1st attempt

Stormchase

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Did a 3 hour drive after work, out of the city, on friday to try and get the milky way. I stopped on the way to my destination to try a test shot. When I got to the lake the clouds rolled in and lost over 50% of the sky. It only got worse as I sat in the pitch black listening to little fish break the surface. I enjoyed the beautiful weather at 58 degrees, it was 105 that day at home.
The only lens I felt would work was my 11-17mm. I think it did well. Doing this kinda of shot made me realize how out dated my camera body is. I shot this on the Canon xs1000. I shot it at iso 800 and its grainy as it gets. 400 I get grain. 1600 is just a frustration to look at. I know the max for stars without trails is around 30 sec. I just couldn't get enough light in at that time so I tried 45 sec. and this was 49 sec i believe. My wide only opens to F/4 and it was still really dark. This was my test shot on the way up. Its all i got for the night.
Post i did a +2.5 exposure over all
brushed an other +0.5 over the milky way to make it pop a little more.
dropped the temp because i shot in shade WB
massive NR with some detail put back in.
and thats about it.
Tips are welcome. Ideas on a recovery for this image?
IMG_3376 by Stormchase73, on Flickr.
 
those stars and clouds are awesome. nice!
Night, stars, moon landscape photography is always a challenge.
personally i would lower the ISO or film speed and decrease the shutter speed.
worth experimenting. nicely done
 
Go back to the raw and set the WB for tungsten light and try editing again, it'll be a better WB and reduce the light pollution in the lower right. Also at near infinity focus you can use f2.8 and still have sufficient dof so an f4 lens is a little slow, I don't think you exposure is far off, just a little long.
 
Thanks for the responses,
I played tungsten but was all blue. Still had to raise it up. this was at 3850 and dropping it down to about 3500 looked pretty good with less light pollution. I know there is a lot of color in the band of stars. I guess I was trying to keep some of that without going too cool.
I really wish I had a 2.8. I was looking at them online and it seems I will have to save up for a little while. I got this lens for sunset type landscapes at F/16-F/22. I remember looking at the wide open F/4 thinking.. thats not too good, but will I really need a 2.8? haha oh well. It would be nice to get a clear ISO 8000 or so. ISO I think is what killed this shot.
Unfortunately if I went to ISO 400 at 30 sec, there would only be a couple stars. This was very dark at these settings pre-edit.
 

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