Today we’d like to introduce you to Rogelio Bernal Andreo.
Hi Rogelio, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
One September evening, just like today, back in 2007, I’m driving down Big Sur in California with the family. It’s already dark, when Ariana, my wife, opens the moonroof of the car, looks up, and yells “Wow!!!! There are sooo many stars!! You’ve got to pull over!! You’ve got to see this!!” As soon as I could, I safely moved to one of the tons of vista points one can find when cruising the Pacific Coast Highway. Then, as we got out, what I saw – a star-studded sky and an extraordinary and dramatic Milky Way shining bright all the way to the horizon on the Pacific Ocean, with nothing but darkness and stars all around us – literally changed my life. Astrophotography became my passion.
One of the things that I’ve heard the most about my astrophotography work is how it departed from what most people were doing back around 2008-10 when almost every astrophoto was a single object in the image, mathematically centered, as if taken out of a catalog, that is all. Instead, many of my astroimages were more like stellar landscapes, often combining several “objects” in a well-thought composition/framing. Somehow, deep sky photography was becoming more of an art form, while still being true to what was out there.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
One of the smartest things I did when I started was to acquire a very good mount. The amount, not the camera or the telescope, is the piece of equipment that is going to allow you to go as deep as you want. We must track (guide) when doing very long exposures, and anything but a very good mount can give you headaches that a better mount won’t.
Also, rather than keep trying new scopes or cameras, I built a very solid widefield system (wide for deep sky photography!) and I just continued using the same setup for many years. I’m not saying one should not try to keep with the times, especially when it comes to cameras, mounts, and software, but in my case, I tried to get the very most out of my rig, and by knowing it better than my own hand, I was able to then push the envelope even more.
Career-wise, the most challenging thing was being able to make astrophotography a business, with different fronts becoming overcrowded by mostly average photographers. Things like workshops and video tutorials were flooding the Internet. So I took a slightly different path, focusing on writing books, selling prints, and licensing photographs.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I mentioned earlier how my deep-sky work departed from what most people were doing back a decade ago. Careful composition and storytelling weren’t part of capturing nebulae or faraway galaxies, but today, sometimes, they are.
Another of my passions has been going as “deep” as possible. By deep, I mean being able to capture the faintest light possible, to reveal things that may have not been photographed before, or perhaps they have, but not at such resolution and “depth”.
There’s no big secret about “going deep”, but it takes patience and some skills. We need skies as dark as possible, and we must accumulate as many hours of exposure as we reasonably can. With that done, postprocessing also becomes important, so we can separate the signal from the noise and present a truthful image of those very faint structures.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
Best? Lively. Art. Cosmopolitan. Weather. Least? Overcrowded and, of course, traffic!
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Image Credits
DeepSkyColors
