In the mid 1800s, with a booming gold rush turning once-filthy miners into Izod-shirt wearing, boat-shoe clad member of the nouveau riche, the miners of Death Valley decided to upgrade their standard of living and send for their estranged families. Unfortunately, as the kids of Death Valley soon discovered, there wasn’t much to do in Death Valley other than work in the mines. Landscape photography was a pursuit relegated to opium addicts and the criminally drunk, and social media bullying still hadn’t been invented. Children, tired of traditional diversions such as “Kick the Cat” and “Whip the Burro,” were in desperate need of some entertainment.
This necessity resulted in a number of children-oriented structures being built: First, a one-room schoolhouse, then a hugely unpopular wooden slide, and finally a high-elevation summer camp perched far above the valley floor and away from the valley’s main settlements. This camp was aptly named “Fun Camp.”
With the summer weather in Death Valley being generally unfit for both man and beast, the mothers of Death Valley had sought out a location at higher elevations where they could drop their kids off for the summer to learn some of the lost pioneer arts of their forefathers, such as animal husbandry, husband wifery, and fence whitewashing. At 4,000 feet above sea level, the location for Fun Camp was a bit of an anomaly, as it rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit all summer long due to coastal zephyrs that, as one 19th century writer put it, “Flowed o’er the seas, gathering up its coolness and finally spat that coolness upon the upper flank of the Panamint Range like so much chewing tobacco in a spittoon.”
During the spring of 1866, dozens of barracks were built. In the summer of 1866 the first group of kids moved in. Over the following decades a number of improvements were made to the 15-acre grounds, including something called a “swimming hall,” rudimentary thrill rides, and what historians later believed to be a sacrificial altar.
But despite all this fun, the camp had its problems. Hilarious but fatal dingo attacks were reported to have occurred on a somewhat frequent basis, and even the most basic of injuries were treated poorly, mostly because not a single adult was onsite from June to August, a detail that the mothers of Death Valley had overlooked in their desperation to rid themselves of a seemingly never-ending chorus of “We’re boooooored.” Some things never change!
In 1931, the newly formed Child Protective Services made raiding Fun Camp their first order of business. The camp was closed, and CPS cited unsafe living conditions, amusement park rides that had been both created from and fixed with duct tape, and a plethora of shallow unmarked graves filled with tiny child-sized bones as the reasons.
The Milky Way, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars shine brightly over these abandoned structures in Death Valley National Park. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form.
Pictured in this photo are Fun Camp’s swimming hall, the pub, and the ticket booth for the world’s very first Tilt-a-Whirl. The structures have been preserved impeccably because of the quick and decisive work of a collective of historians named the Fathers of the Eastern Sierras, who in 1933, two years after Fun Camp’s closing, loaded a dozen 20-mule-trains with some 80,000 gallons of epoxy resin and made the long and arduous trek up to Fun Camp, where they used the epoxy resin to coat the entire site for posterity, thus preserving an important but oft-forgotten part of American history.
During my trip to Baja, my small group spent a couple nights camping near Baja’s Bahia de los Angeles (also known as LA Bay). It was an area I’d remembered visiting on a trip 15 years before, and surprisingly I didn’t think it had changed much. The quaint small town nearby was still quaint, the bay was still amazing, the weather was mostly good, and the night sky was breathtaking.
The day had intermittent clouds rolling through that made me a little nervous, but those clouds had largely dissipated by the time I awoke for a 4 am date to photograph the night sky. After leaving the tent, I was greeted with an amazing sight–the full galactic core of the Milky Way (the 28.9-degree latitude helped with that) as well as three planets: Jupiter (brightest, in center), Mars (in the galactic core), and Saturn (just to the left of the galactic core).
A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. Click photo for a larger version. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the “Contact me” form to the side of this page.
By the way, the yellow-orange glow you see in the sky isn’t light pollution. It’s airglow. The skies down there were fantastically dark, and there’s no way the tiny towns around there can put off enough light to affect the night sky.
