Chasing the Milky Way at Cuckmere

Shooting the Milky Way is dramatic by design, but it doesn’t begin that way.

Arriving at Cuckmere long after sunset doesn’t feel dramatic at all. Pulling into the car park at 11pm, knowing I won’t see home again until the sky begins to show signs of blue, feels slightly absurd when you stop and think about it. I could be getting ready for sleep, winding things down for the night, but instead I’m heading out into it, chasing something that hasn’t even appeared yet.

There’s always a bigger picture at play.

The walk to the cottages in complete darkness does nothing to convince you otherwise. During the day, the cliffs reveal themselves slowly, the river pulls your eye through the landscape, and everything feels open and easy to read. At night, all of that disappears. You’re left with a small, artificial circle of light from a torch, and beyond that, nothing but suggestion.

It’s quiet. It’s flat. And for a while, it feels like nothing is happening at all.

But that’s part of it.

By the time I reach the cottages, there are still hours between myself and sunrise, and more importantly, hours between myself and anything worth photographing. That time isn’t wasted though. It’s where the work actually begins.

You start to break the scene down. The cottages become an anchor, but not the only option. The cliffs, the beach, the river — they all begin to matter depending on how the sky moves later on. You’re thinking ahead constantly, trying to line up something that doesn’t fully exist yet.

Everything revolves around one thing: where the Milky Way is going to sit.

That decision-making actually starts before I even leave the house. One of the biggest choices is when to capture the foreground. It can be done before the sky, after it, or somewhere in between. This time, I chose to shoot it in the middle.

That comes down to how I approach these images. To get the most out of the sky, I use a star tracker, allowing me to take longer exposures without the stars trailing, building up a cleaner and more detailed result. But that also means the foreground has to be captured separately. If I left the tracker running, the cottages would blur, and the whole thing would fall apart.

So the foreground gets locked in first — considered, deliberate, ready for what’s coming.

And then you wait.

When the Milky Way finally begins to show itself properly, it doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds slowly, almost blending into the darkness before separating itself just enough to notice. Then more. Then more again.

Until it’s there.

Visible to the naked eye, stretching across the sky in a way that never quite feels real, no matter how many times you see it.

This is where everything shifts.

The land becomes secondary. It holds the frame, gives it context, but it’s no longer the reason you’re there. Everything moves upward. Everything becomes about the sky.

You can’t control it. You can’t rush it. You can’t hold it in place.

All you can do is be ready when it finally settles into something that works.

That’s what Awe is for me.

Not just the scale of it, or the spectacle, but that moment of realisation — standing somewhere familiar and feeling completely out of proportion to what’s above you. Nothing about the place has changed, but your understanding of it has.

For a short time, everything aligns just enough to make sense.

And then it moves on again.

This is where Bellus came from.

Not from reacting to a single moment, but from working toward something that only exists for a brief window. Visualised beforehand, built carefully, and captured in pieces as the sky finally took over the scene.

The land stayed the same. The sky didn’t.

And for a few minutes, that imbalance was enough.