Canon, Nikon or Sony. They're informed decisions that I made and stand by - I've never been afraid of going down the road less travelled.

Initial Processing

Import your RAW images into your processor of choice and select the images from your series. Most image processing programmes allow you to apply the settings you apply to one photo to a series of photos, so you can hopefully just edit one and cascade to the other images. Crop your image to the final size you want for the image, allowing room around the edges for a final crop. You may want to increase the basic exposure and clarity, but don't over-do it and leave the noise reduction for now, we'll get back to that later.  Apply the crop and adjustments across the whole series and export them all to tiff or jpeg files in a dedicated folder for stacking.

Image Stacking

You will probably have noticed that your photos are a little muddy, a little unclear. That's perfectly allowable; your subject is at least 384,000 km away and you're shooting through 480+ km of air. That air is seldom clean and often full of convection currents, making matters worse. Stacking your images will give you a mathematical mean image, reducing image noise and sharpening the details.

The software I use is a free programme called RegiStax 6 and can be downloaded from the website here. The programme will first align the various images - like I said, the moon will be in a slightly different place each time due to the relative motion of the earth and its satellite. Before the images can be averaged, they need to be lined up. After that, you can select what percentage of the base images you want to use for the averaging before stacking.

Rather than list the specific steps I used and palm them off as my own, I'll point you to the Sarah and Colins Astro YouTube video that I followed verbatim. After aligning the images, there will still not be much difference from the original until you adjust what the programme calls 'wavelets'. Then the magic happens and the crisp image begins to reveal itself. 

I had problems using tiffs; firstly the tiffs I generated from ON1 weren't recognised by RegiStax. The tiffs from Olympus Workspace were recognised, but the resulting image had a lot of digital noise. My best results were from Olympus RAW files exported to jpeg in ON1 Photo Raw. The output from RegiStax can be saved in any of the usual formats, though if you've used jpeg as the starting point for stacking, you possibly won't gain anything by saving the output in any of the information richer formats.

Final Processing

Now it's time for the last polish. Re-open the image in your image processing software. It's likely to have quite a bit of noise in the smoother parts of the image and it's now time to deal with that and any other adjustments you might care to make.

In ON1 I dealt with noise using Luminance 2020 Noise reduction, setting Luminance to 30 and Detail to 5. Your mileage will of course differ. I loose a little bit of detail like this, but it's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make to get rid of the unsightly noise.

Watch the craters at the bottom of the moon as well as the noise in the Sea of Tranquillity (the darker patch towards the top).

Starting Image

After Stacking

After Noise Reduction

Layers

As a last step, you may want to assemble the final image(s) in layers. This will let you plant your final moonshot back in its environment as with my Moonrise over the Allgäu shot at the beginning of this article. I used this process to slightly magnify the moon in this scene to emphasise it. 

What Next?

If you found this tutorial useful, link to your final image(s) below, it would be great to see them. 

If you're still looking for a challenge? Go and take a look at Alyn Wallace's YouTube tutorial on taking gorgeous HDR images of the half moon.

I'll close with two more before and after pics taken later that evening from home to emphasise how much detail can be wrung out of these images. I had to add a gaussian blur to the background on the stacked image due to an ugly moire pattern, but that's trivial.

Later the Same Night: Before || Olympus f/5.6, 1/320 s, ISO 200

Later the Same Night: After || Olympus f/5.6, 1/320 s, ISO 200

Location Scouting for Astrophotography

A couple of weeks ago, one of my photography pals texted me asking me if I wanted to join him on a Milky Way hunt some time since his summer plans had been scratched due to Corona (Matthias, you really need to set up a website so I can link to your photos!). He mentioned a couple of possible locations, which got me thinking; where would _I_ shoot the Milky Way from. I came up with an idea (that I won't share here yet, I haven't seen any other astro shots from here and I'd like to have a crack at it before someone else gets in first, so if you recognise any of the spots in this post, plesase keep them to yourself for now - hopefully in a month or so we'll be able to pull this off). I knew that I wanted to include some 'civilisation glow' in the shot if possible - the night glow from a human habitation and I opened up Google Earth to look for a possible mountainside that would give me the angle that I wanted.

