On March 26th (2018), I had finished my short trip to the Baja peninsula and was spending the night camping near Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The sky was incredibly clear, totally free of clouds, so I had skipped shooting sunset and was instead exploring around my campsite looking for good compositions for shooting the Milky Way later that night.
However, while walking around in the twilight, I noticed that something strange was happening on the western horizon. Venus was glowing brightly—along with a number of strangely colored clouds. The sight was really pretty stunning, and I immediately got excited and ran to get my camera equipment. I had never seen noctilucent clouds before, and I had also never seen iridescent clouds before. Somehow, interestingly, these seemed to be both, and I couldn’t recall having ever heard of that phenomenon.
For the next hour or so I shot various photos, scrambling to find a foreground without missing the show. As it turned out, I could’ve spent a little more time looking for compositions, since the clouds were readily apparent for about an hour, but I didn’t know that at the time (and I’m pretty happy with the compositions I did find).
My first photo was taken at around 7:31 pm, about 44 minutes after sunset (which was at 6:47 pm on March 26th), during nautical twilight.
The planet Venus is low on the horizon while strange noctilucent, iridescent clouds swirl over the Arizona desert. Click to view full size. Contact me for prints or licensing opportunities.
This second photo was taken almost 10 minutes later, with a slightly different composition. This was taken at the end of nautical twilight.
The planet Venus is low on the horizon while strange noctilucent, iridescent clouds swirl over the Arizona desert. Click to view full size. Contact me for prints or licensing opportunities.
This third photo, a panorama, was taken at about 7:57 pm, over a full hour after sunset. Taken with a higher ISO, you can see a number of stars that have emerged during astronomical twilight. Additionally, the strange noctilucent iridescent clouds have settled lower onto the horizon.
The planet Venus is low on the horizon while strange noctilucent, iridescent clouds swirl over the Arizona desert. Click to view full size. Contact me for prints or licensing opportunities.
Have you ever seen anything like this before? Do you have any insights?
I’ll continue to add to this blog post as I find out more about these clouds. In the meantime, please feel free to share this post by using the buttons below.
UPDATE
Since first posting this I found this article in the Washington Post, which states that the clouds likely came from the exhaust of two Trident missiles launched from the Pacific Test Range, off the coast of Southern California.
On our second and third nights in Baja California Norte last month, we followed a wending dirt road north from the sleepy town perched next to the edge of Bahia de los Angeles, past the one-step-above primitive camping of Playa La Gringa, where a row of not-very-private three-sided outhouses sat just a stone’s throw from the beach, bounced over deep ruts and rocks in my uncle’s Subaru Forester over a hill, to finally arrive at a secluded beach where we had great views of Isla Coronado and its volcanic northern tip, Volcan Coronado.
We pitched our tents in a wash to give ourselves a windbreak and proceeded to spend the next couple of days exploring the nearby hills, throwing rocks in the water, eating fish tacos, digging clams, and attempting to make our old inflatable kayak seaworthy.
And, of course, I took some photos.
Our second day was a cloudy one, and windy like all the others. However, the clouds were fantastic: Large stacked lenticulars lingered over the bay for 24 hours, mammatus clouds, wave clouds, and a number of others passed overhead. All were probably a result of the stormy weather blowing in from San Diego, travelling a few hundred miles down the peninsula, and then getting shaken up while passing over Cerro Santa Ana (otherwise known as Mike’s Mountain), It made for quite a show for anyone who appreciates a well-constructed cloud.
While watching these wild clouds, I had thought ahead to sunset and hoped that the clouds would still be visible. In the hours before sunset, the western horizon had been packed with clouds, and my hopes for an interesting sunset had begun to diminish.
That evening, I had begun to help make fish tacos when my son alerted me to the fact that the sunset was about to go off, so I dropped my knife and went into full-on landscape photographer mode. I’m glad I did, as the sunset was probably the best we experienced on this trip, with 360-degree color painted over some of the interesting clouds that had been hanging around all day.
