A STARRY KISS

My friend Joe and Loren became #JOLOJACK in Alpena Michigan and invited me to capture the event. It was a blast. You can see how much fun we had at the reception. Alpena also has a dark sky park called Rockport. Since Joe and Loren are both big on outdoors we couldn’t pass on creating this image. It was a bit tricky because I was only there a few days and one of those was the wedding day. So I really only had one day to scout and one day make this. The scout day revealed two problems. One was that it often gets quite foggy (pictured below) that time of year during sunset. And two even if the fog didn’t cover the stars the Milky Way didn’t show well on the horizon when it would be behind the couple. So the solution was to reschedule the shoot closer to midnight when the fog had cleared and the Milky Way was clear but directly above the couple. I would then reposition it in post. The other tricky part of this was I only had one light which wasn’t a flash. I had a friend stand with an ICE LIGHT which was fine but meant I needed a longer exposure (1/25th) and much faster aperture (f2.8) then you would normally use. I was really worried about motion blur and critical focus. Especially since I had no other monitor other then the tiny LCD on the back of the camera. The subjects were about 30 feet away from the camera so judging in the view finder was also difficult in the dark. So I took a bunch of images using different setting and went slow. When I got home I was relieved to see that critical focus was achieved and the image came out great.