Another side note: While I was taking this panorama and a couple of others, I could hear a pod of whales snuffling and splashing as they came to the surface in the strait to my left. At first I thought the noise was a change in tides, but over half an hour the noises moved from north to south, and included a couple of fins slapping the water. Additionally, a raccoon-sized animal scuttled across the rocks at the left of the frame around this time, too, but I couldn’t quite identify what it was in the dark, and my headlamp had dimmed to the point where I couldn’t make it out when I shined a light on it.
The annotated version of the photo can be seen below.
A vibrant Milky Way and three planets glow over my camp in Baja California Norte, Mexico, in March of 2018. Click photo for a larger version. For print or licensing inquiries, please use the “Contact me” form to the side of this page.
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!
Like a fool, earlier this summer I decided to start following up with for-profit companies and individuals who were using my photos for free, some of them for years at a time. (I have no idea why I didn’t do this during our amazingly rainy winter and spring, but, alas, I waited for the good weather to begin this project.) Although I had occasionally exchanged emails with some prior infringers, I hadn’t launched any sort of full-scale email campaign, which is what I’ve been up to (other than my Crater Lake workshop) over nearly the past month.
So, rather than going outside into the bright sunshine and enjoying my summer (or at least getting some much-needed yard work done), I’m scouring the Internet, drafting emails, and then replying (and replying and replying) to reply emails.
Although I’ve had a couple of reasonably pleasant experiences in dealing with infringers, for the most part it’s a little like going down the rabbit hole into a universe where culpability doesn’t exist, where copyright theft is committed by no-longer-with-us interns, rogue website builders, or just people who don’t want to take a few seconds to see if the image that they want to prominently place on their website’s home page may in fact actually be copyrighted. The same excuses keep cropping up over and over again until you know how the infringers will reply before they even reply. It’s disheartening, to say the least, and an activity not unlike reading the comments on news stories online: If your faith humanity has been shaken, you’re not going to re-solidify your faith here.
This accountability blitz started when, after reviewing some records, I realized that I haven’t licensed much imagery in the past year. Weird, I thought to myself, maybe no one really is interested in using my photos to promote their business anymore. Of course, a quick google search immediately proved that to not be the case. Instead, what people wanted was to use my photos without paying for them, a subtle but important distinction.
In the past, I’ve been criticized by members of the photography community for placing watermarks on my photos. As a result, I’ve spent way more time than I should’ve trying to find a balance between making sure that my copyright can be seen and trying not to make it obtrusive. It’s not easy. And believe me, I would rather not mark them at all, but with “I didn’t know it was copyrighted” being such a rampant excuse for theft, it seems more necessary than ever.
What’s most surprising, to me anyway, is the members of the creative community who have used my photo to promote their services. As someone who creates and uses my own music on my website, blog, and videos, I’ll never understand that.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes.
Photo Details
“Against the night”
“Against the night,” a rock spire stands against the galactic core of the Milky Way, southern Utah, spring of 2017. Click the photo to view it full size.
I took this vertical panorama this spring, with my full-spectrum Canon 6D and a Rokinon 35 mm f/1.4 lens. This is a total of 6 shots, 3 focus-stacked and 3 for vertical height, each taken at ISO 6400 for 15 seconds. (My aperture was unrecorded, although it was probably either f/2 or f/2.8.) I panned upward using my Nodal Ninja 4, which I love. The photo was taken in southern Utah.
I’m going to give it to you straight: Over the past year and a half I’ve fallen in love with panoramas, which now make up the bulk of the landscape photos that I publish. Following the “if a little bit is good, more is better” rule, creating landscape panoramas seemed like a natural step after spending years capturing an ultra-wide, 14-mm field of view. I suppose the next step is full 180-degree x 360-degree virtual panoramic tours, although I haven’t made that leap quite yet.
In my experience, after a certain period of familiarity with a particular lens or focal length, you start to more easily “see” your composition in that focal length. For me, I had become very used to “seeing” and understanding the ultra-wide 14-16mm range. One thing that I never liked about that range, however, was the distortion (particularly at 14mm, and particularly at night).
