Lighthouse and Milky Way
Sometimes, the finished image exists in your mind long before you’ve actually taken and edited it. The photo of the lighthouse with the Milky Way is just such a case.
On to Ameland
The 2023 family vacation took us around the Netherlands for ten days. After two adventurous days at the Efteling theme park to start things off, and five days at a mutual friend’s farm in Hoogland, we finally headed to the picturesque island of Ameland for three more days. With perfect vacation weather, we enjoyed the endless (27 kilometers) sandy beach, which gave us dreamlike sunsets and great beach and swimming pleasure. In addition, the boat trip to the seal island nature reserve, as well as the small town of Nes with its small, enchanting boutiques have left many beautiful memories.
In addition to ample time with the family, I had of course hoped for some photo opportunities. In fact, during the course of the vacation, quite a few occasions to capture animals, landscapes, and moods presented themselves. I had taken along my camera and few selected lenses – but no computer. I wanted to fully enjoy the time on the road and save the post-processing for the rainy days back home.
Before the crossing to over Ameland, I had browsed the Internet for possible motifs, and one of them immediately caught my eye: the lighthouse Bornrif near Hollum. That would be the perfect foreground for a night sky photo…
How to get the Lighthouse to the Milky Way
The weather forecast already provided the perfect conditions: a clear sky and a moon setting shortly after sunset promised a good view of the stars. So, the next thing on the agenda was finding the right vantage point. Fortunately, there are numerous apps available for this, with which you can see exactly where the Milky Way will be in the evening, when the sun sets, and when it gets dark enough. I prefer using “PhotoPills” and “Sky Guide” for this.
I set off about an hour before sunset, so that I had ample time to explore the area around the lighthouse and look for the right location while it was still light outside. A suitable place in the dunes was found soon, and thus the waiting began. But it was not boring at all, not only because of the many mosquitoes. Shortly after sunset, the lighthouse began to paint its circling rays of light into the sky. Capturing these in front of the darkening sky with different exposure times was the first pleasure of the evening. Even photos taken in parallel with the phone showed great first results.
A little more than an hour after sunset, the first stars appeared, and another hour later it was finally dark enough for the Milky Way to show up on the camera display for the first time – right behind the lighthouse! What a fantastic moment! I ended up walking a few more steps to the right to separate the two subjects a bit. The biggest challenge was finding camera settings where you could see a lot of stars without everything being completely outshined by the bright rays from the lighthouse. In the end, I was on location for about three hours and didn’t leave until clouds moved in front of the Milky Way and the high humidity became so high it caused the lens to fog up constantly. The final result, which exceeds my expectations by far, was more than worth the effort!
The Results
The following are the best pictures from that evening in the dunes. The constantly changing light conditions offered many opportunities for different photos. The last picture in the series is my personal “Photo of the Year” and will definitely find its place in the 2024 calendar.
