The story behind... #02

For my interrail trip in de summer of 2019, one of my goals was to find a destination where it would be completely dark at night, so that I could go stargazing and hopefully photograph the milky way. One of the requirements was that there would be minimal to no light pollution from buildings, cities, cars, etc. I knew it had to most likely be a nature-filled area, as there tend to be a lot less cars there, but still accessible by train so I could actually get there. Eventually, the choice landed on the south of Poland, very close to Krkonoše National Park. And there, at around 01:00 at night, I took this picture of the milky way.

26th July, 2019 - Slovenia

I had gone out scouting for locations for this photo a few times already. In the first place to make sure I found a place with an unobstructed view of the sky, secondly to make sure that view was facing south (as that was where the milky way would be), and lastly that I felt confident and safe enough to walk to it in the middle of the night. I actually found this particular place on my first of five days in Poland, but went there a couple more times in the following days, just to be certain I would know my way around (even in the dark).

On the night itself, I left the place where I stayed at around 22:00 in the evening. This way, I still had a little daylight left when I'd be walking to my spot and setting up my camera. Before it was completely dark, it was already close to 23:00. The first two hours I spent making a timelapse (which you can see here), after which I started to take some individual photos of the milky way. By the way, see that red light on the bottom of the picture? That's one of the ski hotels in the surrounding areas, on top of one of the mountains. A true testament to the area I was in when I took this picture.

When I show people this picture, I almost always get a very surprised reaction: "Did you go into the forest all on your own?! In the dark?!" And yes, I did. But surprisingly (maybe even to myself) I have not really felt scared or uncomfertable at any given moment. As I said, I knew exactly where I was headed, I knew I was not doing anything I was not supposed to be doing (in The Netherlands, you're not supposed to enter the forest after sunset, but here in Slovenia I ran into multiple groups of people who seemed to be on guided walks), and I knew that I was in a relatively accessible area less than half an hour away from a small town.

I absolutely love this picture. Maybe not even because I think it's a great picture (there are tons of way more beautiful photographs of the milky way out there), but because photographing the milkyway somewhere where its's completely dark is something I've always wanted to do. While I had hoped very much, and even planned in my head, that I would do it on my trip to Poland, there were still so many things that could have gone wrong: the weather could have been bad, I could have not been able to find a location I liked, it could have been not as dark as I had hoped. But everything worked out: the sky was clear, it wasn't even too cold, I had found and explored my location, and I dared to go out that night. And taking that into consideration, makes this picture extra special to me.