Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography in So Ill: Part 1, Section 1 of 6

 

Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography in Southern Illinois

(c) John O'Connell

Welcome to the workshop!  We are a group of hobbyist photographers who enjoy photographing nightscapes.  None of us are "experts" or career full-time photographers and all of us are still learning the craft.  There's still a lot we don't know but we are often asked by others how they can also photograph the Milky Way.  

We decided to put this event together to help you take your first steps toward capturing the Milky Way.  We look forward to helping you as others have helped us.

First, let's meet your instructors:


John O'Connell - I am a Ph.D. student in Wildlife Ecology at SIU and a hobbyist photographer.  I studied photography in grade school but did not get a digital camera with manual settings until 2018.  Almost immediately, I started trying out astrophotography and I fell in love with being out in the woods at night, enjoying the stars.  I grew up in the metropolis of Miami, Florida, so it's a treat for me to see so many stars here.  I mostly focus on finding natural foregrounds to pair with the sky when I shoot at night.  You can see some of my work on my Facebook page here.


Grant Twiss - I'm an IT Consultant and amateur outdoor photographer focusing primarily on flowing water landscapes.  I started branching out to nightscape photography as a natural extension of my landscape work in late 2019, partially due to an interest in the stars and partially due to my aversion to humid hikes through spiderwebs in the late spring and summer!  Since then, I've become somewhat of an amateur astronomer, spending many many nights photographing deep space objects from my hometown of Harrisburg. I love spending hours gazing at the star-filled skies of Southern Illinois on clear nights and experimenting with my equipment.  Night photography is very good for pushing boundaries, and I feel it has been helpful for developing techniques in all areas of photography I dabble in.  It is challenging, exhilarating, awe-inspiring, and extremely fulfilling on many levels, and I'm very grateful to have begun this journey through the void!

A special thanks to Matthew Lawler, Mark Chambers, and Micah Miller for their assistance in creating this course.

What this workshop is not: 
Image by silviarita from Pixabay 

Our goal for this workshop is not for you to walk away from tonight with a portfolio-worthy photograph.  If you do, that's a bonus.  We also aren't seeking to teach you everything there is to know about the topic.  Heck, we don't know everything there is to know!  We also don't want to tell you how things must be done, how to exactly recreate any works you've seen, or to provide a set formula for landscape astrophotography.

What this workshop is: 

Our goal for this workshop is to help you capture your first photos of a nightscape featuring the Milky Way, or to help you improve upon previous shots if you've tried before.  We will give you some guidelines to help get you close but we want you to find your own path and style after that.  This is art, after all!

How this course is organized: 

This will be a 3-part course with each part bringing you closer to producing your own images.  

Part 1 will consist of a series of 6 blog posts where we will explain the gear, settings, planning, and shooting process that will make it easier for you to show up and start shooting in Part 2.  

During Part 2, we will take a field trip and shoot together so that we can help you refine your technique.  We currently plan to host this at Shawnee Forest Campground on June 17th, 2022. We strongly suggest that you also keep June 16th, 18th, 23rd, and 24th clear in your schedule in case we need to shift the date due to weather.

Finally, in Part 3, we will meet up at Art Gallery off the Square in Vienna for an editing session.  This is currently slated for June 18th or July 15th.  June 18th would obviously depend on whether the weather has allowed us to shoot already.  If someone is unable to physically attend Part 3, then we could likely arrange a video feed, but it would certainly be easier to edit together in person.


Homework?!  Argh!
Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay 

Yes, there will be homework.  We don't want anyone's experience to be impeded because other participants did not prepare in advance. These homework assignments will help things run more smoothly and will help you get more out of the latter Parts.

To participate in Part 2, you will have to complete the homework from Part 1.  

To participate in Part 3, you will have to complete the homework from Part 2.

  

Let's get to learning!

Image by Innviertlerin from Pixabay 

The next several posts will provide information on Gear, Basic Settings, Planning, and Execution.  The final post will describe the Homework. 

We have lots of material to cover, and some of the posts will be lengthy and a bit dense.  Don't feel like you have to sit down and digest this entire course in one sitting.  We encourage you to bookmark this page and come back later if you want. You may even find it to be a useful resource after we have completed all 3 parts.

Much of what we are going to teach you has already been thoroughly covered by many other photographers.  We don't see any point in reinventing the wheel, so we will provide links to their videos and websites where applicable.  We learned much of what we know by consuming those same materials.  In many cases, we will provide you with a simple, brief explanation.  If you "get it," then the linked resources will be redundant and you can skip them.  If we think a resource is particularly important, we will try our best to make that clear to you.

Finally, we can't help but nerd out from time to time.  While we want to keep this course fairly simple, we also don't want to mislead you into thinking that the simple answers are always the right answers.  In many cases, we will present a basic approach and then include a link or point you toward a topic that explains why a different approach may be better.  In those cases, we will try to note that they are "advanced topics" that are not mandatory for this course.  We honestly suggest that you not focus on those at all until you have really gotten comfortable with the basic approaches.  Then you can revisit this blog to see the advanced topics later.

Continue to Section 2 of 6

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