Taking infrared photos often doesn’t give you a lot to work with in post-processing; if you’re only allowing a very small portion of invisible light and NO visible light to reach your camera sensor, the results are going to be fairly limiting, from an exposure, contrast, and color perspective. Those of us who shoot infrared realize this, which is my many infrared shooters choose to convert their photos to monochrome. This also is why the vast majority of infrared shooters take photos during the day.
But the results that can be achieved by shooting infrared at night can be…well…interesting. I took this infrared panorama in April of 2017, and you can see many of the familiar objects of the night sky. Notable is the bright Antares (mid right), which still looks the red-orange color you’ve come to expect. However, you can also see how strangely infrared rendered the rest of the night sky. Airglow seems to disappeared entirely. And of course the spring vegetation in the desert has fluoresced into some really interesting colors.
Plants fluoresce and an oddly-colored Milky Way shine brightly in the sky over Joshua Tree National Park, California, in this panorama. For licensing or prints, please use the “Contact Me” form on the right side of the page.
Like a fool, earlier this summer I decided to start following up with for-profit companies and individuals who were using my photos for free, some of them for years at a time. (I have no idea why I didn’t do this during our amazingly rainy winter and spring, but, alas, I waited for the good weather to begin this project.) Although I had occasionally exchanged emails with some prior infringers, I hadn’t launched any sort of full-scale email campaign, which is what I’ve been up to (other than my Crater Lake workshop) over nearly the past month.
So, rather than going outside into the bright sunshine and enjoying my summer (or at least getting some much-needed yard work done), I’m scouring the Internet, drafting emails, and then replying (and replying and replying) to reply emails.
Although I’ve had a couple of reasonably pleasant experiences in dealing with infringers, for the most part it’s a little like going down the rabbit hole into a universe where culpability doesn’t exist, where copyright theft is committed by no-longer-with-us interns, rogue website builders, or just people who don’t want to take a few seconds to see if the image that they want to prominently place on their website’s home page may in fact actually be copyrighted. The same excuses keep cropping up over and over again until you know how the infringers will reply before they even reply. It’s disheartening, to say the least, and an activity not unlike reading the comments on news stories online: If your faith humanity has been shaken, you’re not going to re-solidify your faith here.
This accountability blitz started when, after reviewing some records, I realized that I haven’t licensed much imagery in the past year. Weird, I thought to myself, maybe no one really is interested in using my photos to promote their business anymore. Of course, a quick google search immediately proved that to not be the case. Instead, what people wanted was to use my photos without paying for them, a subtle but important distinction.
In the past, I’ve been criticized by members of the photography community for placing watermarks on my photos. As a result, I’ve spent way more time than I should’ve trying to find a balance between making sure that my copyright can be seen and trying not to make it obtrusive. It’s not easy. And believe me, I would rather not mark them at all, but with “I didn’t know it was copyrighted” being such a rampant excuse for theft, it seems more necessary than ever.
What’s most surprising, to me anyway, is the members of the creative community who have used my photo to promote their services. As someone who creates and uses my own music on my website, blog, and videos, I’ll never understand that.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes.
Photo Details
“Against the night”
“Against the night,” a rock spire stands against the galactic core of the Milky Way, southern Utah, spring of 2017. Click the photo to view it full size.
I took this vertical panorama this spring, with my full-spectrum Canon 6D and a Rokinon 35 mm f/1.4 lens. This is a total of 6 shots, 3 focus-stacked and 3 for vertical height, each taken at ISO 6400 for 15 seconds. (My aperture was unrecorded, although it was probably either f/2 or f/2.8.) I panned upward using my Nodal Ninja 4, which I love. The photo was taken in southern Utah.
I’m going to give it to you straight: Over the past year and a half I’ve fallen in love with panoramas, which now make up the bulk of the landscape photos that I publish. Following the “if a little bit is good, more is better” rule, creating landscape panoramas seemed like a natural step after spending years capturing an ultra-wide, 14-mm field of view. I suppose the next step is full 180-degree x 360-degree virtual panoramic tours, although I haven’t made that leap quite yet.
In my experience, after a certain period of familiarity with a particular lens or focal length, you start to more easily “see” your composition in that focal length. For me, I had become very used to “seeing” and understanding the ultra-wide 14-16mm range. One thing that I never liked about that range, however, was the distortion (particularly at 14mm, and particularly at night).