One advantage of taking panoramas, however, is that I can have an incredibly wide field of view but don’t have to deal with the ultra-wide-angle distortion resulting from using lenses like my trusty Rokinon 14mm f/2.8. The resulting panoramas are highly detailed and printable in large sizes at great resolution, which is really great, since I like making really big prints. And I can fit so much stuff in my composition. The disadvantages? Well, first of all, there’s so much stuff in my compositions. If you think uncluttering your foreground at 14mm is challenging, try it with a sweeping 180-degree field of view. And of course, sometimes putting panos together can vary anywhere from “Wow, Lightroom makes this easy now!” to “I’ve spent 6 hours on this and I’m still masking out stitching errors.” And the final disadvantage is that it took me a long time to really be able to “see” my panorama compositions in-field, particularly at night. In fact, that’s something I still struggle with, although this particular trip helped me quite a bit.
With that said, the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages for me, at least now. And I’m always looking for new challenges—it’s one of the things that I really enjoy about night-sky photography, and for a long time now creating panoramas of the Milky Way has been a huge challenge for me.
Because the Milky Way lies relatively low on the horizon in the spring (in the northern hemisphere, where I live), because it has a nice arch to it, and because the landscape at Arches National Park is so, well, in-your-face grandiose, I thought my 6-day trip to Arches would be a great time to focus on documenting the dark skies over the park with huge panoramas. And so I did.
After a no-holds-barred, I’m-only-stopping-for-restroom-breaks-when-my-car’s-nearly-out-of-gas, 15-hour drive from Oregon, I arrived at Arches to find spectacularly clear skies, and so I immediately got to work in the Windows area, despite my fatigue. It quickly became clear that North Window offered very little opportunity for imaging the Milky Way, so I moved on to South Window. I started off by climbing into the window. My compositions were extremely limited here, though, so I climbed down and found another angle to capture South Window (below). For this shot, I clambered up a little slickrock and tucked myself into a dark corner. Had I waited another half an hour or so, I’m sure the Milky Way would’ve climbed over South Window. But I wanted to move on.
The Milky Way appears over Arches National Park’s South Window. Comet 252P/LINEAR can be seen as a green dot in the sky in the upper-right of the panorama. The Rho Ophiuchi region can be seen at the rocky edge along the panorama’s right side. Also note the mix of green and red airglow in the sky (as well as the unfortunate light pollution from Moab, nearby).
I then moved on to Turret Arch and quickly scouted out a composition. Although I had hoped to be able to shoot the Milky Way through the arch, based on some online scouting prior to my visit I had a suspicion that it wouldn’t line up. My suspicion was quickly confirmed. Instead I decided to move in really close. Taking the “turret” metaphor too far, in my mind, I had imagined the arching Milky Way as the trail of some fiery object hurled by trebuchet from a more-northern war-like arch. Luckily the charge fell just short of Turret Arch’s ramparts.
The Milky Way appears over Arches National Park’s Turret Arch. Comet 252P/Linear can seen as a green dot in the sky in the middle-upper-right of the panorama. Prints available.
Dramatic post-script bonus story!
As I was standing in the dark, taking the final row of the Turret Arch panorama, I noticed a faint bobbing of light getting closer from the parking lot. Eventually, the bobbing light walked stopped about 25 feet away from me. Of course, I couldn’t see who I was addressing, but I made leap in logic and assumed they were human, called “hello,” and mentioned that I only had two frames left and then I would be done. The voice in the dark replied that was fine and that he’d wait where he was standing. About 20 seconds later, after my penultimate frame, I heard the unmistakable thud and clatter of both a body and some metallic photography equipment colliding with rock. I turned on my head lamp and rushed over to help the man, who had tripped and ostensibly fallen on his face. His glasses were badly bent several feet away from him, and the man was bleeding considerably from a cut (most likely caused by his glasses) on the bridge of his nose.
“Am I bleeding?” he asked, still on his hands and knees and dripping blood, unable to see at night without his glasses. A couple dozen blobs of blood on the ground confirmed that yes, he was bleeding. (Here’s an illustrative tweet, for those of you who must see.) Luckily the man had a handkerchief in his pocket, and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly as soon as he applied pressure. After he got up he insisted he was okay and that he was heading back to his car in the parking lot, where he had another pair of glasses. Selfishly, I told him if he’d wait 20 seconds I’d take my final frame and assist him to the parking lot, but he started off without me. I quickly finished my panorama and tried to catch up with him, just to make sure he didn’t wipe out again, but he was quite a bit ahead of me.
