Opera Stars
This has been a bucket-list photo ever since I first saw a similar shot a few years ago. I remember being absolutely amazed this was even possible, and this year I decided to give it a crack. So it came to pass that one early Sunday morning I found myself at Hickson Road Reserve at 3am waiting for clouds to clear above the Sydney Opera House.
To do this, I used a NiSi GND 16 filter to cut down on the amount of light from the city, whilst still being able to capture the detail of the Milky Way. I took a lot of photos in an attempt to get something that I was happy with, and this particular image is 20 images of 10 second exposures stacked with Starry Landscape Stacker to help reduce the amount of noise. I then spent a long time finessing the details and colour out of the night sky to bring out the core of the Milky Way. This was a very frustrating experience, and I spent an inordinate amount of time fine-tuning it to get to this point (and I'm still not 100% on it).
Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I found it to be a great challenge from a technical perspective, and it really forced me to push my knowledge and skills. I'm also pleased to see so many others attempting this shot as well, and I look forward to seeing them over the next few years.
And I'll probably give it another shot too.
The details for this image are:
- Nikon D750 with Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 G2
- NiSi Filters GND 16
- Sirui W-1204 tripod with K-20x Ball Head
- f/2.8
- 10s
- ISO4000