Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama. Infrared

With age comes invisibility – an infrared Milky Way…

Taking infrared photos often doesn’t give you a lot to work with in post-processing; if you’re only allowing a very small portion of invisible light and NO visible light to reach your camera sensor, the results are going to be fairly limiting, from an exposure, contrast, and color perspective. Those of us who shoot infrared realize this, which is my many infrared shooters choose to convert their photos to monochrome. This also is why the vast majority of infrared shooters take photos during the day.

But the results that can be achieved by shooting infrared at night can be…well…interesting. I took this infrared panorama in April of 2017, and you can see many of the familiar objects of the night sky. Notable is the bright Antares (mid right), which still looks the red-orange color you’ve come to expect. However, you can also see how strangely infrared rendered the rest of the night sky. Airglow seems to disappeared entirely. And of course the spring vegetation in the desert has fluoresced into some really interesting colors.

Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama.
Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form on the right side of the page. 
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Your comfort zone isn’t helping your photography

The galactic core of the Milky Way makes its first appearance of the year over a frozen Lost Lake, Oregon.
The galactic core of the Milky Way makes its first appearance of the year over a frozen Lost Lake, Oregon.

I took this panorama in January of 2015, one of the earliest calendar year captures of the Milky Way’s galactic core I’ve made over the past 6 or 7 years, particularly in Oregon, where the winters are rainy and cloudy. A thin layer of ice covered Lost Lake, which was pretty exciting, because at the time I’d never really seen any night photos of Lost Lake in the winter (and this is still true to some degree). I’m glad that on this particular morning, I forced myself to get up at 1 am and make the drive.

Sometimes getting outside of your comfort zone is the best possible thing.

Doing things that aren’t particularly fun is often rewarding, purely because no one wants to do them. Very few of us are good at getting up at 1 am and gathering our photography gear, trekking out into the cold and unknown, and taking good technical photos in bad conditions.

But, looking back on this moment three years ago, I don’t remember my irritating alarm clock buzzing me awake. I don’t remember the long drive to the trailhead; I only remember that the drive was filled with uncertainty about how I would get to my destination. Was the road even going to be open? What if there was a tree down blocking the road? How far would I have to walk?  What if there was a tree that fell down behind me, trapping me on the mountain?

Luckily, the journey up there wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. And despite the cold of that night, sitting in the dark and taking photos was actually pretty pleasant (mostly thanks to what feels like thousands of dollars spent on high-quality outdoor clothing). This isn’t always the case, of course.

Just last month I found myself moonless-night hiking on an ice and snow-slicked trail to get to a destination for a shoot that was a bust. I was by myself, and I had slipped a few times, stretching some muscles just a bit further than they were meant to be stretched at my age. I was out of my comfort zone: weighed down by equipment, sweating, unsure about predators and nervous. Just plain uncomfortable.

I guess my point is that it’s getting harder to create original nightscape photos, as more and more photographers enter the landscape astrophotography game (which I advocate for, by the way). It’s harder and harder to find and photograph unique landscape under unique conditions, to carve out a unique niche and to be your own photographer.

But it’s not impossible.

And it often starts with doing the things that no one else wants to do.

Do you have any questions or comments regarding this blog or the photo featured in it? Feel free to add a comment below!                                                                                                                                                                                           

Twilight photos

The holdout – photographing sea stacks at Samuel Boardman…

I don’t often get an opportunity to photograph Oregon’s beautiful southern coast, so when my crowded schedule cleared a bit earlier this week I seized the moment and made the long drive. Known for its numerous state parks and its indefatigable sea stacks, the southern Oregon coast is a seascape photographer’s playground.

During the light of day, the dirt trails that cut through Samuel Boardman State Park are safe enough, if you pick your route carefully, can avoid tripping over exposed tree roots, and have shoes with good enough grip to avoid dirt-skiing down a hill and launching into the churning ocean.

