Travelling along the Great Australian Bight is a unique experience to say the least.
Crossing the Nullarbor Plain is loved by many and loathed by some. I find the remoteness of this area difficult to comprehend at times, especially coming from a small island. This remoteness and isolation is strikingly graceful.
The views from Bunda cliffs have been well captured by many. My aim with this photo was to capture the vastness of the landscape and I planned to take a horizontal view of the milkyway to help display this.
I planned to cross this area with a new moon and I was hoping for a clear sky for many hundreds of kilometres. The alarm was set and woke to a perfect night sky for astrophotography. The milkyway was heading towards where I was hoping to capture it. The sky was so dark.
This photograph was challenging. My aim is to reflect the natural scene and emphasis its beauty.
It is a combination of nearly 30 individual photographs. It has multiple long and very long exposures, noise-reduced images. Given that the sky was dark, the foreground was captured using multiple 149 second exposures at a very high ISO. During this period, the wild Great Australian Bight was creating a lot of mist. These images were stacked for noise reduction using StarryLandscapeStacker. The milkyway and sky was also a noise-reduced stacked image using 16 x 10 second exposures along with 8 dark frames. This was done to ensure that the stars are sharp as tacks. The resulting sky and foreground images were combined into a composition that reflects the natural scene - despite using multiple photographs to do so.