Ryan Peerenboom is at Rock Island State Park (Wisconsin).

1 week ago

The last photo in this series was taken our very first evening of the trip. Having experienced a whirlwind of emotions and feeling a bit mentally drained, we quickly setup our camp gear and settled in. When the skies darkened, we set out to the beach for the first time of the trip with the gear. As I began to capture, I immediately noticed the incredible improvements in the Sony a7iii lowlight image quality over my previous 8 year old camera body, and excitement quickly began to build. I furiously captured anything and everything around me and was constantly amazed as I refined the settings and found increasingly amazing performance. I spent most of the night in awe of what I was seeing in the viewfinder.

Very late, near the end of the evening, the Milky Way began to dip behind the horizon. As it did, I captured my first perpendicular-to-the-horizon Milky Way shot and my first ever vertical panorama. I also was shooting a different part of the Milky Way, the tail end of the core as it leads out to the spiral of stars on the outer edge. I was mind-blown at what I was seeing and it set the tone for the rest of the weekend - and caused us to produce all of the imagery I’ve shared thus far.

A huge shoutout to Sydney Champeau for pushing me to move on to the next shot al weekend long and easing me out of my comfort zone as we adventured together under the stars.

Another huge shoutout to Andres Aguilar for turning me on to the incredible world of #astrophotography years ago and for inspiring me with your remarkable visual creativity every time we shoot together - I’m always most-excited to share my astro shots with you, and pushing myself to impress you every time I shoot.

A final huge shoutout and infinite thanks to Rick and the first-class crew at Camera Corner Connecting Point for making this entire experience happen. I hope if ever anyone in the Green Bay/Door County/NE Wisconsin area needs anything photography-related, they are aware that this is simply the place to go for customer service and quality products.

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*I am also very happy to announce that I will be beginning a journey into ‘deep space’ astrophotography imminently as I have recently acquired my first equatorial mount and telescope for tracking and imaging the night sky and am excited to share the journey with everyone! ... See MoreSee Less