“Equilibrium,” a whitebark pine hangs on the rim of Crater Lake by its roots, while the Milky Way spins overhead; prints available here.
I took a physical geography class years ago, and the main thing I took away from it was that wind and water are the Earth’s primary erosive forces. And Crater Lake’s not lacking for either of them.
Crater Lake in summertime is very different than Crater Lake during any other season, mostly because the place is buried in snow from early fall through late spring (if not longer). To a certain extent, that snowy winter coat protects some of the native trees and plants. But the water resulting from 10 feet of snow melting can move a lot of soil around. Once the trees are unburied they’re subjected to Crater Lake’s infamous wind. When the wind gusts at over 30 mph, the top layer of that volcanic soil takes flight, and you can feel its sting against your shins (if you happen to be out there in shorts) or even your arms and face. In these harsh conditions, figuring out the reason why many of the rim’s whitebark pines have become denuded of their bark over time doesn’t take a lot of imagination.
Unfortunately, man’s presence further accelerates the process. We move soil (both inadvertently and on purpose), trample plants that would better secure the soil to the ground, and some of us will even climb on some of these ancient trees in order to get a good selfie. The phrase “loved to death” springs to mind, but I would never begrudge anyone the opportunity to experience Crater Lake’s beauty in the same ways that I have (although I’ve never climbed any trees in the park).
At some future point, this spot may be closed to the public so that restoration can take place. At some other future point, this tree will likely fall into the crater, a (hopefully) natural act that was to some degree partially hastened by my many trips to photograph the tree. And at some long future point, if diseases like blister rust and insects like the mountain pine beetle win out, whitebark pines on the rim of the lake will cease to exist at all.
These seem like slow-moving or outright invisible processes, but I’m always surprised at the changes I see in these trees year over year: an extra twist in the bark, a more-exposed root, a fracture in an exposed root that was likely caused by a human’s weight. It’s these little changes that motivate me to go check in with these old trees, my old friends, to see how they’re holding up. And in the process I take another photo and make another memory.
Big news, everyone! I’m delighted to announce that my photo “A raising of the hackles” won third place in The World at Night’s (TWAN’s) 6th annual Earth and Sky Photo Contest. This is really exciting for me because, for one, I see TWAN as doing important work: It’s easy to point out the differences among all of us (and when I say “us,” I mean the people of the world), but it’s much more difficult to show how alike we are and to reveal how much we have in common. TWAN blends science and the arts to deliver the message that we all share the same night sky, not just visually in the form of stargazing but culturally as well.
Second, I look up to this organization and its members and photographers greatly. If you follow the link to the TWAN page take a moment, scroll down, and check out the contest judges and their work–impressive stuff.
Third, night-sky photography is still a niche form of photography, a subgenre of a subgenre, but it’s gaining in popularity every day. Even in the last five years, I’ve seen a major change of behavior among landscape photographers: They’re sticking around after the sun goes down. I was at a popular location at Mt St Helens Saturday night, and I swear I only saw two photographers leave after the golden hour. At least 15 photographers stuck around to shoot stars. Five years ago, those numbers would’ve been reversed. This TWAN contest represents the very best of my favorite type of photography and is an annual benchmark to see how high the bar has been raised. It’s an honor to be included.
“A raising of the hackles,” third place winner, Beauty of the Night Sky category, The World at Night 6th annual Earth and Sky photo contest. Big, beautiful prints of this photo are available for purchase here.
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 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.
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.
Note to readers: Skip to paragraph 3 if you don’t want to hear about the last time Matt Newman and I got together to take some photos.
I’m just going to get right into it: The last time I went with Matt Newman on a photo outing, we had a finely detailed plan to capture Broken Top (one of the Cascade’s more interesting-looking peaks) at sunset, twilight, and with the Milky Way over/behind it. The plan required an overnight, as you might imagine, so one summer weekend afternoon when the weather was favorable, laden with our overnight gear, we left the trailhead and started making our way toward our overnight destination. Only a couple hours later, we met a group of soaked hikers coming down the trail who told foreboding stories of extreme weather, including hail. Matt and I nodded, expressed our sympathies, and continued on our way.
