It’s new moon last weekend. So, me and an bunch of photographer friends went on a milky way hunting trip in Mersing, a small coastal town east coast of Johor. The drive from KL wasn’t too bad. We took the north-south highway to Kluang town and had our lunch there. After that, we continued our journey via winding trunk road, as there are no connected highways to Mersing.
All in, 4 hours+ later… we arrived. After checking in at our guest house, we went straight to our shooting location. Reached there rather early, about 3pm++. But we wanted to scout around the area to look for some spots to shoot some long exposure, but the weather was not so ideal with overcast dull clouds and tide is low too. So, we ended up walking around that area doing some goofy stuff like taking group photos and silly videos of some caveman.
Mersing Sea Stack
For this iconic sea stack in Mersing, I took a total of 48 shots of the same angle (supposed to be 50, but 2 shots were damaged). Here’s how one of the photo from the 48 shots looks like straight out from the camera raw unedited.
You might be curious as to why I took so many shots of the same stuff. Well, before I began to shoot… I’ve already planned to my post processing method, which is to do the “stacking method”. With this method, I will stack process all my 48 images using the Sequator software to eliminate digital noise and to improve the signal to noise ratio. Below is the stacked image.
Can see the difference? Stacked vs. single photo. If you still can’t see it, let me zoom in and put them side-by-side below.
Now do you see it? That’s the power of stacked photo… Noise begone! Now the noise problem is solved, next will be the foreground.. which are the rocks at both sides and the sea stack in the middle. So… as for the foreground, I chose the photo of the rocks which we did light painting on… and combined it with this stacked photo for the milky way. This will be the “Base Layer” I’ll work with before further processing the photo.
Now, it’s time to enhance the milky way core details… to give the milky way a “pop out” so to speak. To do this, I use the Nik Collection’s Color Efex Pro 4… by applying the pro contrast and polarization filters. After that, I added a few curve adjustment layers to selectively put more contrast on the milky way core, removed some green & cyan color cast on the bottom of the milky way and lastly, I also removed some light pollution that was on the right side of the rock.
Now that my editing in Photoshop is done, back in Lightroom… I added slight magenta color into the overall photo and that’s it. Here’s the final result below.
Shot with XT4 + XF 10-24mm F4 @ 10mm
Foreground – F4 | ISO 1600 | 25sec
Sky – F4 | ISO 6400 | 48photos x 30sec