Starry sky over the swamp

Starry sky over the swamp

An amazing starry sky can be seen over the swamp during a crystal clear night.
Swamps are an ideal place to take shots like this one because in the remotest no artificial lighting is present.

As I was standing there, I only saw a dark black sky with stars and the moon, but no colours.
I guess, the colours became visible due to the very long shutter speed that I used.
I am also impressed by the large number of stars that are visible in my picture (looks much more than it was in reality).

Location : Brackvenn (National Park ‘Hohes Venn’, Belgium)

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The making of :

First, I made a ‘normal’ shot of this scene that resulted in a well exposed moon.

Then I shot the same scene several times again with a different shutter speed (5, 8, 10 and 12 minutes)

To my taste, the starry sky was best exposed in the 10 minutes shot, but the moon of course was totally over-exposed.
I replaced that over-exposed moon by the correct exposed moon of my first shot.

The result is what you see and no further manipulation took place.
(all shots were made on ISO100 to reduce noise as much as possible)

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When the job was finished, it was dark as hell and I still had to go a long way home out of the swamp.....