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While shooting quiet scenery in an old train yard at night a freight train appeared out of the blue and made the shot.
The forecast for Northern Lights was looking excellent so I decided to drive north of the city to see what I could see.
As I was driving I could see a Red Alert email from Aurora Watch, so I thought I was in for a good show.
No moon until after midnight, clear skies, no wind. Couldn't be better.
And I got there.... and nothing :(
There must have been a good show somewhere, but not from here.
I got a few shots of the stars at least so it wasn't a total waste.
Another bonus was a coyote sang me a little song for a short time.
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Reflections in the harbour evening/night, Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England.
Since I was on the subject of vintage theaters I figured I'd post this night shot of what is formerly known as the Strand theater. I posted a day shot of the full facade of the building several posts back. As you can see the theater is now a boring Walgreens store, well actually it's the prettiest Walgreens I've seen.
I need to invest in a wide angle lens. It was a bit challenging using the 35mm to capture whole buildings with the streets of Key West being small and narrow. I was unable to capture the entire building in the frame like I wanted to but on the next run I will.
Chester is very beautiful city and its even better at night time around Christmas. The above image was taken as a 7x HDR shot processed using Adobe Lightroom and the new Photomatix v5.0 using the exposure blending option (to give the most natural HDR shot possible).
Normally when I post a photo I take time to describe it, or something that struck me worthy of mention when I took it. This time, I've decided to try something a bit different . Since getting into night photography, especially mountain scenes I’m often asked about what it’s like to hike up in the dark and cold. A recent trip to Mayflower Gulch and the Boston Mine was a perfect opportunity to try share this experience.
This post will be the first of three consecutive installments describing a recent nighttime hike to the Boston Mine. My goal is describe for you what one of these adventures is like, but since the write up got a bit long I broke it up into three parts.
Part one:
I had the pleasure of joining Brad McGinley, Mike Berenson, Darren White and Cooper the Wonder Dog last weekend on a trek up Mayflower Gulch to the Boston Mine tram. The tram sits approximately 12,400’ above sea level about 1400’ about tree line and most importantly at the time about 2000’ above the parking area. A well planned trip by Mike had us leaving the parking area at 10:30 PM Friday night and arriving at the top around 30 minutes into the next day. I’d done this hike twice before in the winter and the hiking conditions can range from easy to brutal. Fortunately, the photography gods were (mostly) with us this evening as we were met with hard packed snow. Weather-wise conditions were about as you would expect for being above tree line at 1:00 AM in April. Cold, gusty winds and clouds whipping by overhead at blazing speed.
If you’ve never been to this location it’s basically a long meadow surrounded by 13,000 foot mountains on 3 sides, which do a pretty good job of blocking most of the wind from the valley floor. From the parking area you hike the first 2 miles under tree cover on a jeep road which always seems to be an easy hike as far as snow pack goes. Everyone is forced to use this portion of the trail, so it’s always packed snow and sheltered from the wind by the pine trees. This ends at tree line and dumps you out at several miner cabin ruins which are photogenic in and of themselves, but our quest was further on this night. The hike to the top from this point is a well-defined trail in summer and nonexistent in winter. In the past we’ve been: faced with cutting our own trail through deep powder which proved to be too much, and 1” of ice crust over soft snow which nearly proved too much (about 3 – 10 steps and then post hole – even with snow shoes). But on this night the snow was nice and packed. Snowshoes were helpful, but not necessary.
Another phenomenon once leaving the protection of the trees was the wind was free to have its way with us. We had layers and hiking up is always the warmest part of the trip. We’d have to cross the standing around up there when the time came, but at this point no issue with us, but I got nervous for Cooper. I had discussed with Brad (who has far more dog hiking experience than I) beforehand and had asked him if he had a dog jacket from his hiking days with his dog Annie. That didn’t pan out, but we took an extra jacket and put it on Cooper, zipping it over his body and tying the arms in front of his legs. This worked pretty well and he seemed grateful for the protection. I’ll point out that Cooper is a Labra-Doodle and normally has long fur (hair?) which was cut about a month ago so he was less protected than normal.
Our pace to the top was casual, but we had plenty of time. Our main goal for the night was to catch the Milky Way above the mountains, which would begin about 2 AM. It’s only a mile to the tram from the cabins, but man it’s a long mile. Many breath catching breaks were taken along the way. I think both Cooper and Brad wished for less stopping and more walking, but they were outnumbered.
The lighting on this night was somewhat peculiar, and was the cause of strange sensations. There was no moon on this night, but there was a glow to the area which allowed enough light to see. In fact, Brad kept his light off once we were out of tree line. I’m sure this was due to the fact that everything was covered in white except the steepest of the surrounding mountains and what little light there was bouncing off all sides. Plus, there was a decent amount of light pollution reflecting off the cloud when they were overhead. All of this contributed to this weird phenomenon that made it seem like we were approaching our target, though unable to reach it. For example, there’s a distinct edge or seam where the (relatively) flat meadow turns to steep mountainside which we could see this plain as day. It looked to be only a couple hundred feet away, but no matter how far we walked it remained unreachable. I’m not sure why that was, but we all felt it and discussed it several times…..
Stay tuned for part two coming shortly:
