How To Photograph Stars In New Zealand Ep. 17 P.T.W. BTS

Photographing The World Behind The Scenes continues today with Episode 17. This is the second to last episode in our series. In this video, we head back to New Zealand to photograph astrophotography with Elia Locardi. 

Filming photography tutorials at night isn't very easy. At times we could light Elia, but then the background would be completely black. Most of the time we had to keep all lights off because we were also filming star time-lapses for hours at a time. Because of this we decided to photograph a scene one night, and then film the actually lesson the next day while we had light. We would then get Elia to talk about "what he was about to do," even though he had already done it. While he was shooting, we filmed time-lapse footage of the scene and him working, and then we edited over his teaching. This wasn't the easiest way to film and edit, but it did end up making the lessons very easy to understand. 

In this BTS episode, Elia recreates his famous photograph at the Church of The Good Shepard. For the first shot he captured an image of the church at blue hour. Then he captured a shot of the windows being lit us by our cell phones from behind once the sky went black. And finally he shot an image of the Milky Way as it moved behind the church. 

Elia had another camera running at the same time that was being attacked by children and sprinklers throughout the night, but he was still able to capture enough shots to build star trails by combining them all in Photoshop. 

Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel to see next weeks episode 18. This will be the final episode in this entire series. 

To learn more about the full cityscape tutorial you can visit the info page here. If you are more interested in standard landscapes, you can check out Elia's first photography tutorial here.