Watching the Sun Go Down || Olympus f/16, 1/60, ISO 1250

It's not as easy as I'd thought to find a deforested slope facing the right direction in the lower alps. Despite my local knowledge, it took quite a bit of playing around before I found a peak that would work, and even then it was only on paper. At the end of May I headed down there for an evening to catch the sunset and the blue hour to see whether the angles matched up. Even a couple of days beforehand I wasn't too sure about the trip, no-one wanted to join me and I was a little wary of being on my own in the mountains at night - even in familiar territory there are plenty of things that can go wrong. And the forecast wasn't playing ball. Until Friday morning that is. All of a sudden the evening forecast was opening up - a green light.

It's a Sign! || Olympus f/8, 1/80 s, ISO 200

With sunset projected to be 21.05, I set off from home just after 18.00 to allow myself enough time to get down there, get up onto the ridge and find a couple of spots whilst the light was still good. Climbing up from the car park the light was gorgeous. A few high clouds might have been nice to complete the scene, but I wasn't going to complain. The few people still on the hills but coming down gave me some strange looks and I had a quick chat with one bloke who was interested to know what I was doing going up at that time of day before he got pulled to heal by his wife. And then I was on the ridge.

At the Ridge || Olympus f/8, 1/500 s, ISO 200

The views were beautiful, clear air with some mountain cloud hanging around the peaks. It was all I had hoped for from my virtual tour planning and more. There is some lovely rock around, and the peaks still have significant patches of snow on them despite the non-winter of 2019/20. From the ridge its a broad path leading to one of the peaks that had looked promising and so after taking a couple of smartphone shots I headed out, warm setting sun on my left, valley on my right. The light was catching the fir trees along the ridge, especially the skeletal branches of dead trees that had long since lost their bark to the elements. The orange light picked out the highlights nicely.

Catching the Last Rays || Olympus f/8, 1/80 s, ISO 250

Just before the potential spot that I'd looked out there's a broad shoulder that looked promising, the spot itself had a lot more trees and was a lot narrower than it had looked on the computer, pretty much ruling it out. By this time, the sky was beginning to turn orange in the west and I was desperate to find an open piece of hillside facing westwards. East wasn't a problem, I could get to a treeless spot there any time, but the other side was light forest. In the end I had to settle for a gap between the trees. I say settle, I think the silhouettes work quite nicely, but it wasn't the picture I had first envisioned. Dropping the aperture to f/16 helped with the sunburst.

And Down She Goes || Olympus f/16, 1/100 s, ISO 200

In the immediate aftermath of the sunset I headed back along the ridge to where I had first hit it to wait for the first stars. The path back offered a couple of nice shots too, and I particularly like this one with the roots on the path. This is a composite of two exposures, one for the foreground and one for the background. After mixed experience with ON1 Photo Raw's HDR assembling, I've gone over to using layers to assemble these shots, it gives me a deal more flexibility when I can control precisely which elements of the photo I use from each exposure. I'll write a separate blog entry on this some time.

The Path Goes On || Olympus f/6.3, 1/50 s, ISO 1600

Up until this point I'd had my go-to lens on the camera, the Zuiko f4 12-100 mm, getting back to the top of the ridge it was time to get the wide-angle zoom out, the Leica f2.8 8-18 mm. The wider aperture and wider field of view make this a great astro-landscape lens, although I wouldn't complain if there was a convenient lens with an even wider aperture for night shots. The optical quality is second to none though, provided I can focus it properly. During the daytime this isn't an issue, I just leave it on autofocus normally, but focusing on pin-pricks of light at night to get the infinity focus right is tricky, even with glasses.

Golden to Blue || Olympus f/4, 1/60 s, ISO 500

I set up the tripod with my Benro Geared Head to allow me good control over the level and direction and started shooting the blue hour. When hiking, I rarely wear more than t-shirt and shorts, but even setting out from the car I was wearing long sleeves and trousers. Despite my soft-shell jacket it was beginning to get quite cool in the late evening breeze. Wooly hat and gloves time, though putting the gloves on and off was a pain. I was glad of the tripod net that I'd bought for the occasion to store bits of camera in the low light, it made keeping kit under control in the dark a lot easier. 