Long story not much shorter, Matt and I ended up spending approximately four hours on a rocky ridge above two large valleys less than a mile from the mountain we’d come to photograph. In one valley there was supposedly a lake, which was our photographic destination. I say supposedly because, like Broken Top itself, which was less than a mile from where we were, we never saw it. The entire valley just below us was a roiling sea of fog and mist, like a dry-ice-filled punchbowl at a party. And from the direction of this valley came sustained 35 mile-per-hour winds, with the occasional gust intense enough to nearly knock me off my feet. The other valley, away from the mountain we’d hoped to photograph, was totally clear, and fog and mist pushed by these winds crested the ridge where we were hunkered down and dropped away into the opposing valley. This pattern went on for hours, with each of us thinking that, surely, eventually, the misty-foggy valley would clear and we’d be able to take our photos. It never did. And because my body acted as a kind of fog filter between the two valleys, I froze. And I didn’t get a single photo from the trip.
Fast-forward to last weekend, and Matt Newman and I again made plans, this time to snowshoe into Crater Lake for an opportunity to shoot the Milky Way with the moon. I had wanted to shoot from here because it has a great view of Wizard Island, and I thought the perspective it offered would allow me to do a panoramic that would include a great deal of the lake as well as the arching Milky Way. Shooting Crater Lake is (in my opinion) exceptionally difficult, and if your aim is to capture the lake’s entire expanse, only the widest of ultra-wide lenses are up to the job. But the resulting distortion caused from using that wide focal length have some undesired effects, including a rounding of the horizon and a flattening of some of the geographical features around the lake. In an effort to address these problems, I decided to shoot with a wide (but not ultra-wide) lens and stitch together a panoramic.
So there was my plan. And things went really well in the theoretical part of this trip. It was in the actual doing it part of the trip that things didn’t go so well.
Looking back, I can blame some of my lack of preparation on just being out of the game. I’ve been mostly home-bound for the past four months as a result of a couple of elbow surgeries. And I have some other excuses as well. But I think that the main reason this snowshoe trip killed me is because I underestimated what was required.
I habitually carry way too much weight into the backcountry, so this time out I made a kind of pulk out of a plastic kids’ sled. My goal was to pack my 65L backpack full of my camping stuff, and then just pull it on the sled. Then I would wear my photo-gear backpack. The “ease” of this method of backcountry travel fooled me into continually adding more and more unnecessary junk (including a six-pack of beer, which was something I’d never done before, two hardcover books, and bunch of food that I didn’t end up eating), until I was essentially carrying and/or pulling 70+ pounds of gear.
The sled worked fairly well for the first couple miles of snowshoe travel, but its center of gravity was a bit high, and so I had some rollover problems. After about the fourth rollover, I noted that my backpack smelled suspiciously like beer. A minute of freak-out unpacking later, and I was able to visually and tactilely confirm that the reason my pack smelled like beer was because one of the beers had apparently exploded during a sled rollover, leaving 12 ounces of IPA to go nowhere but inside my pack.
At the time, the only clothes I was wearing were my pants and a short sleeve shirt. It was 60 degrees out and a perfect bluebird day. Every other piece of clothing I packed, all of my fleece and wool and layers designed to keep me warm during the cold overnight, were in that backpack. And they were now covered in beer.
I pulled several items out of the bag and strapped them to the top of my sled, and we continued on. We simply didn’t have a lot of time to make much of a fix, much less stop for something to eat (we had both skipped lunch) or even drink (both of my water bottles were awkwardly strapped to my pack). And just for good measure, the altitude was also causing me some problems, as I continued to pant and trudge along in my snowshoes.
About 15 minutes after sunrise we finally arrived at our stopping point. I hung up a couple of beer-covered clothing items so they would dry. I had just set up my tripod and was getting ready to pull out my camera when I realized that I was missing several other items of clothing–these were, of course, the jacket and shirt that I had strapped to the top of my sled in an effort to dry them. And even worse was that my hat and gloves were in my jacket pocket.
