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!
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. Click the photo for full size. Prints available here.
The Pacific Northwest has more capes than Comic-Con, each of them with exotic and descriptive names. But my favoritely (not a word) named cape (a headland or a promontory of large size extending into a body of water, usually the sea, in case you wanted to know the definition) has to be Cape Disappointment, an area on the southwest Washington coast that doesn’t disappoint when it comes to beautiful views of lighthouses, but has been known to have terrible weather. And sometimes it even eats quad copters.
Last week’s weather forecast for the coast looked incredible–almost too perfect. Clear skies and low humidity promised an amazing view of the night sky. I learned a long time ago that there’s no such thing as a slam dunk when it comes to night photography in Oregon or Washington, but every forecast I saw said that it couldn’t get any more clear.
On my way, a thick marine layer met me in Seaside and left me briefly concerned, enough that I almost turned around after over an hour of driving. However, the skies cleared and my spirits soared as I neared Astoria. I clicked through my mental checklist of photos that I was going to take at Cape Disappointment that night while crossing the Astoria-Megler bridge into Washington. Nothing could stop me. However, after arriving at the North Head parking lot at Cape Disappointment, I was met with a surprisingly hard wind that only got worse whens I made my way through a grove of trees to an open bluff where the lighthouse sits.
I set up my gear, but several blurry photos informed me that my normally sturdy tripod couldn’t hold steady during the 40-mph gusts, even with my 20-some pound backpack hanging from it as ballast. My grand plans were being blown away. I realized that a lot of the compositions I wanted simply would not be available to me because I was too exposed.
I had to find cover from the wind, so I sought out different compositions and eventually found a couple spots that offered some protection, at least to the point where my tripod was no longer quaking. I took my sunset photos, and then recomposed for twilight and waited.
Shortly afterward, a couple of guys with a quad copter showed up. The sun was below the horizon, and the sky was darkening quickly. I watched them trot by the path in front of me over to the lighthouse, eager to prepare their drone (I’m assuming there was a camera of some kind on board) for what would’ve been a beautiful set of aerial photos. The sun’s remaining light was breathtaking, and the lighthouse itself was beautifully lit. It was a perfect evening. Except for the wind.
After a quick setup, the quad copter took off, reaching about 50 feet in altitude. Then it began to list like a boat taking on water as the winds quickly pushed it away from North Head, until it was hanging 100 foot above the ocean. The guy flying the drone had no way to put it down without crashing it into the sea, so he kept it aloft until it was over Deadman’s Hollow and Long Beach and was probably over half a mile away. As it got dark, I lost site of the drone. The guys left soon thereafter–presumably to look for their missing equipment–with noticeably different body language from when they had arrived.
I waited around for the stars to come out, and then I grabbed a few more photos, but I was still having a lot of problems with the wind. A couple hours after sunset the winds still hadn’t died down. My eyes were dry and irritated, my face felt chapped, and my equipment and I were covered in blown sea spray. I decided to pack up and leave. I turned my back to the wind and let it propel me down the path back to my car. As I walked the dark trail, far down below on Long Beach I saw a couple of flashlights scanning the sands. They still hadn’t found their drone.
The North Head lighthouse glows at twilight, Cape Disappointment, Washington. Prints available here.
“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.
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.
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.
Over this winter break (I speak in school terms, since many of my vacations are planned around school schedules), I had the opportunity to spend a little less than 48 hours in Joshua Tree National Park.
Getting away on photo-only trips is one of my guilty pleasures. I love my family. I enjoy my family, and I enjoy travelling with my family. My kids have been travelling since they were tiny and do less complaining on eight-plus hour car rides than most adults I know. My son was about a month old (and mostly asleep) when we did our best to hold him up against a blank background for his first passport photo.
On most family trips, in an effort to allow me to focus on photography, my wife does pretty much everything: herding the kids and making sure they have food, water, and warm clothing; cooking meals; checking into and out of campground. I, on the other hand, do what I usually do: I fret over the time, struggle with compositions and equipment, and when the light starts to get good (and even when it doesn’t), I run around like a fool, alternately cheering and cursing myself aloud.