But as is often the case, at night the coast’s hidden coves and thickly wooded trails turn inky black and shadows become impenetrable. The speed of foot travel becomes highly dependent upon the luminosity of your headlamp, and some scrambling, including climbing ladder-like tree roots upward, is required. And if you’re like me, occasionally, when you shut off your headlamp and wait for your camera’s long exposure, you’ll wobble and gyrate in the dark, feet rooted in place to ensure that you don’t take an ill-fated step in the wrong direction in an effort to check your balance.

In other words, this isn’t a place to visit with someone you even remotely suspect of harboring a grudge against you. Luckily for me, I was joined by Matt Newman, a talented southern Oregon photographer who had a little more experience with Samuel Boardman’s trails than I had and was willing to show me around a bit.

Technical details:

This is a blend of three images all taken in low-light conditions. The first was a very long exposure taken half an hour post-sunset with a neutral density filter to ensure that a certain amount of natural long-exposure saturation occurred in the twilight sky. The second was taken just a few minutes later without an ND filter to ensure that some of the darker areas of the photo had adequate shadow detail. The third exposure was taken just for the stars.

Breaking waves sound like thunder as the sun sets on a misty evening in Oregon's Samuel Boardman State Park.
Breaking waves sound like thunder as the sun sets on a misty evening in Oregon’s Samuel Boardman State Park. Click the photo for full size. Prints available here.

 

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An evening at Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park

Death Valley is windy. Despite the malfunctioning weather display at the Furnace Creek Visitor’s Center claiming 1-2 mph wind speeds, the whole time I was exploring for this photo I was blasted with unrelenting (I’m estimating here) 25 mile-per-hour winds, with the occasional 10-second-long gust that caused me to check my balance. Strangely, the wind pummeling me was out of the south (to the camera’s left), whereas the clouds moving over the Panamint Range (the mountains pictured here) were moving from west to east. Of course, I was at around 200 feet below sea level, and the highest point of the Panamint Range rises 11,000 feet higher.

Several times I left my car on the side of the road and trudged the quarter mile or so into the Badwater Basin area, going to a point where I didn’t see many other footprints. I spent about three hours on the flats, scouting different areas and compositions and exploring the strange mud formations. Eventually, when I found what I was looking for, I just took a seat and waited for the light to get better.

At one point while I was shooting (or as most people call it, “waiting”), a large flying bug buzzed by my ear. It was completely out of control, carried away with the wind, its body turned 90 degrees from the direction it was actually traveling. The insect’s undersized wings did nothing to change its large body’s direction, no matter how madly it flapped. Several more bugs “flew” by in the same manner. It was tragicomic.

Without a book to read or an Internet for my phone to connect to, I started thinking about the bugs, wondering if they got frustrated with the wind. Their task was Sisyphean, but it occurred to me that they probably didn’t care. With the ability of ants to carry hundreds of times their own body weight over their heads, I doubt there’s an analog for Sisyphus in the insect world. These tiny careening bugs of Death Valley were supposed to fly, so they did, regardless of the outcome or the progress. As I sat there, waiting, I started to see value in going about my daily tasks with bug-like effort.

The clouds crowding the western horizon looked like they were going to pummel the sunset into oblivion, and despite my new-found resolve to go about my photography in a bug-like way, I started to get a little bummed. Eventually, though, the light got weird-interesting, not perfect or even what I had imagined good light looking like in this particular setting. But small holes in the clouds created bright, sharply defined rays of light over the mountains, just enough goodness that I was able to appreciate it in the moment and feel like my efforts to get to this spot had not been wasted.

I started thinking about how this tiny bit of joy mixed with relief was very un-bug-like. Those flying insects I saw earlier probably feel no joy when they overcome an obstacle or meet a goal. Sure, they likely don’t feel defeated by setbacks, real or imagined, but don’t these setbacks amplify feelings of accomplishment if goals are eventually met? And even if the goals are never met, isn’t there some merit in perseverance or in actively, consciously cultivating a cast-iron resolve? And besides, has anyone ever seen a colony of ants pause to admire a nice sunset?

