This is a composite view of the Kamzang trekking camp on the night of August 18/19, 2014 at Bear Valley deep in the Zanskar Range of northwest India. The Zanskar mountains are northeast of Great Himalaya Range and in their rain shadow so visibility is excellent. The location is a rarely visited valley at 3936m two days trekking from the nearest village.
I was on a 23 day trek with Kamzang Journeys (kamzang.com) across the ancient kingdom of Zanskar. While I was taking the star photos a red fox watched from the willows close to camp; the next morning we found fresh tracks of Himalayan bear further down the valley.
The image is a composite of 47 photographs: 7 of the campsite during evening twilight, 22 of the sky, and 18 of the surrounding hoodoos, valley and mountains taken before dawn the following morning. All were captured with a Canon 6D and Sigma 35mm f/1.4. I used an AstroTrac for the sky photographs. Exposures for the camp and valley ranged between 1/30s and 30s, f/5.0 at ISO 6400 and for the sky 30s, f/1.4 at ISO 1600.
RAW files of the sky were processed using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS6 using settings recommended by Roger N. Clark (
www.clarkvision.com) who also gave me great advice on gear. Land and sky panoramas were assembled with PTGui Pro then combined using Photoshop. The full size image is approximately 13,000 x 10,000 pixels.
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