I'm currently at the beach in a place where there is almost no light pollution from any large towns… There is a city about 20 miles away or maybe even further but it's across a massive expanse of water and the light can only be seen on the very edge of the horizon. Not over the ocean.
I figured that if people are able to take milky way photos with more light pollution than I have around here… I should surely be able to get a pretty decent photo all the way out here!
I read a pretty simple step by step thing and tried out all of the settings but they didn't really work out for me.
In one of my photos I got SOME stars but they only showed up after raising the exposure in my photo editing program as high as possible and it looked like crap.
I have a Nikon D3100. I was using a Nikkor 18-55 lens which is not the same thing that the person who wrote the instructional piece was using… So obviously it would require different settings but I figured that I should try his out first and adjust from there.
What settings (shutter speed, aperture, etc) should I use to get a really nice photo of the milky way?
Read more: Photographing the milky way?