Baillie Farley‘s image from Milky Way Photographer of the Year

Baillie Farley ventured into the Outback chasing dark skies for astrophotography. How exactly did he create this wonderful image?

Wow: the Milky Way over Rainbow Valley. Picture: Baillie Farley

Baillie Farley never has to travel far to get dark skies for astrophotography – he lives in Horsham, in Victoria’s rural Wimmera region, and a 10-minute drive is sufficient to dial down the urban glow. Last winter, though, he and a mate embarked on a three-week astrophotography trip through the Outback, taking in Uluru, Kings Canyon, Alice Springs, the Oodnadatta Track and the Flinders Ranges. “Next level,” he says of the inky-black night skies they encountered on that adventure. “We were shooting every night. It was bloody awesome.”

The 24-year-old works at a photographic print store in Horsham; a lot of his work is retouching school ­photos from all around Australia. He sees some funny things. “Occasionally there’ll be a cheeky kid in a class photo giving the ­middle finger, so I’ll edit out the hand,” he says. “One time, in a primary school group shot, there was a kid spewing over a classmate... there wasn’t a lot I could do about that.”

Outside of work, Farley likes to do what he calls “country things”: trail-riding on his motorbike in the mountains, building a burnout car with a mate (they’ve put $20,000 into the V8 Commodore ute, getting it ready for tyre-smashing fun) and spotlighting foxes as a favour to the local farmers. Their hunting technique is very 2024. “We have a thermal imaging camera on the roof of the car,” he explains. “We’ll cruise around the paddocks at night with the lights off, watching the live feed on an iPad. When we see a fox, we’ll flick on the spotlight and shoot it.”

This image from last year’s Outback trip depicts ­Rainbow Valley Conservation Reserve near Alice Springs; it’s a renowned spot for sunsets, when the sandstone bluff glows with vibrant colours. Creating a night-time panorama (a 270-degree field of view is compressed into this image) was a complicated process. Farley took 80 photos, with each one capturing a small portion of the sky or foreground; after each minute-long exposure he had to carefully adjust the camera’s aim, so it took about three hours. Finally, he used software to merge the 80 photos into this single image. “It’s a technique that enables you to capture a lot more fine detail than a ­single photograph could,” he ­explains. And all that hard work paid off: his image is among the 25 ­finalists from around the world in the 2024 Milky Way Photographer of the Year competition. “A real honour!” he says.