On a clear night in December with the waning quarter moon in the Western Sky, I set out to take a photo of Orion over a little white church at the base of the Superstition Mountains, east of the Phoenix metro area. I didn’t realize it, but I was about to learn several lessons that I didn’t intend on learning. I want to share my planning and the lessons I learned.

Weather & Moon

I planned this photoshoot to be on a clear cloudless night that the moon would be of minimal interference in the western sky. I didn’t want the moon to cast much light into the part of the sky that I would be shooting. Typically you’d choose to do this on a moonless night, but with scheduling, this night would work best.

Camera & Lens

This would be the first time that I was attempting to photograph the night sky with my new Canon R6. My plan was to go out and take photos with my new camera and my Rokinon 14mm f 2.8 EF mounted onto a EF/RF adaptor. I’ve been able to photograph the Milky Way with this lens before on my 6D, so I figured I wouldn’t have much trouble. I also take photographs all the time with my EF 85mm on my R6, so I figured that I wouldn’t have much trouble with the Rokinon 14mm lens. I hadn’t done any testing with this setup before I left, so I wasn’t aware that there’d be a different setup that I’d need to figure out in the cold dark.

When I attached the lens to the camera and attempted to take a photo, the lens wouldn’t respond to the camera. In the dark, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I switched over to my 85mm and had no problems, so I figured it was a lens thing. Because of this, I ended up shooting the night sky using an 85mm prime lens, and having to stitch the photo together (more on that later.) When I got home I saw that the Rokinon lens has a different attachment mechanism that doesn’t allow it to communicate with the R6 mirrorless camera technology.

So the Rokinon 14mm lens wouldn’t respond because it seemed to be unable to communicate with the Canon R6. Some further research turned up a setting on the camera that, when I got the camera, I figured I’d never change. After all, why would I ever want to open the shutter without a lens on it?

I learned that I needed to set the “Release shutter w/o lens” setting in the 4th orange menu to “On”. This allows the shutter to open even if it doesn’t sense a lens attached. Which only makes sense when you have a lens like the Rokinon 14mm attached to it with the different lens connectors. After a few test photos in my office, I can confirm that this works. Now that I know this, I’ll be able to photograph the night sky with the Rokinon 14mm lens.

Photography Strategy

So rather than take a single photograph with a wider zoom, I ended up taking the photo with a Canon 85mm F1.4 lens. This is a FANTASITC lens for portrait photography, but I hadn’t intended on using it for taking photos of the night sky. In order to get what I wanted, which was the Orion constellation directly over the white church, I needed to shoot 12 photos of the night sky, 3 across and 4 down.

While out there, I needed to wait for the occasional vehicle to pass, so there wouldn’t be any light cast into the direction of the photograph. I shot at 15 seconds, F 1.4, zoomed to infinity, 200 ISO. I figured I’d go home, edit them up, and do a stitched photo like I’d done before with other daytime panoramas.

Editing and Stitching

Editing did not go as I had planned. I knew I’d need to clean up corners, balance the exposure, shadows, blacks, whites, highlights, clarity, and sharpness to bring out more stars and not blow out the church in the foreground. I adjusted the color balance, and made sure I removed the lens distortion in Lightroom so that it would stitch well. I knew there’d be some more work once I exported it all to Photoshop too. I did all of that well enough, but when it came time to stich the photos, Lightroom couldn’t do it with the night sky photos. It turned out that Lightroom couldn’t make sense of the stars and do a stitch. I exported them all to Photoshop and tried to stitch them in Photoshop using File/Scripts/Load Files into Stack. Photoshop couldn’t stitch the sky photos either.

I spent a few days trying to put the shots together by hand. I learned that there’s just so much that the software does, and how it compensates for differences in photos. I couldn’t get the photos to stitch by hand either. I was so frustrated because I had to change my photography strategies, but I was excited to see the result. Now I was worried I wouldn’t get to a final result.

In further research I found Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). It’s a free software from Microsoft that will stitch images that are meant for a composite. Since it was free, I figured I’d give it a try. Wouldn’t you know it, that software was able to stitch the photos together with relative ease! It’s image processor isn’t as great as Lightroom or Photoshop, so the image came out a little different than it went in; the image had a strange color cast to it, and some of the spots in the image were lighter due to lens vignetting (that I thought I had already taken care of, but that ICE wouldn’t budge on) but at least it was stitched now, and I could work on the image in Photoshop! I knew how to fix the rest!

I went to work in Photoshop using exposure masks for the bright spots and the foreground, and working on bringing out the night sky a little more with gradient and exposure masks. Here’s the completed image…

Never Satisfied, but Taking the Lesson

I’m never really satisfied with some photos, and this is one of them. I’ve probably done a dozen versions of the photo over several weeks, over and over again. Depending on what the edits are like in Lightroom, ICE will result in a completely different image size and everything. This makes sense because the information that ICE has to work with changes. I think I’ll never be truly satisfied with this photo because it didn’t match my original vision. I’m going to call it done though, and take the lessons with me into future projects.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn so much from this experience. Even if it didn’t result in the image I had hoped for, I still learned some things that I’ll be able to take with me into future projects. If you come across this post, hopefully this was able to help you as well.