Without thinking much about it, I left Matt at our camp spot and took off back down the trail. I’d gone about a quarter of a mile before I realized a few things. First, I was still in my t-shirt, and the sun had just gone down. It was going to get cold quickly. Second, I had left my flashlight back with my gear. It was going to get dark quickly.
With the urgency of the situation increasing, I decided to run. In showshoes. I ran about half a mile before I found my jacket, my long-sleeve shirt, and the bungee that had been holding the items to my sled. Glad that finally something had gone my way, I walked the three quarters of a mile back to our camp, as the last of the twilight’s light faded.
It was at this point that I started not to feel well. My hip flexors, which had been merely sore before, now felt like frayed rubber bands being stretched to the brink of snapping. I was nauseous and tired. And as the temperature began to go down and the wind started to pick up ever so slightly, I decided to see if my wet clothing had dried. It hadn’t.
Not only had it not dried, it had frozen. But I had no choice, so I put on my beer-frozen base layers, hoping my own body heat would unfreeze and then dry the clothing. Which it did, after about 12 hours of wearing them.
At this point I probably should’ve forced myself to eat something, but instead I decided to set up my tent and lie down for a little bit. After about an hour, I began to feel better, though still exhausted, so I drank a little more water and got up to set up a timelapse and then retire for the evening. The wind then picked up markedly, and my tent, which was about 10 feet from the edge of the caldera, began to buck and flap. I decided to move it to a more secure area, not realizing that I had placed my tent on a large rock, a mistake that would haunt me over the next five hours or so.
At this point I realized I had brought the wrong tent stakes, so I relied on my body weight and my gear to hold the tent down. This worked with the bottom of the tent, but not so well with the sides of my tent, which flapped loudly all night and occasionally slapped me in the face, limiting my sleep to somewhere around half an hour. It was like trying to sleep inside one of those dancing balloon-men that you see at used-car lots. But I was too tired and cold to get up and do anything. And I was worried that if I did get up and do something, my tent would fly away.
After one of the worst nights of attempting sleep in the past decade, I finally got up about 45 minutes before my alarm went off, only to discover that the moon was already rising. Somehow I had goofed on my celestial timeline, so instead of waking up half an hour early for the shot I wanted, I was now actually about 5 minutes late. I grabbed my camera and checked the last shot from my timelapse on the back of my camera, only to realize that my quick release plate on my camera had slipped over the course of the past several hours, resulting in a strange 45-degree tilt, effectively rendering the 700 frames I had just shot absolutely, totally useless.
Without a doubt, the universe was officially conspiring against me.
When I went back to my tent to change out my photo gear, I realized that my tent, which still had my keys, my phone, and all of the other photo gear that hadn’t been used in my timelapse, had begun to blow away with everything inside. I set my camera down and ran after my tent, grabbing it before its next revolution, and pulling it to a somewhat sheltered area, which happened to also be a tree well. For the next five minutes I wrestled around inside my tent, which was inside a tree well, first trying to find a light so that I could make some sense of the jumbled contents of my tent.
Satisfied that my tent was going to stay in the tree well and not blow away, I grabbed my gear and walked over to a viewpoint about 100 feet away. I had planned on exploring the compositional possibilities of the area around me, but that pretty much went out the window with me waking up late, so I found a spot that had interested me earlier and got to work.
Things improved slightly from this point. My body heat and the 30 mile-per-hour wind eventually dried my clothes out, although I smelled like beer. I felt like I had gotten a couple of good photos, although I’d missed shooting at twilight the night before and sunrise that morning so that I could attempt another hour of sleep. “Attempt,” being the functional word.
Thoroughly defeated, reeking of beer, and with the hip flexors of an octogenarian, I decided that I couldn’t stay a second night (as I had originally planned), so I packed up my stuff for an early morning departure back to the Rim Village parking lot. I ate a quick pre-packaged breakfast and drank 8 ounces or so of icy water while Matt packed up his stuff. That miniscule meal didn’t do much for me, however, and after nearly two hours of snowshoeing back, I pretty much hit the wall, dry heaving and snowshoeing at the same time for the final quarter-mile push to the parking lot.
