Anatomy of a Composition - 2022 A Milky Way Year

While I missed out on some scenes I’d been anticipating, 2022 treated me to some absolutely brilliant nighttime images. This year’s addition of the yearly Milky Way time lapse has gotten a bit longer and really only gave me more inspiration for 2023’s night adventures.

The season started on one of the coldest nights I've ever experienced, on Clinton Reservoir at -13 degrees fahrenheit (-25 celsius) high in the Rockies. A couple of consecutive weekends here had me excited for more nights out under the stars, and 2022. The valley of the Wet Mountains is a dark sky location so it offers a perfect location for shooting the stars, and even though the weather didn’t perfectly cooperate I was able to put together a set of images that made the trip worthwhile. Alma and the Pennsylvania Mountain always offer some of my favorite scenes. Heavy late season snow made getting to locations along Loveland Pass a bit of a challenge, but the warmer temperatures gave me a reason to head up to higher elevations and watch the night sky from 12,000 feet. Montgomery Reservoir and the upper Taylor River provided some new compositions before heading off to Northern Michigan, where I was rewarded with my first photography opportunity of the Northern Lights. Back to school and the challenges of a personal life cut into my time behind the camera, but only gave me inspiration for the 2023 night sky season.

All footage is captured in RAW, using four different Sony lenses, the FE/14GM, the FE/20G, the Sony FE/24GM, as well as the FE/35GM, nearly exclusively on the Sony a7siii along with the Sony a7iii. EXIF data was all over the board with ISO 3200-6400, F1.4-2.8 and shutter speed ranging from 6 to 25 seconds. All edits completed in Lightroom, clips compiled using PhotoShop with final corrections, grading and editing in Premiere Pro.