His photos are incredible, so I figured what better way to learn than from a pro. We picked a night with a clear sky and drove up to Callaghan Lake, which is about 1h30 from Vancouver just south of Whistler.

It wasn't easy to get to and the road was a real rough ride, but it was all worth it as the lake was beautiful and the conditions were perfect. Since it's far from anything, there was little to no light pollution which meant the sky was saturated with stars.

For these shots, I used my Olympus PEN EPL-7, with the 14-42mm kit lens. It's easy to underestimate the PEN as it's so small, but its capabilities are amazing and I was really impressed by the shots I captured. 

Shooting star trails

After Aaron explained the manual settings and what we were hoping to achieve, we set up the cameras for star trails. After playing around a bit, I set my camera to 30-second shutter speed, f/3.5, ISO 1600, and set it up to shoot continuously for 45 minutes. 

But setting up the shutter speed/ISO/aperture is only a portion of the job. I actually didn't realize how difficult composing the image would be. Fortunately, the moonlight was really bright, which meant I could see the landscape in front of me with my eyes and I wasn't fumbling around with my equipment in complete darkness. However, on my camera, the screen was completely black so it was a case of shooting, tweaking, shooting, reframing, and so forth, until the shot was properly composed. All in all, this took about 20 minutes to get the composition the way that I wanted. When you're trying to capture every aspect of the image - rocks, sky, lake, trees - it becomes a long process taking test shots especially as you can't physically see your landscape through the lens. This is why it helps to know your camera and its movement inside out, but I guess this only comes with practice. It was absolutely freezing too (about 3 degrees), and no cloud cover meant it was bitingly cold so my hands were numb after about 15 minutes.

Another thing that was difficult was getting the shot in focus. Since you can't use Autofocus (because it's so dark your camera has nothing to focus on) you need to focus manually. However, when your viewfinder is completely black, it's impossible to know whether it's in focus or not. Aaron was prepared and brought a powerful torch so we could use the rocks as a marker, but my first star trail shot was slightly out of focus as I didn't focus it properly. 

After everything was set up, we left the camera to shoot for 45 minutes and let the magic happen. In terms of post-processing, the main work was stacking the photos together to produce the star trail. I want to mention that 1 shot won't produce a star trail. This photo was a compilation of almost 100 shots. The longer you shoot, the more movement you'll capture and the longer the star trail will be. I used Lightroom to straighten the image and complete a few minor edits, but it didn't need a lot as the moonlight lit up the shot so much. I was SO happy with the star trail I captured and I can't get over how beautiful it is!

Shooting milky ways 

Although October isn't the prime month for shooting milky ways and the moonlight drowned out a lot of the stars, we could see the milky way ever so slightly for about 30 minutes. 

You can see the cluster of stars and the faint outline of the milky way running up the centre of the shot. It wasn't dark enough to properly see or capture it, but learning to shoot milky ways is definitely one of my goals!

Key things I learned