Milky Way Above St. Francis Church

Last week I made a post about this curch as a part of #architecturalphotography contest hosted by @juliank. That post featured a picture of it during the day. As I briefly explained there, the church is located on Mt. Velebit, at approx. 1000m of height...

Anyway, at that time I decided to come back on a first possible occasion, but during the night, in order to try some astroshots.
And so I did, a couple of months later I came back accompanied by my dear wife, who suffers from a wide palette of phobias. By the time we got to the spot (with a car, of course) she had allready worked out all possible horror scenarios in her head... For that reason my persuasion to get her out of the car and join me outside, under the stars, were completely futile. So I started setting up my tripod and preparing the camera...

Nikon D750 / ISO 6400 / 15s / f2.8 / Samyang 24mm f1.4

I took 4 vertical shots, later to be merged as panorama in LR. All with the same settings, of course... After combining the images, I adjusted the contrast, white balance, clarity, etc... in order to get the most out of the image...

To get back to the mountain, when I was somewhere on the 3rd shot, something dropped near the church. A piece of metal, most probably knocked out by wind. Now, you have to understand that at 1000m high, in the midle of nowhere, at midnight, it's very, very quite. There are no sounds except the wind.
When this piece of metal fell to the floor it made a horrifyingly loud sound. Momentarily I started jumping like a monkey and yelling like a maniac. My primordial fears were set to 100% in a second. In order to get to the car I had to move towards the sound, so I started throwing rocks in the same direction. My dear phobia-friendly wife was so white at this point that she was glowing in the dark. She started honking the car siren in hope of scaring away what ever it might be out there. All of this happened in two seconds...
When I grabbed the door handle, I felt some safety and then I stoped to listen what was there. Of course, nothing was there, just the wind howling, so I got back to finish what I started.

Later it took me two hours to stop laughing at myself and my reaction. My wife was not amused.

I am not a religious person, but I suppose if God exists, he will get the whole picture. I hope he won't see only the part where I throw rocks at his house...
What if somebody deletes the first part!? I am screwed in that case. You know, I die and get to the big interview and then He shows me the footage and gives me a serious look "What was that all about!?"
Then I start panicking, sweating and I start to stutter "But, there was a sound..."
"Yes, of course there was... Lucifer, here's one for ya..."

Yeah, it's time to go to bed...

:)

Thanks for reading,
Hope you like it.

And if you wonder how the church looks during the day, take a look here. It's really beautiful:

https://steemit.com/architecturalphotography/@nkera/st-francis-church-mt-velebit-croatia

Cheers,
Nino.