The Idea
Early May.
For weeks I’d been itching to shoot the Milky Way — and, hey, put my new Sigma 10-18 2.8 through its paces. We had a little 4- or 5-day mountain getaway planned, so I started hunting for places where we could crash those days and, totally by accident of course, land somewhere decent for a Milky Way shot.
I started planning the photo with those solid night-photography apps — AR and all that fancy stuff… in a few days I found the perfect spot: a nice campground at Lagunas de Ruidera, a lookout with room and killer views, and an insanely good orientation. Plus, for the dates we picked — also totally by accident 😇 — there was a new moon…. So the setup, short of being on some paradise overlook, honestly couldn’t have been better.
I started reading up on it, the usual spots everyone digs into, but the flood of options and tips got overwhelming. So I decided — knowing how green I am and how bad my memory is — that I wasn’t going to wing this. I needed a solid “cheat sheet” in my Notes app so I wouldn’t totally blow it…
Yep — I printed out the best settings, where to find them in the camera’s settings jungle, notes on shooting sequences so I could “easily” stack them later in some app for pro-looking results, a packing list of everything I’d need… basically I left nothing to chance… or so I thought.
The Trip
After a nice ~250 km drive, and once we’d set up our little campsite HQ, I volunteered to grab some sodas from the nearby town — and, you know, “while I was at it,” I checked out the shooting spot: a lookout with parking, perfect for setting up the “hunting” post… I checked the shooting direction and the best spot for the gear with the Photophills® app, so I chilled out knowing the how, when, and where. Notes ready, gear ready, location and shooting zone checked — what could go wrong?
First snag
Now I just had to wait 3 days for the moon to be fully out of the way, pick a weekday so there’d be less light pollution, and snag a quiet night — the good window was between 2:30 and 5:00 AM. Buuuut…. First bad news. The local weather, which I’d also checked ahead of time, started flipping two days before “G-Day.” It got crazy cloudy and that afternoon it started raining… black skies, and for the next day — the one planned as ideal — they were calling for rain through the day after that too. So I was watching my shot slip away 😢. Full-on panic, refreshing forecasts on a bunch of sites all day — kinda stressful. Defcon 5.
Is this for real?
“G-Day” (Great Gorgeous Photo day) woke up pouring, but the forecasts started hinting that in the early hours of the next day, between 2 and 3 AM, skies might open up — meaning a tiny chance of a time window to get the job done. Honestly I didn’t buy it… so that night after dinner I prepped all my gear, checked the camera, loaded every setting into C1 so I wouldn’t have to mess with it on location. Went to bed, set the alarm for 1:30, not exactly hopeful.
Orchestral maneuvers in the dark
Alarm went off, I jumped up and peeked out the window of my little “snail shell” camper. No rain. Stepped outside, looked up with my eyes closed, and when I opened them — wow. A ton of stars waving at me, twinkling hard…. So I grabbed all the gear, my headlamp, and started walking to the shooting spot — luckily only a couple kilometers. Walking in pitch dark toward the lookout, I realized just how black it was — I only saw what my headlamp lit up. That area is seriously dark, and the access road has zero traffic, so at that hour there was nothing out there except bats and other two- and four-legged critters rustling in the background…. kinda eerie, honestly. After what felt like forever I got to the spot, set up the tripod, the camera, ran through everything again — but now I had to focus. Plus the forecast window was tight (an hour, maybe an hour and a half), so I couldn’t waste time — no idea when the clouds might roll in.
I’d planned to do hyperfocal focus, but in the dark, finding something usable, lighting it up, and focusing about two and a half meters out was a total disaster — no luck. Then I’d point at the stars and they looked blurry… so I ditched that and went with the most old-school method — and the better one for this: I picked the brightest star (someone told me later it was Antares), punched the viewfinder magnifier, and dialed in focus as best I could. Put the camera back in position, first round of shots…. oh crap, the whole foreground is red! I forgot to turn off the red light on my headlamp — plants and all that came out totally red…. Ugh, time’s ticking…. Stress level Defcon 4….Defcon 3 😖
Lights and flashlights off, plus the extra headache that framing was basically impossible because everything below was pitch black — I shot a few series, including lighting the waterfall area with the flashlight for a couple seconds, then tried the flash with a couple pops per take… and time kept sliding… and I had no real clue how they’d turn out. Around 3:30 clouds started rolling in, so the session was done…. Packed up, and just as I was getting back to my “snail shell,” it started raining again and didn’t stop till noon the next day. So mission accomplished! 😅 (spoiler: not even close)
In the morning, reviewing the photos on the computer, I’m like, “okay, some of these aren’t too shabby,” buuuut… wait wait wait arrrrggggg — turns out I shot every single one at 30 seconds!!!! And I had it written down to do them between 10 and 20 seconds preferably….
All that cheat sheet for nothing — Defcon 3 went straight to Defcon 2.. 😵💫
The big reveal
I knew I had a ton of editing work ahead, so back home I tried that “easy” stacking process with SIRIL — won’t bore you with the details…. TOTAL FAIL, images worse than useless. Defcon 1, full alert! 🤯
So I decided to edit with Canon’s tools (DPP)® and polish in Pixelmator Pro® — the apps I normally use, and because they’re simple, they’re the ones that work best for me. Obviously there was star trailing you can’t kill without advanced techniques, but with a little patience and some tweaks here and there, I got a pretty decent photo. Even the camera’s “Faithful” profile spit out something pretty usable.
Lesson learned
Planning matters for this kind of shot, but there’s always stuff that can make the capture way harder.
Still, if I hadn’t brought the cheat sheet, I’d probably have gone home with nothing to show — but you’ve got to tighten up the notes system…. And that same week it hit me: make a field notebook as simple and organized as possible so I don’t blank on those game-changing details again. That’s where the idea for PhotoNotes was born.