So in late December, when my wife and I were given the opportunity to make a quick mid-winter run to Joshua Tree with no kids, I had the slightest, tiniest twinge of guilt for a half second before I screamed “yes!” and immediately started packing the car.
A few hours later, we ended up in Joshua Tree just after sunset, missing what photographer’s called “the golden hour,” that hour of light before sunset when the lighting gets more interesting. This would bother many photographers, who choose to do the bulk of their shooting during this day, but it didn’t really phase me. The vast majority of the photos I took in the park (and I took around 2,000 or so) were taken, as the title suggests, beyond daylight’s borders. This is representative of my work in general–I guess I just find the world to be interesting during these times.
After quickly queuing up at the park’s northern entrance so that I could flash my annual pass, we made a beeline for the Jumbo Rocks area, because a) I know it be photogenic based on other photos I’d seen and b) because it was relatively close and the light was dimming quickly.
Created in 1994 (making it the dry, prickly grandson of Grand Canyon NP and the twin brother to Death Valley NP), Joshua Tree NP is named for the ubiquitous Joshua Tree, a type of yucca that grows at elevations between 1,300 and 6,000 feet. The Joshua Tree is notoriously slow-growing, with mature plants only growing an inch a year or so. This fact makes some of the park’s specimens wildly impressive, as I saw a few of the trees stretching over 20 feet in the air, likely making them around 150 years old. Even more curious to me was the fact that these things seemed to have bark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more tree-like plant that wasn’t a tree.
Aside from the noble and photogenic Joshua Tree, the upper part of the park is littered with giant smooth boulders, which make for both great climbing and great (in my opinion) photography opportunities. In many parts of the parks there are no trails, and visitors are left to spend hours (like my wife and I did) picking their way through a maze of strewn boulders, prickly chollas, and interesting geology. This fun stuff (and I’m not talking about the cholla when I say “fun”) was readily accessible: In fact, many of the campgrounds were situated very close to these boulder fields, making it a rock-climber’s paradise.
This was both good and bad for me. On one hand, there seemed to be plenty of parking close to the areas I wanted to photograph, which often isn’t the case in our national parks. On the other hand, the parking was limited to certain hours, and those hours were when I was not going to be shooting. But, with a little problem solving, I was able to find a workaround.
I kept shooting through the blue hour and twilight, until eventually nightfall. Eventually, as a result of my unfamiliarity with the park and the freezing cold (the overnight temperatures were below freezing and the winds were gusting around 30-35 miles per hour), I gave up taking photos, and we went to get a few hours of sleep before sunrise.
“Joshua Tree – Venus’s Belt 1,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Joshua Tree – Venus’s Belt 2,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Joshua Tree – Venus’s Belt 3,”available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Pterodactyl rock,”available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Jumbo rocks morning 2,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Jumbo rocks morning 1,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Reconciliation,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.“Waiting for the wobble,” available as a fine-art print; contact me using the form below-right for details.
“The seventh wave recedes, Cape Kiwanda” Click to view larger. Prints available (use the contact me form below to inquire).
It’s summertime at the Oregon coast, and the sun set 20 minutes ago. The horizon still glows warm, a perfect soft breeze blows your hair from your eyes, and churning waves drum at the base of the sandstone cove where you’ve watched the sunset with friends. Somewhere around the seventh or eighth wave you hear a heavy, hollow ka-whump, and a six-foot wall of water jumps vertically, just an arm’s length in front of you, only to crash straight down. These are the sandstone bluffs of Cape Kiwanda, a strange juxtaposition of tranquility and chaos.
Dream seeding; a whitebark pine leans over Crater Lake for a better view; available in 11×14, 16×20, and 24×30 print sizes
Personal details
It’s Monday morning, and I’m just sitting around the house sipping some Folgers (we ran out of the good stuff, so I’m drinking the “camping coffee”) and getting ready to roll up my sleeves and do some work on my website. That is, of course, a lie: I can’t roll up my sleeves, because every since the cast was removed from my arm last Friday, I’ve been in a fairly involved (and expensive) elbow brace. The reality of my situation is slowly starting to sink in: Recuperating from tendon repair is a lengthy process, and I’m only now checking my blind spot while merging onto the road to recovery.
