Friday evening I decided to head up to Pt. Reyes to shoot sunset and then hopefully shoot some stars after dark. Well, sunset was pretty uninspiring, so I left Inverness to head north toward Jenner for some dark skies. After sidetracking to Bodega Head where it was far too windy and cold, I eventually found my way here to Duncan's Point and hiked down to the beach to wait for the milky way to rise.
Hours passed as I sat on a cold wet rock, alone in complete darkness, leaping up whenever a big wave splashed me, often falling asleep between my long exposures. I finished shooting this multi-frame pano series sometime around 3:30am and was shivering so much, I had to pack up and hike to the car. By 4:30, I arrived back in Inverness to watch the moonrise and decided to hang out for sunrise before heading home.
This is a pano using a slowish (f/4) 15mm lens on the Pentax K5. Pentax has a nifty accessory, the O-GPS1 which attaches to the hotshoe and tracks the movement of the earth to allow exposures up to 5 minutes. These were 2.5 minute exposures for the stars and one 11 minute exposure for the foreground, manually blended. I decided to amp up the processing a bit more than my usual, using Nik Suite.
Thanks Darvin for the real time Google Earth phone support when I was lost!
Thanks for looking.
P.S.- This image appears in the Sept 2014 issue of STUFF Magazine (UK tech mag)
http://mikeoria.zenfolio.com/img/s6/v139/p740669139-4.jpg
mikeoria.zenfolio.com/img/s6/v139/p740669139-4.jpg