A denuded branch sits on the salt flats of Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park.
A denuded branch sits on the salt flats of Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park. Prints available here. Click for larger size.
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The Pillars of Rome and Milky Way

I just got back from a week-long roadtrip around southeastern Oregon with my family. We had a great time despite breathing a lot of desert dust, doing a little damage to both our car and our tiny camping trailer (southeastern Oregon is not kind to people or vehicles in general), and getting skunked (photographically speaking) for the first half of the trip.

One of our stops put us in Rome, Oregon, a tiny valley hamlet along the Owyhee River. There wasn’t much to the place, really. There’s a boat put-in for the river, a general store with gas and some camping (and one of the top-5 worst cups of coffee I’ve ever sipped), and a chunk of land north of town called “The Pillars of Rome,” where surprisingly unique and interesting rock formations erupt from the ground and tower over the dusty landscape, which is mostly filled with scrub brush and cows. The crumbly clay structures have a number of fossils embedded in them and apparently were a landmark to pioneers, who likely paused for a moment to admire their grandeur before deciding that there was no way they were going to homestead anywhere near there.

Because our gazetteer had a tiny camping symbol at the BLM’s boat put-in, we assumed we could trailer-camp there, although a gate at the gravel road’s entrance and a sign near a grassy spot stating “Do not place tents on grass – Day Use Only” hinted that maybe our gazetteer was wrong. The only other option was camping at the general store half a mile down the road. We decided to roll the dice and camp at the boat put-in anyway, knowing full well that there was a chance that I would return from shooting in the middle of the night with the car and find that the gate would be closed, thereby preventing me from getting back to our camp trailer and my family. It wouldn’t have been the first time I would’ve slept in my car, but luckily it never came to that, as the gate was still open when I got back.

And this was a good thing, as the general store, for some reason, had lit their camp area to near-daylight proportions with the use of two extremely bright sodium-vapor lights. The lights were so bright, actually, that when they turned on a little past sunset, I thought the BLM’s boat put-in had lights in its parking lot. But no, these were lights from the general store. Half a mile away. I’m not sure how anyone in the general store’s RV park got any sleep without blackout curtains and sleep masks.

Despite the obnoxious lighting practices of the general store, Rome has some extremely dark skies, which is great for photographers like me who enjoy photographing the night sky. The result of one of my photos is below.

Technical details: This is two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground, taken back to back, and blended carefully in Photoshop. This is the true position of the Milky Way at the moment in time in which the photos were taken.

 

The Milky Way over Rome, Oregon.
The spring Milky Way wheels through the dark skies of tiny Rome, Oregon, where just north of town the rock formations “The Pillars of Rome” impose on the dry landscape. Prints available here.

 

Early the next morning, I got the panorama below after finding this location the previous day. 

 

The Milky Way arches over a rock at Pillars of Rome, Oregon.
Moments away from becoming washed out by the dawning of a new day, the Milky Way arches over a sphinx-like rock formation at the Pillars of Rome, Oregon.

 

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Thundering water, singing darkness at Palouse Falls

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

 

-Pablo Neruda

 

A waterfall flows as stars sparkle overhead, rural Washington state.
Palouse Falls’ spring flows thunders at night; prints available (use the ‘contact me’ form).

 

 

These night photos are truly labors of love. When I think of all the mini-hardships I’ve endured…the freezing nights, the never-ending sleep-deprived hikes, the long drives in the dark (and the resulting collisions with wildlife), the hours spent standing around because the ground is too cold and too hard to sit on and I didn’t pack a chair, the nights I’ve forgotten to pack a snack, the mornings in which I can’t make it back home without stopping multiple times for terrible truck-stop coffee because it’s still too early for the little drive-thru coffee shops to open…sometimes I wonder why I do go out for these photos at all.

