I have been on quite the astrophotography kick as of late, and today’s photo is no exception. Since I am heading to Joshua Tree National Park in a few week, and I will be camping, I wanted to make sure I had the skills I needed to properly created a photo of a lit up tent while still exposing for the stars. My first plan was to head out to one of my local parks that has a lot of barren shale piles, which would have added a nice effect to the shot, but I failed to bring my remote for my flash trigger, and It was getting a bit cold. So after a little prep and some hot chocolate, I decided to set my tent up in the field across from where I live. After a few different shots, I was delighted to see this one come out as well as it did.

How I Shot It

Lens: Tokina 11-16 f2.8
Camera: Canon 60D
Aperture: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 30 Seconds
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 11mm
Other Equipment: Tripod, Speedlite, Radio Trigger

Basically after setting up the tent, I put the camera on a tripod,  about 6/7 feet away from the tent, focused to infinity and the set my camera to the settings I mentioned above. To achieve the brightly lit tent, while still retaining star detail, I used a canon 430EX II attached to a cheap radio trigger I bought from Amazon, but instead of putting the transmitter on the camera so it would trigger as soon as the shot was taken, I held the transmitter in my hand and popped of 2 random flashed using the test button. This allowed me to add more light during the course of the 30 second exposure.

After I was all done, I pulled the photo into Lightroom 4, did some color correcting and used some adjustment to pull out a little more detail, but this of course is all according to taste as the photo looked great out the camera, I just wanted a little more punch.