@camutisphoto
POLARIS ( North Star) AT YOUR RIGHT
Being in a low luminosity zone is a photographer´ s dream , including mine . Both my group and my teachers insisted ad nauseam that getting this kind of shot would take no less than 4 hours, and could never be done from Arches National Park, to boot. So I turned away from my naysayers and sought direction from the time-honored maxim, “fortune favors the prepared mind”, and spent the months leading up to the workshop hitting the nighttime photography books. I unearthed the wisdom I sought nestled within their pages - precisely how to catch these star trails.
On the day of this shot, my group, with teachers in tow, trekked off en masse to some other sandy spot (Milky Way shot opp page I had from night before) leaving me to my own happy devices in the midst of a cosmic desert. For an hour and half, the true night sky of the desert enveloped me in an emptiness unconfined by our inexorable modern-day light pollution. The twinkling abyss above me was a canvass bedecked with endless rivers of stars – wholly unimaginable if you’re not standing smack dab under them. It’s just magic, deafening silence…startling and beyond belief when the infinity and dimension of it all hits you: at the very least you feel the omnipresence of the All Powerful.
I set up my tripod and framed my shot, used my smartphone to locate Polaris to ensure concentric circling, calculated hyperfocal distances, manually focusing at infinity. The Arches’ iconic Balance Rock soaring as focal point, and manually “swabbed with color” over one of the multiple shots emerged twenty-four 2.5-minute exposures later (helped along by some post-production cajoling) - an imposing image.
POLARIS ( North Star) AT YOUR RIGHT
Being in a low luminosity zone is a photographer´ s dream , including mine . Both my group and my teachers insisted ad nauseam that getting this kind of shot would take no less than 4 hours, and could never be done from Arches National Park, to boot. So I turned away from my naysayers and sought direction from the time-honored maxim, “fortune favors the prepared mind”, and spent the months leading up to the workshop hitting the nighttime photography books. I unearthed the wisdom I sought nestled within their pages - precisely how to catch these star trails.
On the day of this shot, my group, with teachers in tow, trekked off en masse to some other sandy spot (Milky Way shot opp page I had from night before) leaving me to my own happy devices in the midst of a cosmic desert. For an hour and half, the true night sky of the desert enveloped me in an emptiness unconfined by our inexorable modern-day light pollution. The twinkling abyss above me was a canvass bedecked with endless rivers of stars – wholly unimaginable if you’re not standing smack dab under them. It’s just magic, deafening silence…startling and beyond belief when the infinity and dimension of it all hits you: at the very least you feel the omnipresence of the All Powerful.
I set up my tripod and framed my shot, used my smartphone to locate Polaris to ensure concentric circling, calculated hyperfocal distances, manually focusing at infinity. The Arches’ iconic Balance Rock soaring as focal point, and manually “swabbed with color” over one of the multiple shots emerged twenty-four 2.5-minute exposures later (helped along by some post-production cajoling) - an imposing image.