In July 2017, a year after our first weekend in Gozo, Fred, Steve and I headed to Gozo for another weekend of landscape and astrophotography. We again chose to ‘car camp’ so that we would have the freedom to spend as much time as we liked at each location. We caught the ferry to Gozo in the early afternoon and drove to Xwejni, the awesome salt pans on the northern coast of Gozo.
We did bother shooting sunset, instead we set up our cameras and looked for a composition which included some of the salt pans in the foreground. Finding a compelling composition amongst all the confusion is not easy, but we managed to find something decent and set our cameras up.
Whilst waiting for it to get dark, we set up our tents and cooked some dinner.
The night is long when shooting a star trail, and apart from the frequent checking of the camera to ensure there was no due on the lenses and changing of batteries, we had little else to do than just chat and have a laugh.
By about 3:00 am, we were knackered, the sky remained crystal clear and there were no clouds in sight, so we decided to do one final battery change and leave our cameras shooting till the batteries run out and tried to get some sleep. The result is the below shot which used about 500 shots.
I set my alarm to shoot sunrise, both Fred and Steve didn’t want to get up so I got out of the tent and tried to find a composition which would work. A crescent moon had just risen and was delicately hanging above the salt pans. I tried to include it in my image, but it was still too dark. I waited for the first warm glow on the horizon and manage to capture this shot.
Happy that I had got a decent shot, I crawled back into the tent for some more sleep. We all work up once the sun began beating down on our tent and it was scorching hot in the tent (Who would have thought it would be hot in a tent in July in Malta?!)
After dismantling our tents and packing up all our gear, we had a quick swim to freshen up, then headed to Marsalforn for lunch.
We moved to our next location in the afternoon and took time to scout the location. We planned to shoot another star trail, this time with the Wied il Mielah window in the foreground. Anyone who has visited Wied il Mielah will know that the place is quite tight, and there isn’t much room to get a great composition of the window.
We setup our cameras just after sunset and then set up our tents. As it got dark, we started off our star trails and began cooking dinner. I had planned to leave the cameras going all night long, but due to the hassle of changing batteries, I only changed battery one, giving me a star trail which is about 6 hours long, however due to too much air traffic, I have only used 450 shots from the sequence of 700 shots.
The next morning we packed up all our stuff and headed back home. It was another good trip, and the meant I had ticked 2 more star trail shots off my bucket list and ended up with an unplanned shot of the salt pans at sunrise which is only of my all-time favorite shots!