Yesterday I had a reminder of just how precarious my situation is after I tripped going up the stairs at my house and instinctively extended both arms to catch myself. The result was painful, but it did help to scare me straight, so to speak. I’m not a clumsy guy by any means, but at this point it wouldn’t take much to undo what took my orthopedic surgeon over an hour and several thousand dollars to accomplish in the first place.
Unfortunately, that means that, in the interest of not getting myself (or more specifically, my triceps tendon) into trouble, I probably won’t be taking many photos during the month of November. And I especially won’t be going out at night, when the infinitesimal risk of injury increases slightly. It’s just not worth the risk. I really feel pretty good, so it’s going to be difficult to be patient.
So instead, I’ll likely be going through old photos for most of the month. And this is one of them.
Photo details
This is one of Crater Lake’s famous whitebark pines that rim the lake. As far as views go, it’s doing much better than about 99.9999% of the other trees in the world. Unfortunately, pine beetles, a fungus called blister rust, and a changing climate have taken their toll, and many of these trees are dying off. As you can see, this one’s dead. What you probably can’t see is that a good part of its root system is exposed, and this thing’s going to topple one of these days.
This tree’s been photographed a lot. I should probably capitalize that–this tree’s been photographed A LOT. I alone have spent more time with it than any one person should spend with a tree. Because of this fact, some photographers would stay away from this scene, stating that the act of photographing it can only result in an “unoriginal” photo. I, of course, disagree with that philosophy.
Right now, in Portland, a similar debate is unfolding around the famous Japanese maple at the Portland Japanese Garden. Its leaves are changing colors, and photographers are converging from all over the world and queuing up for a photo of it. The environment is a little circus-like, with long lines, bad behavior, and a whole lotta landscape photographers loudly “declaring” (mostly via social media) that they’d sooner spike their 14-24 f/2.8G lens like a football than be caught taking a photo of such a popular subject. Ironically, it wouldn’t take much of a portfolio review coupled with a quick Google image search to uncover any number of landscape photography clichés with their name attached to it.
You see, I definitely value originality when it comes to landscape photography, but I’m not sure I value it over beauty. There’s a reason that people are drawn to these trees. And it’s the same reason people enjoy butterflies, beer advertisements featuring models, and America’s national parks system: They’re beautiful, and people like beauty.
So how does a creative person who values originality and individualism express their unique vision of an over-shot subject? (Never mind that this question ignores the question of when exactly a landscape subject becomes “over-shot,” that’s a debate for another time.) To me, it’s easy–I work harder to find unique conditions (light, weather, etc), unique angles, and a unique way of post-processing the photo. I work harder to make the photo say something, to mean something. In short, I work harder.
Because saying that you’d never photograph a certain tree, a certain view, or something as ubiquitous as the Milky Way (and yes, the self-righteous declaration of “I’d never shoot the Milky Way!” is becoming a more common refrain) is easy. At best it’s a declaration of the limits of your vision as an artist. At worst it’s an admission of creative laziness.
I’m hard-pressed to think of something I would never photograph. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to my vivid imagination or the fact that I quit using hyperbolic words like “always” and “never” a long time ago. The pursuit of my vision probably won’t lead me to take a photo of a McDonald’s any time soon, but I can think of several scenarios in which I would take that photo. From a creative standpoint, nothing’s off limits. And nothing should be.
Technical details
This was from two exposures, taken about 20 minutes apart. The first was to capture the landscape detail, including the quickly fading sunlight that was warming the white bark of the pine tree. The second was to capture the sky. Both photos were taken with the same focus, aperture, and ISO (100). Only the exposure time changed.
Further notes
Part of the reason I was able to get so many stars in the second, “sky” shot, despite only waiting 20 minutes after the “land” shot was the nature of the southern sky when I took this photo. The bright “stars” on the right side of the sky are actually Saturn (top) and Mars (bottom). In the middle right, you can see part of the constellation Scorpius, with the star Antares. And in the rest of the sky is the galactic center of the Milky Way (albeit one that is washed out by so much ambient light), which has a number of other bright stars in it. In short, these stars appeared much more quickly during twilight than many of the other stars in the sky.
“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
-Pablo Neruda
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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