to establish the Milky Way position,
and I used a weather app to monitor the
cloud cover overhead. I used my Canon
Wi-Fi control app on the phone to trig-
ger the camera while I moved around
with an LED torch painting light on the
subject, and finally I used Photoshop to
stack the images of the foreground and
background for the final result. An im-
age like this simply wouldn't be possible
without the technology advances we
have today – and although it would have
been possible to take it without apps and
an LED torch, it's just much easier to
produce it with these aids.
Of course, there's a earning curve
to all these advances, and to save
frustration you'll probably need to
watch or read a bunch of new tuto-
rials and workshops. But it's exciting
to see what technology now allows.
Of course the advances in technol-
ogy aren't just limited to our gear,
and through social media we are now
flooded with images almost every-I
t doesn’t seem all
that long ago that
digital took over
from film, but re-
cent advances in pho-
tography sometimes
even leave me shaking
my head at how far we've come. Consid-
er this image of a rusty old Austin under
the Mily Way I captured on a property
on the outskirts of Orange, NSW.
I captured this image using the phone
app PhotoPills to plan the date and timeAPS FOCUS
WITH JENNY DAVIDSONwhere we look. This means as photog-
raphers we must work much harder to
capture our viewers' attention.
It's why I chose this image for this
month's column. So many Milky Way
shots we see seem to be captured in
coastal locations with great water ref lec-
tions, and wonderful rocky outcrops. I'm
lucky enough to live in a regional loca-
tion and have been taking star images in
regional locations for some time with a
variety of different cameras. At this time
of year it is very cold, but it is also re-
warding to capture images of locations
many people aren't familiar with, mak-
ing them a little different.
Of course it doesn’t matter if oth-
ers don’t view your images as the best,
they must first please you and give
you pleasure when you view them.
Remember too, photography isn’t all
about gear and software. It is still fun-
damentally about light, and if we un-
derstand light we can make an image
with almost any camera. ❂TRANSFORMATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
TOP: Austin under
the Stars.Being able to take images
that simply were not possible
a decade or two ago is one
of the the most exciting things
about modern photography.