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Waking up, I glanced at the clock. It was 3:49AM. The kids were sleeping peacefully in our room at Yosemite Lodge.
I dressed for winter, and headed out into the night. The paths were icy but the stars were crisp and bright.
I made my way to a clearing in the woods below Yosemite Falls....
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As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave.
To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all’s well that ends well, well worth it!
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Many of my night photos are created in homage to Vincent van Gogh, who wrote in a letter to his brother Theo, “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.”
The star swirl in this image seems particularly van Gogh, so I thought I’d name this one Starry Night, after one of his most famous works....
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Against the backdrop of pounding surf and a light mist on the ocean, I photographed star trails behind Point Reyes Lighthouse in this portrait of the edge of night....
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The north fork of the Point Reyes peninsula stretches through historic dairy farms and rolling green hills towards Tomales Point. Caught between the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay,
this spit of land faces across the water towards Bodega Head and the northward marches of the California coast.....
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Photographers often ask me how to get the right exposure with night landscapes. It’s a tricky topic. My experience is that the light meter in my dSLR is pretty much worthless for anything that is dark enough to need an exposure of longer than about 15 seconds at ISO 100. This can be OK for night cityscapes, which typically come in at between 15-30 seconds at ISO 100. But it does mean that the internal light meter is useless in darker landscape situations.
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Coming up the trail from Kirby Cove, it was fully night. Not a pitch black night, because there was a sliver moon and light pollution from the bridge and city. But as dark as it was going to get.
Up on the fortifications of the Marin Headlands, I decided to see how long a time exposure I could make of the Golden Gate Bridge.
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If you look at the Exif data for this image, you can verify for yourself that this was a long exposure, thirty seconds, with the 10.5mm digital fisheye lens wide open at f/2.8. But it really doesn’t look like a long exposure in almost complete darkness should look. In fact, I bet if you were shown this photo and didn’t know any better,
you would think it was taken in the daytime, perhaps the late afternoon (with the incoming storm). Read more |
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Photographing at night can be literally a trip into the unknown, dark and impenetrable. Often you can see neither your photographic subject nor your camera controls. You may be flailing around in the murk and gloom, at some risk of tripping over
obstacles or falling down unseen cliffs. Read more |
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OK, let’s start with two questions. Would you think this photo was taken into almost complete night?
And why would someone go to a great deal of trouble to hike out into the wilds somewhere,
mount their camera on a tripod, and take a long time exposure into total darkness?
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