I’m now 36 hours removed from this Sufferfest and feeling quite a bit better. My hips now feel like those of a man in his 50s rather than his 80s, which is a slight improvement. The beer has been washed from all of my clothes. Most importantly, I’ve now gotten a full night’s sleep. And I’m already planning the next time I’ll go back….
Technical details
This is a panorama taken with 8 vertical frames shot at 24mm. Aperture was unrecorded. RAW processing was accomplished in Lightroom. The stitch and post-processing was completed in Photoshop. I actually took a separate, stopped-down exposure for the moon, just in case I wanted a better “moon star,” but I ended up preferring the moon as it was captured with a nearly wide-open aperture.
The moon and the Milky Way rise over the eastern horizon of Crater Lake on a frozen winter night. Prints available.
If night-sky photographers were to have an off-season (and they could certainly use such a thing, to catch up on sleep if nothing else), the winter time would most likely be it, at least in the northern hemisphere.
From about November through February, much of the galactic core of the Milky Way (the colorful, dust lane-riddled part of our galaxy) lies below the horizon, at least where I live in Oregon.
Of course, the absence of this singular feature of the night sky doesn’t stop me from going out and taking photos. I could probably write a separate blog post on my and other night sky photographers’ fixation on the galactic center and how winter night-sky shooting may even be preferable to shooting during other times of the year, but I’ll save that for later. Suffice it to say, between the long nights and the cool temperatures (which are better for creating low-noise images), the winter’s a great time for night photography.
But I have to admit, like plenty of other photographers, that first glimpse of the Milky Way’s mysterious glowing center on my camera’s LCD is exciting.
So color me giddy when I was able to get my first glance of this feature of the Milky Way in 2015 last weekend. For this trip up to “the mountain” (Mt Hood, for those of you who don’t speak Portlandese), I was able to convince fellow night-sky photographer Chip MacAlpine to join me. Actually, “convince” is probably the wrong word, since it doesn’t take a whole lot of prodding for Chip to drop everything, sacrifice some sleep, and head out into the wilderness for some photography.
While we’re on the topic of “wilderness,” while technically it’s in Mt Hood National Forest, Lost Lake’s hardly feels like wilderness, especially from the vantage point of this shot. Because of the lack of snow this year, the road up to the lake’s still open, although I was warned by a ranger that fallen trees haven’t been removed. So I was a little worried that our trip up to the mountain was going to be foiled by a downed tree blocking the road, which luckily didn’t happen.
For me, the greatest obstacle in my way was the fact that I had just had surgery a week and a half before on my left elbow, which was still bothering me at the time. The next-greatest obstacle was the tiny window I had in which to actually get this shot. Half an hour isn’t a whole lot of time when you’re taking multiple long-exposure photos, and although I would’ve had a slightly smaller window of opportunity the following morning, the forecast was for cloudy skies. In short, I had half an hour to get this photo or I’d have to wait until the following month.
Technical details: For those of you wondering, this panorama was created with six vertical photos, all shot with the same fairly standard settings: 15 seconds at ISO 6400. My aperture was unrecorded. I made some basic RAW adjustments in Lightroom, before exporting the files to PS6 for stitching. After that, I did some cropping and a little bit of careful warping to correct for perspective. Then I did my usual post-processing workflow, which includes luminosity masks for self-feathered selections.
Title details: The title of this photo is an allusion to several things: First, it’s kind of a play on the lake’s name. Second, it refers to the galactic center of the Milky Way, which has been hidden for the past few months. And third, it’s a comment on my own healing process and what has been required for me to (hopefully) live a life with a little less pain in my day-to-day activities.
Prints details: This print will be available as a 20×40 limited edition print on aluminum. With 50 total prints made, pricing is variable depending on the print’s number in the series. Use the contact me form below-right for details. I’m in the process of ordering this one for my own house, and will post the photo as soon as I can make it happen.
The galactic center of the Milky Way slowly rises behind Mt Hood, as seen from a frozen Lost Lake in mid winter. Limited-edition prints available; contact me for details.
Landscapes