Finding a foreground was relatively easy. I really enjoyed shooting the varied pyroclastic rocks in the area; they made for interesting foregrounds with their differing shapes and colors.
Sunset colors explode over Baja’s Volcan Coronado. Please use the “Contact me” form on the right to inquire about art prints or licensing the photo for commercial use.
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!
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
-Romeo Montague, “Romeo and Juliet”
“Wow, look at that z-light!”
-Me
Ah, zodiacal light, that confounding glow on the horizon long after the sun has already set. At times (particularly in the fall in the northern hemisphere) I have cursed it because it interfered with my view of the Milky Way, but more often than not I celebrate it.
Why?
Because I think it looks cool.
After you’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of the night sky you start to really appreciate unique events or circumstances, and even though I’ve photographed zodiacal light a number of times, it’s still (to me, anyway) a rare and exciting phenomenon. I still think it adds a lot of visual interest and an air of unpredictability to the standard night sky.
But what is it?
It’s billions-of-years-old space dust, lit by our sun! If that answer doesn’t suffice, check out EarthSky’s articles on the topic (found here and here), or even wikipedia’s.
So as an ode to these bright triangles of glowing interstellar dust, below I’ve assembled a collection of my zodiacal light photos, in almost no particular order below.
“Jupiter rising, Kofa Mountains,” the largest planet in our solar system, bathed in zodiacal light, hangs over the jagged peaks of Arizona’s Kofa Mountains.
The above photo (“Jupiter rising, Kofa Mountains”) was one of the rare times I had anticipated seeing zodiacal light in the night sky. Why? Because I had seen it in the same place the year before, and the weather conditions were similar. This time around, I knew Jupiter would be very close to the zodiacal light (it was more in the southern sky the year before), and I had hoped that the planet and the z-light would line up. My hopes came true.
The desert southwest is a great place to go to see zodiacal light in the wintertime: That clear, dry air seems to really allow for some great z-light displays. In this case, I set an alarm for a couple of hours pre-sunrise, got up and left my phone glowing in the bottom of my tent (see photo below), and then took these multi-row panoramas. The final field of view on these is somewhere around 180 degrees wide.
“A light on the horizon,” zodiacal light appears behind the Kofa Mountains, Arizona.
But dry conditions in places like the desert southwest aren’t required for taking these sorts of photos. Occasionally the skies clear up on the “wet” side of Oregon’s Cascades, giving us Oregonians a chance to view zodiacal light as well.
The photo below was one of the first times I had an opportunity to properly shoot zodiacal light and incorporate it into my composition. (Previously I had only haphazardly photographed it, not really realizing what I was seeing.) In the case below, I had researched where the sun would set, and I knew it would line up pretty closely with where I wanted it to be for the composition below. What I didn’t realize is that strong zodiacal light would persist well after sunset. Surprisingly, I’ve seen zodiacal light in this same location a number of times, despite the Oregon coast not being well-known for its clear skies.
“False dusk and falls, Oregon coast,” second-place winner in The World at Night’s 2014 Earth and Sky photo contest.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve really come to enjoy photographing the night sky in the wintertime, for various reasons that I won’t get into here. In the two photos below you can see the results from a night of winter shooting at the Oregon coast (the same location as “False dusk and falls, Oregon coast” above).
“Tributaries in the river of light,” zodiacal light appears off the Oregon coast in this familiar location. This photo received “special mention” in TWAN’s 2016 Earth and Sky photo contest.This full-dome view of the night sky at the Oregon coast shows the winter Milky Way, airglow, and strong zodiacal light that nearly reaches the sky’s zenith (right side).
The photo below was another memorable occasion for shooting zodiacal light, mostly because it was on a sub-freezing morning at Joshua Tree National Park during my first visit to the park. This particular shot was
Zodiacal lights shines brightly during the pre-dawn of a winter morning at Joshua Tree National Park. In this case, the planet Saturn bathes in zodiacal light, while the bright star Vega shines on the left side of the photo.
And finally, here’s one from the dry side of the Cascades. Again, Jupiter played around in the zodiacal light for me, which is always a nice bonus.