 

I definitely don’t take these types of photos for the money. In fact, it has been quite a while since I’ve sold a print of the night sky. I do it because these photos sing to my soul. I love taking them. I love processing them, re-processing them. I still find joy in these Buzzfeed-like lists titled “20 AWESOME photos of the night sky!” and find myself wasting 4 or 5 minutes scrolling through the entire list of photos taken by my contemporaries, even though I’ve seen nearly all of the photos before. I love looking at the photos of other talented photographers who go out and document their sky. I am particularly enamored by the southern hemisphere’s skies–they look so different than the ones I’m used to here in Oregon. When I see those Magellanic clouds and their upside-down galactic center I’m instantly transported somewhere foreign and exotic.

 

Anyway, the galactic center of the Milky Way will be retiring shortly (around here, anyway), but there’s still a lot of great night photography that can be done. And so tonight, some dark beer, college football, and some padron peppers stuffed with sausage and cream cheese and wrapped in bacon have won out over another night in the cold, camera clicking away. But I’ll be back out there before too much longer.

 

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Star party at Cape Kiwanda

Star party at Cape Kiwanda

A group of beachgoers sits around a bonfire under the Milky Way, Oregon coast.
A group of beachgoers sits around a bonfire under the Milky Way, Oregon coast.

 

Terence Lee and I had been shooting some stars at the sandstone bluffs around Cape Kiwanda when we packed up our gear and trudged out, sand in our shoes, and saw a group of about 20 twenty/thirty-somethings gathered around a bonfire, having what seemed to be a great time on the beach.

I walked up through the darkness to the edge of the group. They still hadn’t seen me because they were focused on the bonfire itself, and I did my best not to freak everyone out when I announced my presence by asking if I could take their photo.

A handful of them said something that sounded like “sure,” so I positioned myself in some grass farther inland so that I could shoot at them with the Milky Way behind them.

The conditions were challenging, to say the least. I had some wet grass very close to my lens, and the dynamic range between the center of the fire and the moonless night had to have been roughly 3,000 stops of light. The shot above is three bracketed exposures: one for the foreground, one to control for lens flare, and one for the night sky. I had to do a little dance in post-processing, but I eventually got the job done.

After I had packed up, thanked everyone, and started walking off, someone in the group asked if I wanted to shoot them playing with their sparklers. I really didn’t, but several folks insisted that I did, so I got my gear back out and took the obligatory sparkler photo (below) shooting back toward my original position. You can see Terence still lurking like a ninja in the background on the left.

Until next time!

 

A group of beachgoers plays with sparklers in front of a fire, Cape Kiwanda, Oregon coast.
A group of beachgoers plays with sparklers in front of a fire, Cape Kiwanda, Oregon coast.
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My Night at Delicate Arch…or The Magic of Random…

I’ve been re-processing a number of my old photos lately. A while back I received an IPS monitor as an early Christmas present; as someone who had struggled to find the black point and a reasonable level of contrast in the night sky, this monitor was a great addition to my post-processing tool set. I can’t account for your web browser or your monitor’s color profile, but I’m much, much closer to printing exactly what I see on my monitor. For me, as always, it’s still all about the print.

Additionally, my thinking has slowly evolved when it comes to deep, detail-less shadows (or even not-so-deep shadows) in night photos. Years ago I relied on the heavy lifting of the shadow and/or blacks slider in Lightroom 4 or 5 to pull detail out of these darkened corners. But Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw) are strong medicine, and just because you can pull sliders all the way to the left or right doesn’t mean you should. Lifting shadows too much often gave me undesirable results (purple blotching and noise, for instance), which resulted in even more time spent post-processing.

Slowly I’ve worked away from the I-have-to-have-detail model, at least when it comes to night photography. I’ve come to accept that the night will have shadows–sometimes shadows so deep and dark that they’re completely impenetrable.

This photo of Delicate Arch (in Arches National Park) was originally put online in early July of 2013. It was EarthSky’s image of the day for July 10th.

