Wandering Stars

The Milky Way and millions of other stars above Mt Jefferson, Mt Jefferson Wilderness, Oregon.

This is an image from an early season backpacking trip to Jefferson Park several weeks ago with my buddy Jordan Ek. It was a completely moonless night and the stars were absolutely amazing. There was no light pollution at this location, which is an added bonus for central/western Oregon.

Technical info
Nikon D800, Nikkor 14-24 at 17mm
5 exposure blend for DOF and dyanmic range
2 sec at f/9, ISO 100 x4 for DOF in the foreground water/snow/mountain. These images were captured at ~9:20PM during twilight.
20 sec at f/2.8, ISO 3200 for the stars/star reflection. This image was captured 3 hours after sunset at ~12:20AM

Processing notes:
Water/snow/mountains - I prepped the 4 flies in lightroom and converted them to b/w and used the split toning feature to create a nice cool blue tone. I usually don't convert to b/w for my night images, but it worked here to create the cool tone I was after. I then blended the 4 twilight files together using the auto-align layers and auto-blend layers functions in photoshop and flattened the file.
Stars/Sky - I then pasted the file with the stars/sky onto the flattened water/snow/mountain file as a new layer and used the auto align feature in photoshop to align the images. I then created a selection of the sky using the magnetic laso and then used the refine edge feature to find the edges of the mountain. I created a layer mask with the selection and it perfectly selected the sky.
Foreground stars - the reflected stars were not showing up as well as I would like because the foreground pool kept freezing due to the cold mountain air. To solve this problem, I made a copy of the sky layer and hit it with some gaussian blur to blur it (reflected stars are usually a bit blurry). I then flipped this layer vertically and then horizontally and used the move tool to manually place it in the correct place in the foreground. I then used a layer mask and a low opacity brush to paint in the stars in the foreground.

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. I'm curious to hear what you think. I appreciate everyone taking the time to share your thoughts on the image. Please check out the larger version.