We'll start at the beginning.
Driving to Coles Bay on a very wet and windy day, it seemed all hope of a clear sky for an early morning shoot had disappeared. But I set the alarm anyway. The conditions didn't even allow me time to scout out a great location. But by 5.00am there was not a cloud in the sky and all was calm. Working quickly is the key. The light begins to change so rapidly.
In this shot we can just make out the first inkling of the dawn. The silhouetted landscape reminded me of a Japanese print I had once seen, so that was confirmation enough of a good spot. So I took the shot on manual focus (it's just too dark for AF) and hoped for the best.
Years ago I was a member of an amateur astronomical society and used to know the Southern Sky like the back of my hand. I was glad that I still recognised the key features. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (dwarf galaxies neighbouring our own Milky Way). The Southern Cross (Crux) is there, although more difficult to make out in the pristine sky unaffected by city lights. And most pleasing of all to me is how clearly the Coalsack Nebula showed up.
The Coalsack Nebula is the most prominent dark nebula in the skies, visible to the naked eye as a dark patch obscuring a brief section of Milky Way stars as they cross their southernmost region of the sky just south of Crux. I even had a couple of shooting stars during the exposure - you'll see one here in this shot.
The choice of black and white was simple in the end. It provided a clarity that the colour version lost as the emerging dawn light tended to overshadow the real stars of the show (pardon the pun).
[I've tagged the key astronomical features for you. I tried to keep the exposure as short as possible so that the stars remained points of light and didn't show the earth's rotation. At the same time I wanted to minimise my ISO to reduce noise. In the end ISO400, f/4 and 15 seconds was my compromise.]
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