Waiting for the Stars || Olympus f/2.8, 1/6 s, ISO 200

And so I sat and waited for the first stars to appear, the half-moon high in the sky away to my right, the dew beginning to fall. Taking a shot every five minutes or so, exposure bracketing just to be on the safe side. I was watching the clock too, I didn't want to be out too late on my own - there was still a trek down to the car in the dark. Even with the half-moon and my head-torch, stumbling around in the dark in the mountains shouldn't be taken lightly. And then there was the 90 min drive home.

Gibbous Moon over the Allgäu || Olympus f/3.3, 10 sec, ISO 200

The descent proved easier than I had feared and I was soon back on the tarmac. Definitely worth the evening's trek. Oh, and remember the SD card that went through the washing machine? It seems to have finally given up the ghost. Fortunately after I transferred the photos to the PC and not before. Sometimes you've gotta have a bit of luck!

End of the Day || Olympus f/4, 0.8 s, ISO 800

Ten Below Zero

At about the same time as we came to Bavaria, two of our friends moved to southern Norway. Over the years we've kept in touch and every few years visited each other. With the children out of the nest, we decided to use the opportunity to head north this winter for a week's cross country skiing with them up at their cabin in the hills above Lillehammer. The temperature maximum for the whole week was - 9°C, a fleeting moment on Tuesday lunchtime if memory serves, and with a perceived wind chill of a further -10°C, so it didn't really count anyway. 

The Hills at Fagerhoy || F8, 1/640 s, ISO 200

Shooting in snow and in minus temperatures is challenging. Because of the inherent brightness of the conditions we need to shoot even further to the right than normal to avoid muddying things and without losing any details to the highlights. Unless I'm deliberately shooting high key, where it doesn't matter if parts of the photo are washed out, I like to be able to see at least a breath of detail in even the brightest parts of a photo, otherwise it disturbs me as much as a wonky horizon. So, shoot as far to the right as possible. 

The next problem is the cold, whether out during the day or during the two astro sessions at night. Either the battery didn't like it or the lens frosted over. When I'm hiking or cross country skiing I like to have the camera attached to my rucksack strap with a Peak Design capture plate; I'm more a runner and gunner rather than a tripod shooter. At -15°C the battery only lasts so long strapped to the shoulder and the padded holster tends to interfere either with the arms if attached to the hip or certain parts of the male anatomy if it's further round to the front. On the coldest days there was no other option if I wanted to take photos though. 

Blue Shining Through || F7.1, 1/320 s, ISO 200

The challenge the first few days was more a question of abundance of light and lack of familiarity with the landscape. Bright blue skies on snow make very high contrast images, turning almost everything else in the frame black, whether trees or people. And although we'd been to this location once before, it had been at the end of summer rather than the middle of winter. There was no reverting to my standard approach of focusing on the foreground or foliage - there simply wasn't any, and the landscape is significantly different to my normal alpine stamping grounds, the skies are much more wide open than I'm used to. 

Intimate details

Whilst trying to get the lie of the land, my eye was caught by some easier intimate shots, my safety fallback. I know some photographers struggle to see these mini landscapes, but my eye seems to be tuned to these more compact pictures somehow. In the snowy landscape it was the folds in the hills where streams run in summer, the collections of bushes on a hillside or an isolated farmstead, abandoned for the winter. The subtle shots. 

The Folds || F6.3, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

Sometimes you don't have to look for the compositions, they veritably jump out at you such as here with the frost covered birch trees. There are essentially two types of trees on the hillsides around Skeikampen, either the dark firs or the stunted coppery birch, both of which simply appear to be black against the blinding white snow. The last two nights in the cabin there was enough mist at night that it formed hoarfrost on the wind-stunted birch, adding a third shade to the otherwise stark black/white contrast. This alone was enough to grab all of our interests, the grey tones adding a significant point of interest to the scene. 

The Folds || F6.3, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

Fjell Farmsted || F8, 1/400 s, ISO 200

Norwegian hyttekultur 

The Norwegians love their mountain cabins, their home from homes in the wilds (and less than wilds). In fact it's not unknown for them to invest more in their weekend houses than their town dwellings; a small flat in Oslo and a comfortable cabin in the hills. My research tells me that in 2008, every second Norwegian had access to a second home of some kind. The hills around Skeikampen are littered with these cabins in a range of sizes and styles, anything from the simple wooden structures to low-lying dwellings made from the local stone, sometimes with grass roofs. In fact some of them blend in so well that you don't appreciate how many there are dotted around the countryside until dusk, when they all light up. 

