Summertime at Crater Lake tends to be either perfectly clear or hopelessly cloudy, and the few days I spent at the lake this past summer were no exception. In reality, what I was seeking was a perfect mix of clear and cloudy, enough clouds to blow up with color in the pre-dawn light and provide some mysterious drama, but enough clear patches to have a sprinkling of stars shining through. Of course my best-of-both-worlds hopes didn’t materialize, so I’ll happily attempt to get that shot another time: it’s just another excuse to make a trip to Crater Lake.
Technical details:
This is three exposures taken chronologically as follows: The first was taken for the stars, the second was taken for the sky, and the third was taken for the land, all before the sunrise.
Other notes:
In the next couple of weeks I’ll be announcing my 2016 workshop schedule, which will include either one or two workshops at Crater Lake in which I’ll cover my techniques for sunset, twilight, and full-on night photography. I’ll be covering these techniques via lecture in a classroom setting, then field work at Crater Lake National Park, and then back to the classroom for post-processing.
If you’re interested in learning these techniques from me, I urge you to sign up for my workshop newsletter over here. These workshops are set up in a small-group format, and I try to teach my techniques both as a technical and as an artistic (fine art) endeavor.
Additionally, if you prefer to strap on some snowshoes and capture Crater Lake with a coat of white snow, I am available for private lessons this winter at Crater Lake–message me for details.
Crater Lake’s rim glows in the pre-dawn light as stars sparkle overhead. Prints available here. Click for larger view.
“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.
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.
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.
This photo, like all of my images that I took this night, was from the Crater Lake’s west rim. I and my friends Jack (of Jack Crocker photography–check him out) and Robyn Clipfell (of Clipfell Photography–check her out as well) hefted heavy packs and snowshoed a little over 3 miles from the Rim Village to a site just a bit south of The Watchman, the giant peak on Crater Lake’s west side.
Getting the Shot
This photo was taken at 4:56 am, just 12 minutes after I had taken the final photograph for my panorama, and it’s a fantastic example of how important dark skies are in capturing the Milky Way. Cameras and lenses? Both very important. But the MOST important aspect of lotsa-stars-Milky-Way-photography is a super-dark sky.
I knew from checking the Internet that the sun was going to rise at about 6:30, and I knew from experience that the sky begins to lighten in the east about 2 hours before the sun is visible. So when I started shooting my panorama of Crater Lake at about 4:17, I wanted to make sure that I got my east-facing shots first, since that area of the sky would begin to lighten first, thus drowning out the Milky Way. Luckily, I just barely got my panorama photos taken in time. (Yes, it actually took me a long, freezing half hour to take those photos.)
Twelve minutes later I took this photo, the last of my “night” photos. The stars disappeared pretty rapidly after that.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d also captured the comet PANSTARRS in my photo. An eagle-eyed reader on my facebook page alerted me to this fact. In the images below, the arrow points to a very, very small PANSTARRS, complete with tail.
The wizard dreams in black and white: Crater Lake’s Wizard Island under the Milky Way
Getting There
This photo was taken at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon in early February. Crater Lake receives over 40 feet of snow a year, so, if you’re planning on visiting, keep in mind that showshoes or cross-country skis are pretty much required, unless, of course, you love sinking up to your mid-thigh in snow with every step. Also, all-wheel-drive or 4-wheel-drive transportation is needed for the snow-covered and ice-covered roads on the way there.
The great thing about visiting Crater Lake in the winter is that there’s no park entrance fee. Of course, there’s only one entrance to the park that’s plowed, and that’s on the southeast side. The other cool thing is that backcountry permits are also free, and you basically have the entire awesome park all to yourself, since 99.9% of the sane people hop in their cars after the sun goes down and the weather turns cold.
Getting the Shot
This shot was taken at about 6 am after a long night of snowshoeing and photographing the night sky. I fell asleep in my tent sometime around 2 am, shortly after the moon had risen. My plan was to awaken around 5:30 am, when the Milky Way had rotated around to the northeast side of the lake and the moon would be illuminating Wizard Island. This would still be 2 hours prior to the sunrise (which, of course, would occur in the east, near where the Milky Way would be), and I was hoping the sky would still be dark. Unfortunately, my phone battery died earlier that night, and I couldn’t figure out how to correctly set the alarm on my watch (seriously). Exhausted, I gave up mashing buttons in the dark and went to bed, hoping that my “you’re missing an awesome shot” alarm would wake me at 5:30 am.
Instead, it woke me at 6:00 am, just a little late. I unzipped my tent, and the view was breathtaking (and it wasn’t just the altitude). The moonlight caused the lake to absolutely glow. I hopped out of my tent, threw on my unlaced boots, and post-holed 25 feet away from my tent to get the image. I didn’t bother putting on snowshoes, and snow was stuffed inside my unlaced boots and up my pants.
The image was pretty much exactly what I had anticipated, except for the fact that, an hour and a half prior to the sun hitting the horizon, you could see the very beginnings of the sun beginning to blot out the stars near the horizon in the middle and right side of the photo near the horizon. In a way, I felt like the sun’s first light creeping into the photo added to the picture. I’d recently seen a series of composite photos by a photographer who was combining images of various places taken during the day with an image taken at night. I felt like I had done that in one shot—here was the Milky Way in all its glory, and you could actually see the very first rays of the sun to reach the sky that morning.
My settings for the photo were 14mm, f/4, 30 seconds, at 4000 ISO.
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