Zodiacal light shines over the playa of the Alvord Desert in eastern Oregon.
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 should probably preface this review by saying that I loved the Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 when it first came out. It was inexpensive, ultra-wide, and the best part, especially for a photographer like me who spends his nights out under the stars, is that it wasn’t afflicted with coma, an aberration that’s the bane of night-sky photographers (or at least this night-sky photographer). I bought my gold-ring Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 in 2011, and it’s been a workhorse of a lens ever since, although it’s suffered a fair amount of abuse at my hands. Despite me having no relationship with Samyang/Rokinon/Bower (all the same company, in case you were wondering), I’ve long recommended the brand to photographers who have taken my night-sky photography workshops and lessons.
Hopes and dreams
I was pretty excited when I heard that Samyang was releasing a “premium” version of this lens, the 14mm f/2.4. On their website, Samyang Lens Global boasted that this lens was a “premium manual focus photo lens designed for high resolution photoshoots.” And then they continued, “It has the unprecedented resolving power, matched with 50 megapixels photo and 8K video productions. The resolving power contains abundant pixel information.” Wow! Sign me up, right? Never mind the fact that I’m shooting with my old Canon 6D, with its puny 20-megapixel sensor.
What I really wanted from the lens were the following:
A reduction in astigmatism/field curvature, which was my main criticism of the original Rokinon 14mm f/2.8. The old lens tended to really elongate stars near the corner of the frame, which required either cropping or a lot of cloning work in post-processing.
A usable wide-open aperture. When I first began shooting with my old 14/2.8 I wasn’t terribly bothered by the softness at f/2.8, but as my skills as a photographer grew over time (and I began making larger prints) I realized the limitations of that lens at f/2.8 and began to shoot at f/4 more often, gaining a sharper overall image but losing a stop of light in the process.
A brighter overall frame (less vignetting). Making panoramas from my old 14/2.8 was problematic, as the edges of the frame were considerably darker than the center (even at f/4, unfortunately).
And that’s pretty much it. Although these seem like modest requirements, I hadn’t yet found a lens that met them in this price range ($999). And all this language about “unprecedented resolving power” made me wonder if I should open the lens’s box with gloves, lest I cut myself on the sharpness of the lens.
Initial thoughts
As mentioned before, the Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 SP retails for $999, versus $299 for the old f/2.8 version. Although this might sound like a big difference in price, I was willing to pay a premium (pun intended) for a lens with even small improvements over the older f/2.8 version. The first thing I noticed when I received the lens was the designation “SP” on the box, which I had somehow missed when ordering the lens. The SP stands for Special Performance. Perhaps the word “premium” didn’t fare as well in focus groups? (That pun not intended.)
Cool box, huh?
The Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 and the Rokinon 14mm f/2.4SP.
From an aesthetics standpoint, which I honestly care almost nothing about, the 14SP is a nice-looking lens and was clearly designed with Zeiss’s external look in mind. The focus ring is rubber, like the older version, but doesn’t have the grippy ridges of the old version. The front element is also larger, which probably accounts for the extra 200 grams of weight from the f/2.8 version to the f/2.4 version. The lens isn’t overly bulky, though, and feels fine on my Canon 6D. Unlike the older f/2.8 version, the SP version doesn’t have a manual aperture or manual aperture ring: The aperture is controlled electronically via the camera body.
The new 14mm f/2.4 SP weights in at 793 grams, or 1.74 pounds, with rear cap.The ol’ 14mm f/2.8 weighs in at 593 grams, or 1.3 pounds, with rear cap.
Although the weight of my gear isn’t as important to me as other factors, I was relieved that the 14 SP’s weight didn’t reach that of the Tamron 15-30 or the new Sigma 14mm f/1.8, which are around half a pound heavier.
Also worth noting, unfortunately, is that the lens does not mount smoothly to my 6D, unlike any other lens I’ve owned or have tried. Instead, there’s some metal-on-metal friction that eases halfway through the twist before becoming sticky again. The closest comparison I can make is when, years ago, I bought the cheapest set of macro tubes I could find on amazon. This is not a good sign.
