Saaksum, Groningen - by Hessel de Jong Fotografie

"Old Ghosts and New Stars"

I don't have a car myself, but I really wanted to go out this evening to photograph several churches in Groningen with the starry sky in the background. In the end, I was able to borrow my parents' car. My father had nothing to do that evening and he also knew where to find some nice little churches. So he became my private driver for this evening.

It is important for star photos that there is little ambient light, so the churches on the outskirts of the village or even outside the village provide the best results. This was one of the churches which was a bit more in a village, but fortunately the 90 residents of Saaksum didn't have too much light on. So I could go ahead and look for the right compositions.

Star photography sometimes really gives me a kick, which you might not immediately expect from an activity that can be quite static. The process is fairly simple: put the camera on a tripod, choose the right settings, attempt a good composition - which is often tricky because you can't see anything on your screen - and then press the shutter. Then you wait for 13 seconds, which would normally be over in no time. But while shooting, full of doubt as to whether your composition is the right one, those seconds seem endless. When you finally look at your screen and see the church tower, with the Milky Way glittering in the background, you experience a moment of pure euphoria. Full of pride, you return home, totally hyped to view the photos on a bigger screen. You remove the SD card from your camera, insert it into your laptop, open Lightroom, and then... then it turns out that 9 out of 10 photos are out of focus because you accidentally bumped into the focus ring after the first photo. That's how it goes in the life of an astrophotographer (or maybe I'm just not that good).