One advantage of taking panoramas, however, is that I can have an incredibly wide field of view but don’t have to deal with the ultra-wide-angle distortion resulting from using lenses like my trusty Rokinon 14mm f/2.8. The resulting panoramas are highly detailed and printable in large sizes at great resolution, which is really great, since I like making really big prints. And I can fit so much stuff in my composition. The disadvantages? Well, first of all, there’s so much stuff in my compositions. If you think uncluttering your foreground at 14mm is challenging, try it with a sweeping 180-degree field of view. And of course, sometimes putting panos together can vary anywhere from “Wow, Lightroom makes this easy now!” to “I’ve spent 6 hours on this and I’m still masking out stitching errors.” And the final disadvantage is that it took me a long time to really be able to “see” my panorama compositions in-field, particularly at night. In fact, that’s something I still struggle with, although this particular trip helped me quite a bit.
With that said, the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages for me, at least now. And I’m always looking for new challenges—it’s one of the things that I really enjoy about night-sky photography, and for a long time now creating panoramas of the Milky Way has been a huge challenge for me.
Because the Milky Way lies relatively low on the horizon in the spring (in the northern hemisphere, where I live), because it has a nice arch to it, and because the landscape at Arches National Park is so, well, in-your-face grandiose, I thought my 6-day trip to Arches would be a great time to focus on documenting the dark skies over the park with huge panoramas. And so I did.
After a no-holds-barred, I’m-only-stopping-for-restroom-breaks-when-my-car’s-nearly-out-of-gas, 15-hour drive from Oregon, I arrived at Arches to find spectacularly clear skies, and so I immediately got to work in the Windows area, despite my fatigue. It quickly became clear that North Window offered very little opportunity for imaging the Milky Way, so I moved on to South Window. I started off by climbing into the window. My compositions were extremely limited here, though, so I climbed down and found another angle to capture South Window (below). For this shot, I clambered up a little slickrock and tucked myself into a dark corner. Had I waited another half an hour or so, I’m sure the Milky Way would’ve climbed over South Window. But I wanted to move on.
The Milky Way appears over Arches National Park’s South Window. Comet 252P/LINEAR can be seen as a green dot in the sky in the upper-right of the panorama. The Rho Ophiuchi region can be seen at the rocky edge along the panorama’s right side. Also note the mix of green and red airglow in the sky (as well as the unfortunate light pollution from Moab, nearby).
I then moved on to Turret Arch and quickly scouted out a composition. Although I had hoped to be able to shoot the Milky Way through the arch, based on some online scouting prior to my visit I had a suspicion that it wouldn’t line up. My suspicion was quickly confirmed. Instead I decided to move in really close. Taking the “turret” metaphor too far, in my mind, I had imagined the arching Milky Way as the trail of some fiery object hurled by trebuchet from a more-northern war-like arch. Luckily the charge fell just short of Turret Arch’s ramparts.
The Milky Way appears over Arches National Park’s Turret Arch. Comet 252P/Linear can seen as a green dot in the sky in the middle-upper-right of the panorama. Prints available.
Dramatic post-script bonus story!
As I was standing in the dark, taking the final row of the Turret Arch panorama, I noticed a faint bobbing of light getting closer from the parking lot. Eventually, the bobbing light walked stopped about 25 feet away from me. Of course, I couldn’t see who I was addressing, but I made leap in logic and assumed they were human, called “hello,” and mentioned that I only had two frames left and then I would be done. The voice in the dark replied that was fine and that he’d wait where he was standing. About 20 seconds later, after my penultimate frame, I heard the unmistakable thud and clatter of both a body and some metallic photography equipment colliding with rock. I turned on my head lamp and rushed over to help the man, who had tripped and ostensibly fallen on his face. His glasses were badly bent several feet away from him, and the man was bleeding considerably from a cut (most likely caused by his glasses) on the bridge of his nose.
“Am I bleeding?” he asked, still on his hands and knees and dripping blood, unable to see at night without his glasses. A couple dozen blobs of blood on the ground confirmed that yes, he was bleeding. (Here’s an illustrative tweet, for those of you who must see.) Luckily the man had a handkerchief in his pocket, and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly as soon as he applied pressure. After he got up he insisted he was okay and that he was heading back to his car in the parking lot, where he had another pair of glasses. Selfishly, I told him if he’d wait 20 seconds I’d take my final frame and assist him to the parking lot, but he started off without me. I quickly finished my panorama and tried to catch up with him, just to make sure he didn’t wipe out again, but he was quite a bit ahead of me.
Infrared
