I wandered about, backpacking both the Windriver and Tetons range in Wyoming for three weeks in the summer of 2009, literally waiting for the stars to align. To achieve the effect you see here, combining the Milky Way with the landscape, I needed to pre-visualise how it would all line up. I also needed a luminous foreground subject, as the shot would have to represent the darkness of night. Without moving the camera, I took two 30-second exposures after experimenting with this scene the night before. One exposure was taken just after twilight for everything excluding the sky, at f/18 and ISO100, and processed to look even more like night. The second shot was taken at f/2.8 and ISO3200, for the sky only. It would have been impossible to get a clean, high-resolution shot of the whole scene at such a high ISO and wide aperture, so the composite was necessary to record what was actually there. In recent years I've seen other photographers try similar techniques, but at the time it was all new to me.