Comparison methodology
For these comparison tests, I shot with the lenses on my Canon 6D. Mirror lockup was used, as was my tripod. Neither the camera nor the tripod were moved between shots. Focus was achieved manually, with live view zoomed in 10x on the same focus point for each lens. I was extremely careful not to touch the focus ring at all after achieving critical focus. I also used a wireless remote with my drive set to a 2-second timer to eliminate any chance of camera shake.
The photos below are both completely boring (it’s Oregon in the winter, what can I say?) and unedited, save for the default settings applied by Lightroom. All photos were exported as web-res jpegs with no output sharpening.
Initial tests
All right, let’s get to the good stuff. We’ve been cursed with cloudy skies for quite a while in my part of Oregon, so instead of taking the lens out for some star photography, I took the Rokinon 14mm SP for a quick trip down to a local park. For this first set of comparisons, I chose a particular tree far beyond the bridge, which is where I focused the lenses (see below). I did that to simulate the technique of focusing on a faraway object (like a star, for instance) while shooting at night.
The red arrow shows my focus point for all 3 lenses, and I’m estimating the focus point was around 70 feet away.
Here’s a comparison of the two photos, both taken at 1/25th of a second, ISO 100, f/2.8. I know many of you are probably wondering, why f/2.8? Well, I’m a star photographer, and this would primarily be a “star photography lens” for me. I have to see improvement in these wide apertures to justify making a purchase like this. If the full resolving power of the lens doesn’t kick in until f/5.6, it’s useless for my needs (although clearly not useless for most other needs, including landscape photography).
On the image below, move the slider right to see the 14SP’s photo, and move the slider left to see the older f/2.8’s photo.
Right away I noticed the following:
Slightly different fields of view (FOV), despite both lenses being 14mm, which could have to do with…
…less distortion for the 14SP. My next series of photos will better illustrate that the 14mm f/2.8’s infamous “moustache distortion” has been greatly reduced in the new lens. Strangely, the bridge structure appears flatter and more squat in the 14SP version, despite the fact that the older version seems to be a slightly wider lens. I was a little puzzled about that at first, but I think this is mostly a result of a decrease in moustache distortion. If you think about it, moustache distortion causes objects in the middle of the frame to arch upwards slightly. Since that’s been eliminated, I can only assume that buildings, mountains, and other tall, prominent objects will appear more diminished and flatter than the older version of this lens. The fact that moustache distortion could actually benefit landscape photographers who enjoy shooting mountains with an ultra-wide-angle lens was something I hadn’t really considered before.
The 14SP is a brighter lens, I’m estimating around 1/3 of a stop, with more contrast. The brightness may be partly due to the vignetting on the older f/2.8 being so extensive, which leads to my next point….
…less vignetting on the new lens, although some still exists.
I wanted some straight lines so that I could better see the differences between the two lenses as far as distortion goes, so I took the photos below, both shot at f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/30th of a second. The background was intentionally slightly blurred because I focused on a point on the far side of the bridge, which was only about 4 feet away: much too close for infinite depth of field at f/2.8, even at 14mm. Again, pull right to see the 14SP’s results.
Okay, so the new 14SP version clearly has less distortion. But something that really puzzled me on these were the out-of-focus (OOF) areas in the background: The SP’s OOF areas were far more OOF than the old 14’s, but only at the edges of the frame. The center background wasn’t quite as OOF. This inconsistency was my first real indication that something may have been wrong with the Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 SP.
I proceeded anyway, with the following photos, both taken at f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/250th of a second. Once again I focused on the same very far-away object for both photos, which meant I lost a little depth of field at the very front edge of my foreground. Again, pull right to see the 14SP.
