It was a cold windy night in Paradise Cove which is where we had just moved a moving truck full of stuff into our new house.
One of my closest friends, Colton Polland had just helped me move all of our stuff...one of those buddies you can rely on for that kind of stuff.
To celebrate being completed with the move, back and shoulder's sore...we had some beers by the fire in my backyard.
One of our topics of conversation was astrophotography, he mentioned that he'd gotten a new camera and had never really messed around with star shots so I got a bright idea! ☝️😏✨
We gathered up some camera gear and made our way down to the boat ramp/docks on our street to go have a look at the stars over the wonderful Lake Murray. We were on a floating dock so I knew a long exposure would be difficult. We had a Sigma 12-24mm 2.8 art lens that we wanted to try out. We bumped up the ISO (Artificial Light) so that we wouldn't need to do too long of an exposure. Did not want the image to have any motion blur. After 10-15 tries we knew we had nailed it with this one. Went back to the in house studio at my place and started the edit process. Did not really have to do anything to the image, it was astonishing. No noise cleanup, no cropping or color corrections...just a little sharpness and black reduction to get this shot ready for print. What really amazed me was when the 24x36 inch aluminum print came to the house and we saw how beautifully it printed on that medium with a nice gloss effect.
To date, this has been my favorite medium to get this shot on, it does well with a large fuji pearl but is not the same quality as a large format Aluminum or Acrylic print. To date, this piece occupies space on walls in my home and is always a great conversation starter. My neighbors love this piece, it's already in a few households! I know this print is a great introduction to what I do, it encompasses everything I love about the peaceful Lake Murray and the constant reminder of out space, showing us just how tiny and insignificant we really are. For the record, if you've read this far...starry nights are where I go to really balance myself and center my grounding. It's the natural world where I connect with the creator but what's even better is being among nature....at night!