BACKUP PLAN

A few weekends ago

I was itching to give my newly made car setup a go so I threw it the back of my car, grabbed some camera gear, stopped at the store for some snacks and breakfast and headed to a location that I had my eye on for a few years.

After 90 minutes of driving I got to the dirt road turnoff to the lake only to find it was still very much covered in snow for the last 2 miles of the road. I had two options, hike alone on icy, slushy, uneven snow in the middle of the night with a very high possibility that the lake was still frozen over and covered in snow, or go to a backup location. I chose the backup plan.

I first checked out the alignment with the milky way using my Planit app, then I turned in for a few hours on my new bed. I found it to be comfortable enough, at least for using a backpacking air mattress. There's not much headroom because my car isn't very tall and I built the bed to sit off the seats so I can put bags and things underneath it.

After a few hours of sleep my alarm went off and I went out and set up both cameras for a time lapse for a bit, then I figured I'd do some photos using my 85mm lens, so I stopped the timelapse on one camera and shot around with it. These next two images are 20 images stacked for noise reduction.

I did a 3 image stacked pano (3x10 photos for 30 total photos) with a Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 (45mm equivalent)

I closed out the night by doing a wide pano of the full arch of the milky way. This was with my Sony A7RIII and 16-35mm ƒ/2.8.

After a few hours some wispy clouds moved in and I figured I'd caught enough photos so I headed back to the car for a few more hours of sleep before sunrise. Sunrise wasn't very impressive so I didn't bother getting up for it.

As I was leaving, I saw an Osprey nest with a couple Osprey, one of which had caught a fish in its talons. I pulled off the side of the road to get some photos and video of it flying around.