Milky Way + Mt. Haleakala | How I Got The Shot | By Jeff Allen, Orion's Eye Photography
- Wedding Hawai'i Magazine
- May 4, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: May 4, 2020
How I Got The Shot Written & Photographed By
Jeff Allen Orion's Eye Photography
Of all the wedding photo's my wife and I had planned to take, this was the one I was most looking forward to doing. We were staying in Wailea and started our trek up Mount Haleakala early in the evening. It was an extremely foggy drive going around very narrow & curvy roads. We wanted to catch the sunset but time was not on our side. We got there right as the sun went down and I quickly grabbed my camera and started snapping away. The temperature was dropping rapidly and we were dressed in our 90 degree beach clothes.
ON TOP OF MT. HALEAKALA BY JEFF ALLEN, ORION’S EYE PHOTOGRAPHY CAMERA: NIKON D5 LENS: AF-S NIKKOR 14-24MM
F/2.8G ED
FOCAL LENGTH: 15MM
SHUTTER: 15 SEC
APERTURE: F/2.8
ISO: 5000
LIGHTING: ELINCHROM ELB1200 REAR
Once the sun was gone, we had another speed bump to get over... THE MOON! It was big and bright! That's normally great, except when you want a picture of the Milky Way. So we waited and waited and waited. Finally around 11:30pm we changed into our wedding attire, found our location and began to set up. By this time it was freezing! I remember my toes being numb and my wife's teeth chattering non stop. Our daughter had a blanket wrapped around her but she was still pretty cold too. So all of this changed the way I was going to take the picture. I knew I had to be quick so we could get out of there ASAP. I decided to go with a silhouette look for that reason. It was as dark as it could possibly get once the moon went down and we had a real tough time finding our way around.
The Shot:
I went with my Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 so I could capture as much of the Milky Way as possible, I also chose that lens because you can leave your shutter open a little longer without getting star trails. Again, it was so ridiculously dark, I had to add light just to create a silhouette. So I used my Elinchrom ELB1200 with a standard 50 degree reflector and placed it behind us on the ground, facing up at us. I probably would've use my Elinchrom ELB400 but it got damaged in Hurricane Olivia the day before. I ended up firing the shot with the camera timer instead of my CamRanger that I had been using because I thought the light from my phone (you use an app to control it) would be too bright and show up in the picture. So I set the timer to 30 seconds, ran in the dark across the very sharp and rocky lava in my flip flops, grabbed my wife, held the pose for 15-20 seconds and bam! We got the shot! Something that I did not account for was the backlighting had created a blue laser looking beam that shot up in the air behind us that I had to Photoshop out. But overall, I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
@Orions_eye_photography
Wedding Photography Big Island, Maui, Kaua'i, Oahu, Molokai
Stunning pictures. Loved reading the articles. So informative. Beautiful magazine.