Sonia Smith, Samford Valley (May theme: The night sky)

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the beautiful skies we see on the East Coast of Australia. Especially during the colder months when the Milky Way is at its best. I have gone from learning astronomy to astrophotography as I recently bought a DSLR a couple of years ago. I used several different light painting techniques for this photograph, even using my car headlights at one point to give the foreground and grass some colour! I also used a tent light inside the tent to give it the glowing look. The Milky Way is another photograph I took in the same location stacked on top of it. HDR and Bracketing did not seem to do the trick for this shot so I decided to experiment with stacking and layer masks. I am not 100% percent happy with the results of this photograph but I really would love to win some filters so I thought I should start entering some competitions.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.