Once again, we see that the 14 SP is brighter, with better contrast and less distortion. But when I started pixel peeping, I noticed some weirdness, which I’ll get to in just a moment, below. But to be honest, and this may sound a little foolish, I really didn’t buy this lens to shoot at f/2.8. I was really hoping to shoot the night sky with its wide-open aperture, f/2.4. After all, if this lens is indeed 1/3 of a stop brighter than the non-SP 14mm f/2.8, and if this lens is usable at f/2.4, we star photographers are gaining nearly a full stop of light (1/3 + 1/2 = 5/6).
So before we hang it up, let’s make this already highly unscientific comparison even more unscientific: Let’s take a look at f/2.4 on the new lens vs f/2.8 on the old, below. First some notes: Both shots metered the same. The exposure on the 14SP was 1/400th of a second; the exposure on the old f/2.8 version was 1/250th of a second. That’s 2/3 of a stop difference in shutter speed. These two photos were taken about two and a half minutes apart, so it’s entirely possible that the scene lightened or darkened slightly in that time. Again, slide to the right for the f/2.4 version.
I think the old Rokinon may have a slight edge in center brightness, but it appears that the new Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 SP may have a slight edge in the vignetting department. I thought about comparing 100% crops of these photos to illustrate what seemed to be a negligible difference in sharpness, but we should probably just go straight to…
The weirdness
Okay, back to the weirdness, and this is where this comparison is probably rendered useless. Here’s an approximate 100% crop from the area that I focused the lenses. Pull right to see the 14SP. (Note: The crops don’t line up exactly because the field of view and distortion in each lens are slightly different.)
So I thought these crops were pretty similar, with the 14SP again having slightly better contrast and being slightly brighter overall (which is a good thing for star photography). Here’s where things get weird. Again, pull right to see the 14SP. (Note: The crops don’t line up exactly because the field of view and distortion in each lens are slightly different.)
Huh? Clearly the Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 SP has a problem with the right side of the frame. If you look closely, just to the right of the playground equipment you can almost see the line where the resolution turns to mush.
Here’s a crop from the same photos, far-left side. (Again, pull right for the new 14SP.)
Okay, so the 14SP is still brighter and has a little more contrast. I think that the sharpness here is fairly comparable, and not at all like the right side of the frame, although the 14SP looks like it may be slightly worse as far as sharpness goes. Which begs the question: Is there also something wrong (just not as badly wrong as the right side) with the part of this lens that renders the left side? Or is this how this is supposed to look?
I’m not going to go to great lengths pondering those questions here because I returned that particular lens and will get a replacement. When I receive the replacement I’ll definitely continue comparing it so that I can upload the results from that. Suffice it to say that this was a disappointing experience.
*Update*I never did follow up to receive a second copy of this lensafter sending the first one back. However, I’m leaving this incomplete review in place because I thought it might be of some small use to photographers considering purchasing this lens.
My wholly incomplete conclusion
The results here may lead to more questions than they’ve answered. I’m not sure we can assume that this particular lens only performed badly on the right side, although that may be the case. It very well could be that the entire lens underperformed due to some optics being out of place.
Regardless, we’ve gotta wrap this up with something. So let’s revisit my earlier hopes and dreams for this lens, as follows:
Less astigmatism: Maybe? Less distortion, for sure, but we don’t know if that means less astigmatism for star photography yet. Mark this one “unresolved.”
A usable wide-open aperture: Also “unresolved.” I would need a better copy of this lens to say for sure. On this copy, f/2.4 seems to resemble f/2.8 on my old Rokinon lens pretty closely as far as vignetting and sharpness go, although the new lens has better color and contrast. If I considered f/2.8 on my old lens to be unusable, I would probably have to consider f/2.4 on the new lens unusable, although f/2.8 on the news lens seems to be a clear improvement. But is that enough?
A brighter overall frame: This is true at apertures f/2.8 and narrower. But again, not true at f/2.4. However, I’m not sure how much vignetting can be influenced by out-of-alignment optics, so again, I’ll mark this “unresolved.”
