First time shooting the Milky Way: Mt. Hood

Hi everyone, I've been inspired by this section of the forum since I stumbled across it and posting in here feels like hanging finger paintings next to Van Gogh! I got a chance during the new moon this weekend to go out to Kingsley Reservoir in Hood River, Oregon to see what I could see. Here's what I ended up with. I have a lot to learn but was surprised by all the colors and detail my camera picked up. I'm hooked!

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/ovh4​vh

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/otRZ​Hf

I'm new at this myself so take anything I say with a grain of salt! I really like your shot a lot. We don't have vistas quite like that here which helps sway my opinion significantly. Apart from that, looks like a solid exposure and the reflection of the stars, MW and mountain in the water are an awesome compositional element, nice job!

Only nitpick for me would be the silhouetted trees in right side of frame creating such a large dark/black area. Maybe if you had composed the shot a tad more to the left including only the silhouettes of the branches and tree top and more of the night sky to the left?

All in all looks great to me.

great shots for your first time out? What focal length did you use for these? The core looks huge! The trees to the right do throw off the balance quite a bit in the photo, especially with the MW toward the right. Great photos for your first night out though...my first night photos were GARBAGE

Very nice

nice. you should put it up in the 40mm thread as well.

I like the composition a lot! Makes me feel more like I am there and can't move to see past the trees----great shot! JD

You're all very kind! I wish I'd had more control over composition but get this-I had no tripod and was working with various lake rocks to get my camera up high enough to see the sky! I did a lot of holding my breath and hoping my camera didn't fall into the lake. But with stars like these I couldn't NOT take some photos! So the poorly placed trees are mostly due to poorly placed rocks. Darn nature! I will definitely play with some different crops and see if I can come up with something more pleasing to the eye

As pkim1230 mentioned, these were with the 40mm pancake. Makes my 5d mkii almost feel portable!

Looks great to me! Beautiful scene... Welcome to the dark side

Beautiful shots! You've just added another location to my PNW shooting list for when I'm next in the US!

Awesome first shot! Love the reflections in the first one

Everything besides the balance being a bit off because of the trees looks amazing. Really nice exposure and reflections in the first one. What was your exposure time on these? According to my math you can do 12.5 seconds before getting trailing, I'm surprised you were able to get such a good exposure with 40mm @2.8.

yeah, mind if I see the original without PP?

I never tire of great Milky shots and this is one of them.

You have me hooked as well..... nice work!

Proper_propaganda wrote in post #17076522
Everything besides the balance being a bit off because of the trees looks amazing. Really nice exposure and reflections in the first one. What was your exposure time on these? According to my math you can do 12.5 seconds before getting trailing, I'm surprised you were able to get such a good exposure with 40mm @2.8.

Sorry to get back so late to this thread, I've been out camping with no wifi!
I did these exposures at 15 seconds, 6400 ISO. There was some minor trailing happening, but not enough to bother me. I'm just as surprised as you are, I think I can only credit how very very dark out it was, and how very very bright the milky way was even to the naked eye.

pkim1230, the lake photo is a composite of two images. I'm attaching the original right side (the milky way side.) ((EDIT: Oh dear, uploading it via POTN is rather dreadful looking.. Hm.))

Thanks again for all your lovely comments. I feel I have a lot to learn and POTN has been a great resource!