Here’s my first attempt at photographing stars at night. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but haven’t been in a remote enough location to do this. The trouble with shooting near a large city is that with a long exposure, you’ll get light pollution and get big light spots in your photo.

But out in Central Oregon, you can get away from those big city lights and just focus on the stars. In this case, I wanted to feature the Three Sisters mountains in my image and fortunately for me, the Milky Way is right over them as you look south. I used the iPhone app Star Walk to find out what constellations and other galaxies or stars I might find and it all worked out.

My camera settings were:

• Exposure: 20 seconds @ f/4.0
• ISO 12800

I processed the image with Lightroom, Photoshop CS5 and PhotoTools 2.6 Professional Edition.

On a separate note, the weather was perfect. No clouds. No wind. Just a slight chill in the air but nothing a light jacket couldn’t deal with. Just a few bugs to deal with. Oh, and I got really lucky because as I was walking back to the condo where we’re staying – just as I got to the deck, the sprinklers in the grass came on. These aren’t your typical, small sprinklers you’d see in your backyard. These are the industrial size, golf course type sprinklers designed to cover hundreds of square feet. I would have been drenched along with my camera gear. Whew!