A family group of us went back-country camping in Kawartha Highlands Signature Site Provincial Park (www.ontarioparks.com/park/kawarthahighlands ) North of Peterborough, Ontario this past weekend. We had canoed and kayaked in and set up our camp site at the North end of Bottle Lake. One of my objectives was to see if the sky here was dark enough to get a better Milky Way shot than my efforts to date had achieved. After a long day on Saturday, we sat around under our screen tent and waited for dark. And waited. Come 22:30 we were all so tired we could not stay awake longer. It was simply not dark enough to make a photo and, worst of all, the mosquitoes were incredibly bad. Knowing we had to get a very early start the next morning we headed off to sleep. Milky-way photos would have to wait for another day.
Awakened from a sound sleep to hear one of my fellow campers running around accompanied by his scanning the area with a bright flashlight, I gathered myself together, grabbed my flashlight and joined him, praying that we had not been visited by a bear. It was with significant relief that I found out had been raided by a pair of raccoons who had opened a bag full of kitchen gear (no food and yes it was clean but that did not seem to have helped) and pulled out a number of clear plastic zip-lock bags holding various kitchen equipment. One raccoon had climbed about 5 metres up into a tree adjacent to the screen tent. The other had made off into the woods, trailing zip-lock bags and pieces of our coffee press (an essential survival tool in the back-country, also clean, but in hindsight may have retained some coffee odour infused into plastic parts – next time it goes up in the bear-proof barrel hung high up in the trees away from camp). We recovered the coffee press and plastic bags. We cleaned up a bit and locked the coffee press safely inside our big, heavy, old-school Coleman stove. I noticed there were no bugs, I then stepped down to the beach at our campsite and had a clear view of the Milky Way. Fate had decided I was indeed to photograph the Milky Way so I did. Then back off to bed. About a half our later and just dozing off, I was awakened by a big, metallic crash from the screen tent area. We scrambled out and proceeded to scan the area with our lights. No raccoons in sight, but our Coleman stove was on the ground, half dragged out of the screen tent. It appears we had been raided by a pair of coffee-addicted raccoons who simply could not get past an opportunity to get their hands on a nifty coffee press. We should have know by the trembling paws of a true caffeine-addicted raccoon.
Once again we packed up our stuff and made sure the Coleman stove was going to stay in place. Then off to bed with Milky Way shots in the camera and a tale of adventure in the wilds of Ontario. – JW
Date Taken: 2014-07-06 at 01:26:03 – in case you were wondering…
Tech Details:
Taken using a tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with a Nikkor 12-24mm lense set to 12mm, ISO 1250, Manual mode, f/4.0 (wide open for those unfamiliar with this lense), 30 sec. PP of NEF (Nikon RAW) file in free Open Source RAWTherapee: two versions created one with more tame treatment of the lower area covering the sky-glow and lake that does not really bring out the Milky Way and another that really brings out the Milky Way but overdoes the sky-glow and lake area, in both cases exposure was adjusted to bring the focus of the version to a suitable level disregarding the impact on the other area of the image, adjust black levels to get the dark sky regions as dark and speckle-free as possible while keeping the stars as bright as possible, apply noise reduction to minimize colour speckling in the darkest areas of the sky, make one version with no vibrance applied and another with vibrance applied to a significant extent to bring out colour detail in the Milky Way and save each version. PP in free Open Source GIMP: load the two versions as layers, no-vibrance on the bottom and vibrance above it, leave the no-vibrance version alone as it will be used to supply the sky-glow and lake later on, on the vibrance layer (always disregarding the impact on the sky-glow and lake areas) apply a tone curve with a very steep slope in the central region (effectively adds contrast and differentiates the elements of the Milky Way section), boost saturation overall to help bring out the colours, slightly increase contrast and slightly darken overall, use a very large soft-edged eraser tool (to git a long blend area) to remove the lake and sky-glow from the top/vibrance layer revealing the more ‘natural-looking’ corresponding areas from the no-vibrnace layer below, create new working layer from visible result, sharpen, add fine black and white frame, add bar and text on left, scale to 1800 high for posting.
NOTE: There was a lot of trial and error in getting to the end result so take the above as a general guide rather than a detailed step-by-step. Regardless, this way of processing attempts to mimic some of the results posted on the Internet for Milky-Way shots, but does significantly exaggerate the appearance of the Milky Way compared to what you actually see when you look up at it. Still trying to decide if I realy like this style of presentation.
