I left you at Botallack Mine at the end of the last post, with two very different shots of the Crown engine houses. If you haven’t seen it you can read it here. This time we move further along the coast to Wheal Reath, and an altogether different challenge…

I’d set out to photograph the Milky Way on this occasion and arrived at a deserted little car park in complete darkness. Picking my way around the buildings by torchlight I eventually found a suitable spot to set up my camera, struggling like hell to focus on the brightest star and attempt some kind of composition when I couldn’t see a damn thing. I knew I needed to leave the aperture wide open and push the ISO as high as I dared, and I also had an inkling that just two hours after the sun had set I was too early. I was still staggered when the 25 second exposure returned an image that clearly showed an orange sky full of residual light invisible to the naked eye. Even in darkness, there is light…

Once again I had to change my plans but I quite liked the result, so set about adapting my plans to capitalise on it, lighting the engine house with a dash of torchlight to make it stand out. Now if focusing by torchlight wasn’t challenging enough it became a damn sight more difficult when the torch failed, leaving me standing in a field where I couldn’t even see my hands trying to change the batteries by touch – and the LCD of an iPhone – alone.

The torch benefited from this as it happened and was all the more effective for its brighter beam, and I captured a few more shots as the sky lost its colour – the one below simply lit by a passing car’s headlights and shown here as an alternative to the main image at the top. I know, the stars are out of focus…

I was just getting ready to attempt a star capture when the remote shutter release – things I have a tendency to drop in the sea and ruin – started acting up. It was cold, and after an hour of struggling in the dark the camera gear was now covered in condensation and I couldn’t even gauge a decent exposure in manual mode.

Botallacks to this, I thought. Time to drive back to base…