This is easily the most difficult image I’ve captured to date. Over 12,000 images captured over 5 nights with 5 cameras to create a 360VR experience of the Geminid meteor shower.

The debate over prime versus zoom lenses is one that echoes around most genres of photography but there are important and specific points to be made when discussing landscape astrophotography.

Zoom lenses provide the convenience of multiple focal lengths in a smaller, lighter, and probably cheaper setup compared to multiple prime lenses that would cover the same range. So despite the fact that my aching back hates me for carrying so much gear around, why is it that over 90% of my images are captured with primes?

Once a year there’s a special opportunity to capture Jupiter and its four Galilean moons with a foreground subject and it’s called opposition.

With 2021 drawing to a close I was reflecting on how little photography I was able to do the past year. At the same time, plans to celebrate New Year’s Eve were crumbling as all my friends began coming down with covid. I’d yet to photograph Comet Leonard and it was no longer visible from the UK so a last-minute flight to Tenerife began the chase to capture the cosmic snowball before the year finished and it headed back off to outer space. Who needs fireworks when you have a naked eye visible comet?

If you’d asked me 5 years ago if I thought a smartphone would ever be able to capture a decent image of the Milky Way my answer would have been a resounding no. With tiny sensors and small lenses that aren’t capable of guiding much light onto the sensor there’s no way they’re ever going to be much use in such low-light conditions, right? Well, ask me the same question today and my answer would be a lot different.

The Sony a7S range comes equipped with a 12MP full-frame sensor that has phenomenal low-light videography capabilities (The “S” stands for Sensitivty) to the point where no other prosumer camera even comes close. Now after a couple of months of testing and comparing, I’m finally releasing my review of this night vision monster.

The Kase Starglow filter has been created in collaboration with Alyn Wallace Photography. Made from toughened Kase Wolverine glass, the filter is designed to make bright stars glow and bloat whilst also accentuating their natural colour. It simultaneously hides the fainter stars making constellations pop and stand out. Unveil the glory of the constellations and take your astrophotography to a whole new level.

The Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM very quickly became my favourite lens of all time and is still in my opinion, the best lens ever made for landscape astrophotography. But I appreciate that a lot of people find the 24mm focal length quite restricting and tight and would prefer something a little wider. When Sony announced the 20mm f/1.8 G I didn’t hesitate to pre-order it, although I kept my expectations low given that it was only designated a G and not a G Master.

I recently did a live “Milky Way Photography Masterclass” with PhotoPills, my favourite app for planning my Milky Way shots. I shared plenty of tips based on some of my favourite images that will help you plan in advance and we also go deep into the settings and gear that I use for landscape astrophotography. I hope you enjoy :)

My latest YouTube video is another awesome project you can try during the lockdown. Create stunning HDR images of the Moon where you can see the illuminated and the unilluminated side of the Moon in the same photograph. You don’t need a tracking mount or anything fancy, just a camera, telephoto lens and a tripod.

In my latest video I show you how to create stunning star trail images. The tutorial covers gear, settings and even post-processing (although I did save a couple of secret tips for my Patreon supporters).

A day doesn’t seem to go by without an image popping up in my social media feed of someone proclaiming proudly that they’ve captured meteors only to be sharing an image of a satellite or a plane trail. It’s an easy mistake to make, even the mainstream media have a habit of using images of satellites and star trails when writing about meteor showers. So rather than simply bursting their bubbles with a brash comment, I thought I’d make this article to help educate others about how to identify what it is you’ve captured.

With many of us stuck in lockdown, quarantine and self-isolation, I thought I’d share 10 ideas for astrophotography that you can do from home, even if you live in a light polluted town or city. If there’s one thing that this pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re all in this together and astrophotography and astronomy only help to solidify that sense of unification. We all live under the same Sun, the same Moon, the same planets and the same stars. People stuck at home all over the world have a chance to photograph the same subjects and share their images with each other. This borderless aspect of astronomy is one of the reasons I love it.

So my “award-winning” film SOLACE is now available on YouTube. It was filmed entirely in my own back garden during the UK Coronavirus lockdown. My aim was to capture and share the solace that I experience whilst out under the stars. People all over the world are going through an incredibly difficult and uncertain time right now and I hope that this film can make you forget everything for just a moment and bring you some peace and solace.

Last week I made the long trip from the UK to Chile in the hopes of capturing my first total solar eclipse. I had experienced a cloudy total solar eclipse from the UK in 1999 but back then I was just 9 years old and certainly no photographer. Now that I’m apparently a professional landscape astrophotographer, a total solar eclipse was a gaping hole in my portfolio. 

Total solar eclipses are of course a rare event. They occur once every 18 months on average but totality can only be seen from a thin and short path each time. On top of that, there will inevitably be eclipses ruined by bad weather and eclipses that occur in locations difficult to reach, such as the 4 December 2021 eclipse that passes through Antarctica. As such, people who are experienced in photographing total solar eclipses are few and far between and although I have only now captured just one myself, I’d still like to share what I learnt from it. 

Back in 2017 a friend and I packed our cameras, hired a CampEasy campervan and hit up the classic photography locations of Iceland’s southern coast. From Snaefellsness to Hofn and back to Reykjavik, we slept under the stars and northern lights and woke up next to glaciers, beaches, mountains and volcanoes. We were constantly at the helm of the rugged weather but at one with the landscape and the freedom to relocate was so liberating. It was so good, I wanted to do it again.

As a landscape astrophotographer one of the first things I'll do when using a new camera is to find out the best ISO to use for low-light noise performance. The way to do this is to test the camera at all its ISO settings and find the point at which it begins to display ISO-invariant behaviour (if it even does at all).

Sigma Imaging UK recently short-loaned me their 14mm f/1.8 Art lens to take out under the dark skies of Wales and see what I thought of it from an astrophotographer's viewpoint. With a night-long forecast for clear skies just before the new moon I headed to the Elan Valley in Mid Wales to test it out. 

It was only when I powered up the camera and saw the images on the rear LCD that the previous night felt real and I could firmly pen a tick on another bucket list item - swimming in bioluminescent plankton. Something I never thought I'd get to experience here in Wales.