About Steven
In 2014 I was under a lot of stress and depressed as GM were pulling out of Australia, passionate about my Holdens I was uncertain as to what job to move onto and I needed a hobby to take me away from those uncertain times. I had always enjoyed star gazing however I had no idea on where celestial objects were in the night sky, so I purchased my first GoTo telescope the Celestron Nexstar 6SE.
After doing more research, I had noticed you could connect a camera up to the telescope and this introduced me to the world of astrophotography and being broke for the rest of my life!
I then purchased a Nikon D5100 and connected it to the Celestron 6SE telescope and took my very first deep space image of the Trifid Nebula, then the Lagoon Nebula.
My First Telescope
The Celestron Nexstar 6SE, who would have thought this would have started everything.
Trifid Nebula
The first deep space image captured with my Nikon D5100, Celestron 6SE, Neodymium Filter, 1 x 30 Second Exposure, ISO6400
Lagoon Nebula
The Lagoon shortly followed with my first stacked image. Stacked a massive 3 images.
My First Galaxy
The first galaxy I captured and with that the stacking got larger with a total of 30 minutes intergration time.
OMG Orion
Here we have the jaw dropping moment I captured my first image of Orion, again with a 30 minute stack.
From this point on I was hooked and the wallet became empty real quick. New equipment was purchased and things started to get serious!
Yup This Happened...
Celestron AVX, Celestron Edge HD8, Nikon D610 and the good old Orion guiding setup.
So what happened next???
More equipment of course... however I started to get into shooting nightscapes and landscapes.
Celestron Nightscape 8300
I moved fast from DSLR to my first cooled CCD with the KAF8300 chip.
It Didn't Last Long
The Celestron Nightscape 8300 camera didn't last long and I had became in contact with Nikon Australia regarding my images and I was talked into buying the Nikon D810a
So now I was travelling around taking my setup to darker skie, imaging away. I started to fall for nightscape photography as well as landscape.
Come 2016 I entered my first nightscape pano into the Epson International Pano awards and my results came back, I was only a few points away from a Bronze. From this moment on I wanted to be a photographer and honed in on my skills.
By 2017 I found myself teaching nightscape photography for Nikon School Australia and by 2018 I had won 12 Epson International Pano awards in the one year. My greatest achievement was yet to come.
My First Award
Captured on the Yorke Peninsula, this was the very first nightscape panoramic of mine I had won an award for.
Australia's David Malin Awards
THE MALIN AWARDS
In Australia we have the David Malin Astrophotography Awards and in 2019 I won the Nightscape Category. As you can see deep space imaging became exsistant in my work.
I camped out at Lake Bonney on a -4 night in my roof top tent. When the conditions were right I began my sequence of photographs using a Nikon D810a and Nikon 35mm 1.8G lens.
I had to move quick as a fog had started to move in.
With everything going on I found very little time to enjoy photography for myself and come 2020 I was beinging to get burnt out. So I had to think long and hard about what I wanted to do, not only was I running workshops for Nikon Australia, running my own photography getaways, starting my YouTube Channel, was an ambassador for a filter company and doing all this while working full time... it was all getting a bit much for me and started to burn me out.
I had a decision to make, and as hard as it was I left Nikon School Australia and went back to doing what I fell in love with and that was deep space astrophotography and sharing that journey on YouTube.
