The best shots come from good planning. Of course, if you don’t apply good composition skills and enjoy the creative journey then the chances of capturing a decent photo are reduced, but with Astrolandscape photography, you need to have everything in order before you setoff. The weather needs to be good of course. Batteries need to be charged. So many other things have to be pre-planned. But something that I always bang on about when I teach is something I like to call ‘Daytime Scoping’. At night its way more difficult to picture a frame when you arrive at a shoot location – after all, its dark! That’s why the majority of my shots are pre-planned and I know well in advance of the shoot what the final outcome will roughly look like. However! Sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable to just wing it. And this image was created on one of those occasions. On this evening I wasn’t planning a shoot but as I sat in my lounge, all set for a nice quiet night in, I looked out the window and saw how clear it was. The stars and lack of clouds were the motivation I needed and after a quick check to see what time the Milky Way core rose, I grabbed my camera gear and went for a drive. It takes an hour or two to get away from light polluted skies near where I live and as I drove around random dark roads, almost wishing that I did have a plan (!), I noticed this little stretch heading in the rough direction I wanted. The foreground was literally all I had to play with but it spoke to me as I carried out some test shots. I also noticed that Jupiter and Venus were out to play too. I tried to time it so that Venus (the lower one of the 2 bright sky objects) filled in and was framed by the small gap in the trees. Something that wasn’t easy and took quite a bit of shuffling and recomposing!