Look, I know it’s unusual to have a usable wide-open aperture on an ultra-wide angle lens, and many photographers assume that they’re going to have to stop down for best performance. Truly, only star photographers hope to use these wide-open apertures. But interest in star photography and Milky Way photography seems to be growing at a pretty rapid rate, and Samyang will continue to have more competition in the fast, ultra-wide-angle lens market, as we’ve seen over the past year. If you’re only going to improve upon an existing product by an aperture value of a half stop, you’d better hope that half stop is usable.
Last year, during a trip to Italy with my family, we spent a few days at a bed-and-breakfast on the side of Mt Vesuvius, up-mountain from the coastal town of Herculaneum. When we first arrived in our tiny rental car, entering through a large motorized swinging gate after being buzzed in, an elderly Italian woman who spoke no English greeted us. She lived onsite, on the upper floor of their impressive tri-level square house, with its acre of land and an impressive garden. The middle and lower floor (where we stayed) were dedicated to lodgers. The house was a gigantic white box with a square white roof, black railings, and a circular turret facing the west that offered commanding views of Mt Vesuvius, Herculaneum, Naples, and the Bay of Naples.
On our first night there, I entreated the woman who owned the house to allow me to take some photos from the roof. She spoke almost no English, and my Italian was limited to around 20 words, exactly zero of which had anything to do with photography, but I waved my camera and pointed and bastardized some Spanish words until I got my point across. She stopped her gardening, wiped her hands on her housecoat, and led me up a creaky wooden staircase on the interior of the house. At the time, I didn’t realize this would require going through her third floor—I assumed the roof could be reached via an exterior tightly-wound circular staircase. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
As we got closer to the top of the stairs, I could hear a baritone voice belting out something in Italian. We walked through her front door and she shuffled ahead quickly, attempting to close the gaping bathroom door before I got an eyeful of her husband (or lover?), who was doing his best Pavarotti impression in the shower. Regret filled me to the bursting point. I did my best “Oh hey, what’s that on the ceiling?” impression, and she quickly waved me through the kitchen and out onto a balcony overlooking the garden, where I found the circular staircase leading to the roof.
So the next day, during an approaching storm, I was more than reluctant to ask her if I could go back up on her roof. Instead, outside of the gate of their property and a few hundred feet down a gravelly street was a large, unfinished concrete structure—three floors! All I had to do was jump across a ditch, avoid various construction supplies laying around, and climb its skeleton structure to the second floor, which was conveniently sheltered from both rain and lightning (I thought, anyway).
Watching the storm roll in over the bay around sunset was surreal. I spent over an hour on my concrete perch, watching the day turn to twilight with the glow of orange-yellow city lights flickering to life, and finally to night. So much seemed to be happening: The sun setting, with its residual glow, cruise ships entering and leaving the bay, and an endless stream of car traffic. Lightning crashed around me the entire time. Eventually I left and ran to get my wife and kids, despite it being past their bedtime. The show was too good to miss.
Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples, and Naples, as seen from the second floor of an unfinished house on the side of Mt Vesuvius. (Click for full size.)
During the final days of my family’s trip to Italy, we stayed at an apartment set directly in the middle of a dusty olive grove on the outside of Vieste, on Italy’s Gargano peninsula. The place was so clean and new, smelling so strongly of fresh paint, we suspected we were the unit’s first occupants, a suspicion confirmed when we discovered that the owners had forgotten several items of importance, including a trash can.
Despite the seemingly endless beaches just a mile away, one of my fondest memories of the trip was sitting outside of our apartment in 90-degree heat, eating sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil that had been pressed the day before by our host family.
But my second fondest memory involved the afternoons my wife and kids and I spent hiding under brightly colored, oversized umbrellas and occasionally risking splashing around in the shallow waters of the Spiagga del Castello (Castle Beach). I was captivated by the beauty of the vertical white cliffs that erupted from the seaside to support the city’s old town, as well as the iconic beach monolith Pizzomunno, which stands around 80 feet tall.
While lying on a recliner on the beach I wasn’t entirely sure that I could get up to this photo’s vantage point. But one morning, while in a delirium after a full night of long-exposure photography, I decided to attempt a sunrise photo.
