Getting The Shot
The first time I saw a picture of this place I wondered if it was some kind of combination of photo and painting fantasy. An artist’s rendition of a fantastic place.
When I learned it was real, I wanted to go there, but doubted that I ever would. And then, maybe 20 years later, the opportunity to go came up and I grabbed it.
Getting there was an adventure. I took a 5 hour flight straight south from Orlando to Medellin where I spent two days just because I was very curious about the place called the city of eternal spring. It did not disappoint.
Then I spent two days in Bogota and really, one day might have been enough. Then I flew 6 hours straight south to one of my very favorite cities, Buenos Aires. I was able to arrange a 5 hour layover in the downtown airport so I grabbed a taxi and spent a Sunday afternoon in the famous San Telmo market. From there it’s another 3 hour flight straight south to El Calafate and from El Calafate it’s a four hour bus drive to Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. So yeah, you really have to want to get there. But after 14 hours of airplanes and multiple taxi and bus rides I was there and it was even better than the photos. In other words, not quite believable.
It was April, which is autumn in the southern hemisphere and in Patagonia the sun comes up late. This photo was taken at sunrise.
You can’t actually see the Torres del Paine. Those are three granite towers that soar behind the formations you see here. They are obscured by both the clouds and the mountains in front. Those magnificent formations are the Cuernos. The horns. And the Torres del Paine means Towers of the Sky. For a week I photographed El Torres and Los Cuernos from every angle I could find at sunset and sunrise and sometimes in between. At different times I fall in love with different photos from those days. Right now I’m in love with this one. The mountains there catch the clouds coming in off the Pacific. So there is almost always some interesting interplay of clouds and light. And it changes fast. Every few moments the winds blow the clouds and a different look appears. So it’s the same mountains and yet now quite the same.
Patagonia is a wonderful wild part of the world and this is one of its crown jewels. My heart sings to me because I was privileged to travel there and take this photo.
My Most Popular Image Was Also My Most Difficult
Milky Way panorama arching over The Fins rock formation in Arches National Park, Utah. Stunning desert night sky astrophotography showcasing the galaxy above iconic sandstone fins.
Unlike my first two blogs, I didn’t have to go to the ends of the earth to capture this image. Getting to Southern Utah is a LOT easier than either Patagonia or Northern Alaska. Almost 40 years ago when my wife was pregnant with our first child, we visited Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon in Southwestern Utah, and then we visited Monument Valley in Southeastern Utah, and that was my total previous experience with Southern Utah. There are 5 national parks across Southern Utah. They’re known as the Mighty 5. And 3 of them were still on my bucket list. On this trip I crossed the remaining 3 off the list. Capitol Reef, Arches and Canyonlands. They are each dramatic in their own way.
For this shot I left my hotel in Moab at about 2:30 AM. Yes, it’s difficult to get up and out. There is a small silver lining though. No one is staffing the entry booth at the park so no fees, no timed entry reservations.
The ideal time of the month to shoot the Milky Way is during the new moon and the roughly 1 week before and after it. The Milky Way is very dim. If the moon is anything more than a sliver it just creates too much light to effectively shoot the Milky Way. The ideal time of year to shoot the Milky Way arch is in the spring when the Milky Way appears low enough to the horizon in a nearly horizontal plane from our perspective. That gets it close enough to the horizon to shoot the whole arch and get some foreground in.
On top of all of this you need to be situated in a very dark place - Arches is an International Dark Sky Park - with no clouds in the sky. And though Arches is in the desert, that doesn’t mean it’s always cloudless. One previous trip I made to the Southwest desert resulted in days of overcast skies. No rain and no Milky Way photos.
But this trip was a lot luckier. The skies were cloudless at just the right time.
All of this, and more, went into the planning for this shot. I had some help from various websites and phone apps to get everything lined up, including how the Milky Way would line up with my chosen foreground.
All of this planning resulted in me standing in the chilly dark at 3 AM in Arches National Park in late April wearing warm clothes and a headlamp setting my camera up on a star tracker mounted on a tripod. The planning for this shot took months. Sometimes it’s all for naught because you can’t predict weather very far in advance. But this time it had all worked out. I had all the necessary gear, I was in the right spot. Now what?
The Milky Way is very dim. To shoot it requires special techniques, plural, and special gear. I mentioned the star tracker above. The earth moves and so, relative to me, the Milky Way would be moving the sky relatively quickly. To get a clear shot of the Milky Way requires a long exposure. But if the camera, or the subject, move during a long exposure, the result is blurry. Even a 10 second exposure of the Milky Way can slightly blur the stars. To get a really sharp image you need the camera to move in sync with the stars. That’s what a star tracker can do for you. For this image I took multiple shots of 90 seconds each.
If that sounds like a long time, when you’re standing alone in the dark, it is. And I didn’t take just one picture. The Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon. It’s possible to use an extremely wide angle lens to get it all in one shot, but with that comes a great deal of crazy distortion. For this shot I took 6 side by side shots which I later merged using special software for the purpose to create the panorama of the Milky Way arch. But that’s only half of the photo!
