Photo of the Week for December 15, 2017

One of the keys to taking eye-catching night-sky shots is to include an interesting foreground. And certainly, Nova Scotia’s famed Balancing Rock qualifies as “interesting.” It’s a 9-metre-high basaltic column that stands precariously isolated from a cliff face on the shore of St. Mary’s Bay.

As photographer Barry Burgess recounts, “I wanted a picture that was a little different from the ones everyone takes from the viewing platform, so I went below and shot up. This enabled me to include more sky and a give a feeling of how massive this stone really is. I did not require any fancy lighting equipment—all I used was the screen of my cell phone to paint the rock with light.”

Barry made the 30-second exposure at ISO 1600 with a Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera and Rokinon 20mm wide-angle lens (working at f/2).