The first step was to find a place nearby to park my rental car, which proved to be a harder task than I first realized on the one-car-wide cobblestone streets of the old town. After parking, it was just a matter of walking uphill and occasionally checking Google Maps. I then found myself at a 6-foot-tall iron gate that blocked off the parking area of a condominium.
Not being one to balk at gates, especially in the pre-dawn of one of the longest days of the year, I climbed over and walked into the apartment’s parking lot. The parking garage itself was couched in the side of the hill, so again I scrambled up the dirt on the side of the garage before I found my way up to its roof.
And there was my view. I cautiously picked my way through some thorny weeds, approached the edge, set up my tripod, and began to shoot. After a series of panoramas, I began to imagine the small section of land I was standing on cleaving and falling 120 feet to the beach below, which led to me losing my nerve a bit.
I decided to get out before I got kicked out, so I packed up my gear and turned to go, only to see an old woman sitting on her apartment balcony. Apparently, she had been watching me the whole time.
The resort town of Vieste unfolds below this clifftop view. Click for larger view.
Welcome to the Profitis Ilias Chapel, on Milos, a Greek Island in the Cyclades. I had scouted this location during the day, which required skirting a farmer’s field, passing by some crumbling stone walls, and then hiking nearly straight up the side of a hill that overlooked the large bay in the center of the U-shaped island. The trail was overgrown and, well, let’s just be real for a moment—scratchy. The trail was scratchy, and it scratched my legs all up.
When I came back that night, it was much cooler and much buggier, but equally as scratchy. The previously unoccupied field was now occupied by a Greek farmer shepherding a fairly large herd of goats across the trail. Although I tried to keep my distance, the farmer didn’t look too happy about me deciding to visit the chapel beyond the bounds of daylight. Or maybe he was worried that I was going to spook his goats. Or maybe he was considering whether he’d have pork or chicken souvlaki for dinner, I honestly couldn’t really read his facial expression or body language that well in the dark.
Once I got past the goat herd and herder, I headed back up the hill to the chapel. I spent about an hour up there taking photos. For being on such a high promontory (by this island’s standards, anyway), the air was still and calm, just a slight cool breeze to make the mosquitoes work for their meal.
If I stood on the cool whitewashed barrier and threw myself off of it, down the hill, I’d eventually end up not far from where the Venus de Milo was discovered in 1820, by a local farmer. If I continued rolling down that hill, I’d eventually come to rest at an old Roman amphitheater that’s in the process of being restored. It was, and still is, a magnificent venue with an incredible panoramic view of the bay behind the main stage. In fact, the whole island was littered with Roman ruins. If you look carefully on the right side of the photo, you can see half a dozen whitewashed Roman columns just lying around. One of the columns was built into the church, on the left side of the door. On the back side of the chapel you can see evidence of how a fallen column was used as the base of the church.
In the present day, if I continued going downhill from the Roman amphitheater, which was below where the Venus de Milo was found, which was below this tiny chapel on a hill, I’d get to a small village that hosted at least half a dozen barking dogs. This village is just barely visible on the far left side of the photo, and you can see a bunch of anchored boats floating in the harbor by it. This tiny village built by the bay had about half a dozen syrma in it, colorful little boat garages built right next to the water. As idyllic as that scene is, I wouldn’t want to live there, because seemingly half the town’s residents are dogs that bark all night.
Behind and to the right of the chapel, you can see Plaka, or Milos’ old town. This is ground zero for the island’s nightly traffic jam, which occurs when people try to drive into the old town, only to realize that the streets are too narrow to allow for cars and that all the nearby parking is full.
About an hour past sunset, the large LED panel that lights the outside of the chapel turns on. It’s solar powered, and its battery is likely fully charged after a day spent in the hot sun. On the inside of the chapel, both day and night, candles burn.
The Profitis Ilias Chapel on the Greek island of Milos sits beneath clear skies at twilight. Click for a larger view. Prints available (use the contact me form). Licensing available here.
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.
Twilight photos
