Tracked Milky Way Galaxy Lake Reflection Composite Tutorial

[@royadid123]

when i see a video of mike i press the like . simple.

[@Milkywaymike]

Lol thanks!!

[@spirithealershamanism]

Super! I have not been using sky replacement. Why work harder!!! And I love the vertical flip on the sky to create the reflection. So many good tips. Thank you.

[@NomadOutdoorAdventures]

Looks like I’m the first want to come in today. Awesome.

[@Milkywaymike]

Thanks!!

[@mikehomner4724]

Excellent tutorial! Thank you for doing these videos... :):)

[@StarScaperPhoto]

Thanks for the tutorial Mike. Inspiring stuff!

[@akkarparkiamopas3401]

Hi Mike, I have found it is really hard to blend blue hour lake or seascape with Milky way. Thus, most of the time I ended up using the real night foreground in stead of blue hour. Your video is very helpful in this scenario. Thanks a lot.

[@timscanlanphotography]

Love this Mike ! Thank you so much for sharing. 👍

[@Milkywaymike]

Thanks for watching!

[@ujjwaldatta6713]

Thanks so much for this video. Quick question. You mentioning the video that you “isolated” the meteor from one of the frames from the sequence. If you can kindly let me know how you cut out out the meteor from a frame-save it in your desktop-and then paste it in your Ps document and how you enhance the meteor in color etc that would be super helpful. Thank you.

[@Milkywaymike]

Their are numerous ways to this, but essentially you can just crop around the meteor and then export it / save it as a jpeg or tiff file. Then when you want to use it you can bring it back into a night photo and place it where ever you want in the sky and change the blend mode to lighten which will allow the meteor trail to remain on top of you sky. Here is a meteor tutorial which should help explain in more detail if my written response doesn't make sense. Thanks. kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z4Cld5yLebyZaK8si=bE6enay8_rg_V19N

[@ujjwaldatta6713]

@@Milkywaymike awesome. Thanks from a fellow New Jersian.

[@balintk.9373]

What if you shoot the foreground image during night with a long exposure and blend that image with the tracked sky shot? That way you get the smooth water surface and the reflection too :)

[@Milkywaymike]

Absolutely that is another technique I use as well, however it is much more time consuming depending how low you set your iso and how sharp you want your image (F2.8 to F4 at night vs F8 to F11 at twilight). If you use ISO 100 - 400 and F8 at night it will have to be a very long exposure to gather in enough light which also can create hot pixels as well. I prefer to speed things up with astronomical twilight shots and then set up the tracker so it is ready by the time it is complete darkness.

[@balintk.9373]

@@Milkywaymike makes sense, thanks Mike

[@KubaJurkowski]

you now you can track the MW in the reflection if the water is still right?

[@Milkywaymike]

Yes... the water wasn't still in this instance and we had other people there using red light so I had to track at a different part of the lake.

[@jmart_4]

How would you track the milky way in the lake reflection? I'd imagine you would have to change your tracker alignment to where the north star would be reflected? I tried a few things without much luck

[@KubaJurkowski]

you just rotate the tracking mount 180 deg around the base. it's easier to do with a regular tripod when you can just rotate the center column, and it's ok for ~wide angles. I did up to 50mm 2min like that @@jmart_4

[@jmart_4]

@@KubaJurkowski I'll give that a try sometime!

[@jacobrichards8359]

I need MW season to come back.

[@Milkywaymike]

Agreed!

[@rene909]

I think this also would look nice with the winter Milky Way and Orion!