The Folds || F4, 1/3 s, ISO 1600

Layers

Morning mist on the last morning gave us the double bonus of a touch of hoar frost together with some sweet layers. The time windows were quite narrow though, even with temperatures below - 10°C, as soon as the mist lifted the late February sun warmed the branches of the trees and the frost quickly disappeared. The transformation from magical to mundane was very stark. 

Layers in the Forest || F8, 1/1250 s, ISO 200

Frosty Forest || F8, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

Astro 

There were two new bits of gear that I took with me that I was itching to try out; my Benro Geared Head and a new Haida Clear Night astro filter. Added to that I had some ideas about how to shoot some star trails using the Olympus Live Composite mode; essentially this in-camera setting allows you to take a single starting exposure and then press the shutter a second time and the camera starts a series of shots that only record additional light - it's useful for lightning storms for example, allowing you essentially to take a long exposure without danger of overexposing the base image. Other cameras require you to take a series of images and then stack them additively in post. Live Comp allows you to do it in a single image. The disadvantage is that a single complication can ruin the whole 30 min shot (a car driving past, for example, or somebody knocking the tripod by accident), the advantage that you can do the whole thing in one take without stacking. 

After a couple of test images taking multiple 30" exposures over about 5 min I tried a first 30 min image on the first night out. A couple of nights later I'd scouted out a much better location pointing north towards the pole star overlooking the local village. I deliberately placed the pole star* off centre as I felt that having it dead centre would have been boring. The final shot is a composite of three images; one for the sky, one for the brightly lit village and one for the snowy forest. Assembling and masking the layers in ON1 was tricky, particularly the border between the night sky and the fir trees, but I'm quite happy with the end result. 

Pole Star over Skeikampen || F2.8, 40 min, ISO 1600, 30 s ISO 200 and 30 s ISO 6400

*The pole (north) star can be found by drawing an imaginary line connecting the two stars at the back of The Plough (Big Dipper, The Wagon or Ursa Major) and following it about 5 repeats upwards until you get to the next bright star.

One thing that I was quite eager to see while we were so far north (for us at least) was the northern lights and I loaded the Aurora app on my phone before we left. I rather naively thought that we'd be seeing them every other night and so was quite disappointed when the KP forecast was only 2/8, rising to a maximum of 4/8 in the middle of the week. Imagine my surprise (and excitement) then when looking at my first test shot looking north to see a green fringe on the horizon! There was absolutely nothing visible to the naked eye, but a 25" exposure revealed a clear trace of the northern lights. 

The winter Milky Way isn't all that much to look at, but here's my final take on Cygnus and the Northern Lights. Single shot edited in ON1 Photo RAW 2020.

Northern Lights at Skeikampen || F2.8, 60 s, ISO ISO 6400

Regarding the new gear, the Benro certainly makes precise alignments a whole lot easier, making focusing much simpler too, using the camera focus zoom to centre in on a bright star. Whether or not the star filter brings a lot to the table remains to be seen. There isn't a whole lot of light pollution in central Norway and I didn't have the presence of mind to do any with/without comparisons, so they're all 'with'. 

One error that I'm consistently making with my astro shots is foreground exposure. Because it's dark, the images on the back screen of the camera appear comparatively bright, but take the image indoors and it's a very different picture. 

Panoramas

I have a love-hate relationship with panoramas. It's something that I'd love to be able to do well, but feel that it's a discipline that I haven't yet mastered. I'm comfortable with the 16:9 format, but anything longer than that is challenging. I don't know whether it's simply a question of size - that I can't envisage how the picture would look printed big, or whether it's something more fundamental. Whatever it is, it's going to require significant work to consistently arrive at images I'm happy with (with the exception of this one). Be sure to let me know if you have a suggestion concerning how to improve my panoramic game. 

Over the Fjells || F8, 1/1000 s, ISO 200

So, those are my 10 'below zero' shots. What adventures have you got coming up, and what preparations are you making for the photography?