I was planning on doing my final Traveling in China post today, but I started Lightroom rendering previews for a wedding (rendering high quality previews for 4625 photos takes several hours) and it is eating up all my computer power. It seems to be goofing up my photoshop from loading right now, so I can't resize the photos, so I can't do that post yet. Not that you care, but I just wanted to write something to vent my irritation at it (first world problems! haha).

Anyhow I took these photos on our recent camp trip to Vancouver Island with friends. We stayed up late one night because it was a clear sky and in Sombrio there is an amazing opportunity to view the most incredible night sky you might ever see.

These shots were taken with a Nikon D750 camera and a Nikkor 58mm f1.4 lens. Not a typical star/landscape photography lens but it was the only one we took since it is weather sealed and I didn't want to pack a lot of gear out camping. One of the benefits I found out though is that it really can show you the amount of stars there are in the sky. I also didn't bring a tripod, again trying avoid extra weight, so to get these I pulled out the articulating view screen on the D750 and used it as a prop while setting the camera on a chunk of driftwood, haha.

I did some noise reduction in post on these images to get them to a clarity that I am happy with. Often I find with these types of shots that the noise reduction algorithm in Adobe Lightroom tends to clump small stars and image noise into the same category and filter them both out. You can see this really dramatically if you hammer up the noise reduction and all of a sudden some of the very obvious stars start to disappear. However in these images I was truly shocked at how many stars really are up there. I took them at a relatively low ISO (1600 mostly) and shutter speeds around 5 to 15 seconds so I really didn't need to do that much noise reduction. It's pretty amazing to look at in real life, but when you get a photo of it at a long exposure it can really blow your mind.

I really like this one, and the shooting star (satellite maybe?) is pretty cool. Unfortunately it's pretty blurry. Maybe because of the no tripod situation but I think it was also too long of an exposure at 15 seconds.

Blurry again, but I love the nebulous look in this one.

Started to figure out a good shutter speed at this point, about 5 seconds, and finding my composition to get the milky way bits where I wanted them in the frame.

You can probably see how much sharper these ones are, it's a tough balance shooting stars because you need a long exposure but too long will ruin the sharpness.

I think this is my favorite shot of the night, it's as clear as I could get it without a tripod and you can still really see the star clusters in the milky way.

Well I hope you enjoyed my shots of the beautiful Pacific Northwest sky, stay tuned to see the full post I'll be making about our camp trip and as always if you like the post feel free to toss me one of those sweet up votes, you know I always appreciate them! Be sure to follow me @dexter-k on Steemit to see more of our travels around the world, and new original content all the time.

Thanks for reading!

Dexter