For me, this was a throwaway or “sketch” shot. I was pretty sure that this was the composition that I wanted, since I loved the leading lines of the sandstone bowl that led to the arch itself. What I wasn’t sure about was the periphery–I couldn’t really see anything at the edges of my frame through the viewfinder, so I took a handful of shots to see what my camera saw.

A couple closer to the arch (who was already there when I arrived) was shooting, so I did my best to stay out of there way. This is, or at least should be, a common courtesy among night photographers, within reason of course. (If they had shot uninterrupted for another half hour, I would’ve politely tried to work my way into their space.)

There had been a lull in the action as the couple pored over their photos on the back of their camera, so I set up another sketch shot and tripped my shutter. Just then, I heard him giving her instructions which amounted to “walk up to the arch and then shine the flashlight at it from below.” So she turned on the flashlight and walked up to the arch, just as he said.

At first, as I watched her walk up to the arch in the middle of my photo, I was a little annoyed, since I hadn’t really gotten a clean shot yet and was hoping to get one without extraneous lighting. But, at the same time, it was just a sketch photo, and they were there first.

As soon as I reviewed the image, though, I saw that her path up to the arch was arch-like itself. I made a mental note that the photo hadn’t been completely ruined and kept shooting.

This is part of the reason that I seldom, if ever, delete photos off my memory card in the field. I can’t imagine how disappointed I would’ve been had I decided to get rid of this photo in the spur of the moment because “she ruined my photo.”

The next day, after reviewing those images, I saw that not only had the image not been ruined, but that the woman’s path made the photo much more interesting to me. With the flashlight’s arc, a level of metaphorical meaning had been achieved. Additionally, the photo seemed to illustrate the magic of a long exposure–that random events (usually, moving lights) don’t necessarily ruin long exposures at night. In fact, they often add to the image.

I shot several photos of Delicate Arch with the same composition, but without any lighting. I like the photos and will probably post one sometime soon. But, to me, the addition of the flashlight and the human figure changed the photo’s entire meaning. This was no longer just a photo of one of the most-photographed sandstone arches in the southwestern United States. First off, it documented the process of night photography–it was a photo of a photo. Further, to me, the photo commented on the difficulty of escaping the “maddening crowds” in our national parks system. Even after a mile plus of night hiking near steep drop-offs.

A woman with a flashlight walks toward Delicate Arch, Arches National Park
A woman with a flashlight walks toward Delicate Arch, Arches National Park
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Star trails over Yosemite Falls

Getting There

There’s no secret to this location–this is upper Yosemite Falls, right in the Yosemite Valley of Yosemite National Park. If for some reason “see Yosemite before I die” isn’t written on a piece of paper in your possession, you should probably change that. The park was incredible.

Getting the Shot

This is 35 exposures (25 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1250, 22mm, shot on my Canon 17-40) stacked in Starstax (gap-filling mode). I highly recommend this free software, available online. Stacking shorter images (rather than taking one longer image) has several advantages, including less noise in the final image and the ability to remove a frame or two if something bad unexpected occurs (such as airplanes, car headlights, etc) during your exposures.

Basically, I pulled up next to this meadow at about 11 pm, set up my camera, took a few test shots to check my composition and my settings, double-checked my focus, and then I set my intervalometer to take 50 exposures. Then I walked back to my car, kicked back the driver’s seat, and tried to enjoy a short nap. About 10 minutes in, someone pulled up behind my car and sprayed the entire meadow with their headlights, disturbing my nap. I ended up tossing that exposure in the trash. After about 30 shots, a blanket of high clouds moved in, eventually covering the sky (and shifting my white balance, which was set to auto). I threw away many of those frames as well.

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Landscape Astrophotography 101: Let’s talk about settings, baby (and…

Okay, so if you’ve been following along you now know how to focus your camera in the dark. You also know WHERE to focus your camera in the dark in order to get maximum depth of field. Now, you’re asking, what are my settings so that I can capture those awesome images of the Milky Way, thus making me an overnight Internet hero?

