 So as a photographer, I have this long running list of photos that I want to someday take. And one of them looks a lot like this. There's a large sprawling valley and snow covered mountain tops. But of course, the main focus of this photo is the beautiful Milky Way cutting straight through the center of the sky. So I hit up the person who took all of those photos to teach me how they do it. Welcome back to Full Frame Buds. Becca's first astrophoto. On not just DSLR mirrorless either. All right, Becca. So really, regardless of what you're shooting with, you have to know where to go and when to go to get the perfect shot of the stars. My name is Betty Maya Foote. I am the director of engagement for the International Dark Sky Association and an astrophotographer. Basically, you want to avoid light pollution that can be caused by a number of things. SkyGlo is light scattered in the atmosphere from a nearby city or town, obscuring the view of the night sky. Glare is light that's entering your field of view at shallow angles that causes visual discomfort. Light Trespass is light from another property trespassing onto your property or into your home. At the International Dark Sky Association, we work to protect the night from artificial light. So a great place to go to start to look for a dark place is our International Dark Sky Places program. But there are a lot of other places around the world that are still great to shoot. One of my favorite maps to look at online is lightpollutionmap.info. So when you found your place to shoot, you're going to want to take a look at the moon cycle and figure out where the moon is in its phase before you go out to shoot. If you're looking for that really, really dark sky, you're going to want to go before the moon rises or after the moon sets or during a new moon period. It's also really great to use crescent moons to light up your foreground as well while not blocking out too much of the night sky. And brighter moons are really good at brightening up your foreground completely and it almost looks like daytime with stars. You're also going to want to check the weather. You want a good clear night with no clouds in order to see the most amount of stars. Betty Maia and I decided that we'd meet in Ridgeway, Colorado, which is right near top of the pines recreation area. It happens to be the most recently designated dark sky park in the US. So I called in some filming friends and away we went. And there was one more expert I enlisted to help us take the perfect photo of the night sky. And give us another clap. Good morning. My name is Val Schwark and welcome to the San Juan Mountains outside of Ridgeway, Colorado. I'm a retired meteorologist. I used to work for NOAA in Boulder. And I'm the local dark sky point of contact for Ridgeway, Colorado and top of the pines. I'm a little concerned about how cold we're going to be. Both Val and Betty Maia stress the importance of scouting your location during the day and making sure you will have nighttime access. So our local guide Val led us up to top of the pines to get a lay of the land. This is our big break Val. This is such a nice open horizon. So I'm looking for just something intriguing like that will draw your eye in to the foreground. And you're also noticing kind of any leading lines or any like color blocks or different parts of the landscape that are going to be there. And then you're also noticing like the color blocks or different parts of the landscape that are going to draw your eye to a particular part of the photo. After a whole bunch of scouting and truthfully getting most things wrong. And the Milky Way comes out of the west this time of year. No, it comes out of the east. It's going to be probably like right over here like this. The brightest part of the Milky Way is going to be below the horizon actually. We agreed upon a spot that our last checks of where the Milky Way and major constellations are going to be. And we decided to go back and prepare our gear. Betty Maia brought along the Canon 5D Mark IV with a Sigma 14mm f1.8 and also a Canon 6D with a Rokinon 24mm f1.4. And you might notice that the lenses she brought are both wide and they stop down to at least an f1.8. If you shoot with a wider lens you can expose for a longer amount of time before you notice the trailing in the stars. So we took the Canon 5D Mark IV with a Canon 24mm f1.4. And then of course the Pixel 6 Pro and the iPhone 13 Pro. And we took our last few moments of warmth to dial in camera settings as well. Changing our focus to manual focus here on our lens. White balance it's good to start in daylight. We're going to change our shutter speed. We're doing moonlight shots. We'll start at about 10 seconds. Go down to aperture 2.2. We'll take our ISO. Let's start with 3200 since we're doing 10 seconds. Then we are going to make sure that our LCD brightness is all the way down. Ooh good call. So and we're also going to make sure we have image quality raw. And why is it important to keep your eyes acclimated to darkness? So you can see the mountain lion that's coming to get you. Don't tell me that. Oh no. The last thing we had to do before hitting the shutter button on our cameras was focusing. The first step is to set your lens to manual focus. Then focus to infinity. Next bring up the live view and punch in at least 10x magnification in the middle of your screen. And find a star. Bring that star in and out of focus until it is the smallest dot of light that you can make it. Then finally take a photo and don't forget to zoom in and review your focus before you take any more. I spent most of my childhood summers sleeping on the trampoline as a kid, you know, looking up at the night sky. To me it always helped me wonder about the universe as well as just like understand that we're both so small but also so big and such a part of this infinite universe. We spent close to four hours out shooting that night and it was incredible to be under something so grandiose in a space so vast and quiet and cold. And although I wish the photos that we took came out of our cameras looking as good and contrasty and punchy as the photos you just saw, well, unfortunately there's one more part to getting the perfect astrophoto. I like to think of editing photos as I try to create a scene that makes me feel like I felt when I was there experiencing that moment. Betty Maia uses a combination of Lightroom, Photoshop, and a program called Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce noise and bring out what's called airglow in the image. Airglow are particles releasing energy as light as photons and here we can see it. You can kind of see these lines. We ended up shooting with six different camera systems while we were out there from Canon to Fuji, Sony to Apple and Google. And I was most impressed by the work the Pixel 6 Pro was doing. The level of detail it was able to capture and instantly process, especially when compared to the iPhone 13 Pro, had me saying, again and again. For printing, enlarging, extended time lapses, or bringing out more of that airglow, the DSLRs and mirrorless are obviously going to provide far more detail and control. But no matter the camera system, getting the perfect astro shot ultimately comes down to one step. You have to know where to go and when to go to get the perfect shot of the stars. Man, I always get sad at the end of the project, you know? It's like, what do I do now? Drop a comment down below. What photo are we knocking off the list next? And a big thank you to Betty Maia and Val. I could not have done this without you. Alright buds, I'll see you on the next one.