My Albany Covered Bridge Picture

The Albany Covered Bridge is a much-photographed attraction along the beautiful Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire.

I drove up there twice during new moons, staying at a cheap motel the first time and driving home very late the second. This picture is from my second visit.

After accidentally soaking my sneakers in the Swift River, I set up my Canon T6s with a 10-20mm lens and a homemade L bracket. With an interval timer, I began taking zillions of 15 second exposures of the Milky Way (ISO 6400 and f/3.5 because the lens was only $600).

I synchronized the interval timer to my watch so I would know when the shutter was open. I walked back to my car and, when I knew the camera was taking a picture, drove it through the bridge with only the parking lights on to illuminate the inside of the structure.

I used Sequator to stack the Milky Way exposures. Using the zillion shots I had taken didn’t work well: lens distortion and that pesky rotating celestial sphere was too much for the stacking software. I settled on stacking 10 images. If you use Sequator, be sure to read what each setting does and experiment a little; it can make a huge difference in the end result.

The output from Sequator looks very dim, but tweaking the curves in Photoshop really brings out the starry sky.

The foreground is from a three minute exposure, with the sky masked out.

Creating masks for the sky and foreground wasn’t too bad since fiddling with contrast and brightness easily distinguishes them, and then you can make masks from that. But the fringes of the tree line were not perfect. Quite honestly, I cheated there, hand-painting masks and using Photoshop’s clone stamp tool on anything that still didn’t look right.

A few more tweaks with brightness, contrast, and noise reduction, et voilà!

There are a lot of Albany covered bridge pics on the web, including some really nice ones with the Milky Way. Two that inspired me are by Adam Woodworth and A. G. Evans. Check them out; they’re really beautiful.