We’ll get to that. First, let’s talk equipment: You have a DSLR camera, hopefully with live view. You have a wide or ultra-wide lens that is in focus for your shot. You will probably also need some sort of remote trigger for your shutter. You have a tripod.

Even more important than your equipment is your setting (not your camera settings, mind you, but your physical setting): You should have travelled far, far away from the nearest city lights. At least a hundred miles. Trust me on this. You can spend thousands of dollars on equipment, but if you’re not willing to find the darkest places around, your photos of the Milky Way will fail to thrive. Feed your Milky Way photos with total, pitch darkness. This also happens to mean you also need to wait for there to be no moon in the sky.

Wha? No moon? But, you ask, doesn’t that reduce the number of days that I could possibly take these types of photos to just a handful per month? Yep, pretty much. This is just one of those sad facts of life for landscape astrophotographers. It goes hand in hand with the fact that you can spend more on your camera than you did on your car and the camera will still produce noise at high ISOs. It also goes hand in hand with the fact that there are cougars in them thar woods. And they eat at night.

Cougars aside, the moon thing certainly complicates things, doesn’t it? What all good landscape astrophotographers do is study moon phases (no kidding). Look at when the moon rises and sets; do the same with the sun. Keep in mind that both bodies will affect the amount of light in the sky hours before and after they rise or set. Understand the orientation of the Milky Way and how it moves through the sky (more on this later). Understand that if you’re shooting part of the Milky Way that’s oriented west, and west happens to be the same direction as the nearest city, even if it’s 100 miles away, you very well may lose some detail in the Milky Way because of the city’s light pollution dome. Understand that if you wait several hours for the Milky Way to rotate north-northeastish, then you might have to contend with the predawn light of the sun (in the east). There are very few “happy accidents” in landscape astrophotography. The photos you see online are usually the result of a whole lot of research and planning.

Anyway, now that I’ve said my piece about dark skies, let’s review the three settings that we, as photographers, can use to control light: Shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. If we use the rule of 600, we know what our shutter speed is. For those of you who don’t know the rule of 600, it is the result of 600 divided by your focal length, in seconds. (Keep in mind that if you’re shooting on a crop sensor camera that you should be multiplying your focal length by the crop factor—for instance, on a Canon t4i that’s a 1.6x multiplier).

In order to gather as much light as possible, we’re also going to open our aperture up all the way. Later, in another blog, I’ll discuss when it’s appropriate to stop down a bit to sharpen up the image, but for now, let’s just assume we need to go wide open.

So our shutter speed has already been determined. Even our aperture has already been determined. The only other variable left is our ISO. This is really the only factor that you, as the beginner landscape astrophotographer, can control. Everything else is fixed.

So I’ll tell you the ISO setting I use most often: It’s 3200. I find that to be a very usable ISO for my particular camera. It’s a little noisy, but not so noisy that I can’t deal with the noise in post processing. And it’s sensitive enough to do a really good job exposing the Milky Way, allowing it to really light up and for us to see some of its different, subtle hues.

Your own experimentation should guide you to your own “correct” ISO. If you can handle the noise, by all means, go with 6400 or even higher. If you like a cleaner look, lower your ISO.

So there are my settings. But all technical talk aside, the absolute
most important aspect of Milky Way photography is getting to a dark place. If you live in the city (or even near a city) and you try those settings at night, you’ll quickly find out that what you’re really photographing is a whole bunch of yellowish-orangish light emanating from the city itself. It’s depressing, really, but it’s the truth.

In the photo of Crater Lake below, the orangish glow near the horizon is light pollution from Klamath Falls, Oregon, a city of 20,000 residents about 70 miles away from Crater Lake. If you were in doubt about the insidiousness of light pollution, there’s your evidence. Now just imagine how much orange glow a city 10 or 100 times that size emits. Now imagine the city being 35 miles away instead of 75 miles.

The bottom line: You now know the settings, but you have to escape the city lights to make your Milky Way star photography shine. Until next time, photo-friends!

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