Next I took the foreground photos. Arriving at my spot at roughly 3 AM, between set up, test shots to get everything in focus and my exposure levels where I want them and to make sure that my stars are perfectly sharp, and then taking six 90 second photos all took about an hour to an hour and a half. A little while later the very first rays of the pre dawn started to give a slight bit of light to my foreground. On a new moon night in an International Dark Sky Park, there’s no other option. The ground was so dark I couldn’t see my shoes without a flashlight. But between 4:30 and 5 AM there was just enough of an inkling of light that I could now take the foreground photo.
To take that photo I had to remove the star tracker because for the foreground I don’t want the camera to move. That’s another reason that separate pictures have to be taken of the sky and the foreground. So at roughly 4:45AM I took another 6 pictures, this time of the rocks and the foreground. And then I packed my gear and headed back to the hotel and surprisingly, I was able to fall asleep!
Next came the editing, also known as post processing. For this photo that was quite involved. I had a total of a dozen photographs that had to be stitched together, then their colors and exposure levels teased to make them look like you see here, and then finally joined together into the complete image in front of you. It took a lot more time doing it than to describe it. Rough total time was 90 minutes.
So these then are the 3 stages of taking an image. The planning stage, which can be anything between something catching your eye in the moment to planning months in advance like with this photo. Taking the picture which might take only a moment or in this case, a couple of hours. And then post processing. The last phase for the first roughly 2 centuries of photography was somewhat industrial, done in a dark room which chemical wizardry. Terms we still use today originated in that time.
Today it’s done with computers which is at once far easier and because of that, far more capable. Cameras have advanced dramatically but with all their advancements they are still not much more than half as capable as your eye. And so rendering exactly what you saw, in most cases, requires some computer work after the fact. But each stage is a combination of technology and art. Each stage is an opportunity to express the unique vision of your eyes, brain and emotions.
Opportunity At The Ends Of The Earth
From Chicago there are direct flights to a lot of places in the world. A short flight will put you in some of Canada’s major cities. In 4 or 5 hours you can be at a beach resort in Mexico. In 6 hours you can be in Reykjavik, Iceland. Or you can go to one of the great frontiers on the planet, our 49th state, Alaska. It’s such a far flight that my mind played tricks on me. It kept thinking I was in another country. I was told that’s a common experience of people from the lower 48.
It’s hard to get your mind around how vast Alaska is. From the eastern most portion where the cruise ships all go through the Inner Passage, to the western most part in the Aleutian Islands, it’s 2,500 miles. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the distance from New York to Las Vegas.
Much like my trip to Patagonia, northern Alaska is a place you have to really want to get to. After our 6 hour flight from Chicago we stayed overnight in Anchorage. The next morning our guide picked us up at the hotel and we drove 8 hours north to Fairbanks where we stayed a second night. The next day we drove another 8 hours north to the tiny town of Wiseman, AK, which has a sign stating that it’s 62 miles north of the Arctic Circle. To put this in perspective, when I went to far southern Patagonia to the exquisite Torres del Paine National Park, I was actually 1,000 north of the Antarctic Circle. So Wiseman, AK, population 12, is extremely far north.
Wiseman is in the North Slope Borough which is the northern most county of Alaska. It covers roughly the northern 1/4 of Alaska. It’s one county but it’s roughly the size of Oregon. This vast territory has a population smaller than Jefferson County, Iowa, where we spend our summers.
There’s only one road north after you leave the exurbs of Fairbanks. It’s called the Dalton Highway. It’s 414 miles of mostly dirt road from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. There are some side roads and some roads in other parts of northern Alaska but if you’re going into the northern interior of Alaska, there’s only one road and it wouldn’t even be here if they never built the Alaskan Pipeline.
I’d come here to see the Brooks Range, the farthest north mountain range in North America. In my mind I saw vast pristine valleys between spectacular mountain ranges. In hindsight I feel foolish that I didn’t know these great mountain landscapes are only the warmup act. The Auroras are the big show! And what a show they are!
The landscape is beautiful though by fall it was covered with the early snows of winter and so was uniformly white, especially towards the northern end of the Brooks Range. But after sunset the Aurora comes and it is a truly heavenly show on earth.
Now I’ve told you all this so that you have the setting. Our small group of 3 people and 2 tour guides is out in the middle of the Artic night in a place where there are no services and no homesteads. There’s one dirt road and nothing for hundreds of miles. It’s as dark as it gets anywhere on the planet, and as quiet. It’s September but the nighttime temperature was 5. That’s not a typo.
And the sky if filled with lights. The lights of heaven coming down on our heads. I know, that sounds religious but it felt religious. I understand that it’s a natural phenomenon and I did not think that God had sent it, but that’s what it felt like in my heart. We were filled with wonder. The lights were dancing. In the photo you can see mountains and they are green because in the dark Arctic night, the only light was from the Auroras and they were mostly green.
In the middle of the night, our small group was huddled next to our van on the side of the road photographing this awesome phenomenon. At night the big semi trucks rule the road. They light the road with big bright white lights mounted on the top of their cabs and come barreling north on the hard packed dirt as fast as they dare. Standing there with my camera on a tripod, I saw this truck coming from a long way off. To shield the huge cabin mounted light on the front I set my tripod up at the back of the van and pointed up the road to the north. As the truck came roaring past I opened my shutter for a long exposure and caught the trails of the running lights under the Auroras as the driver carried his load north in the night to Prudhoe Bay.
Over time the memory of the cold fades as does the memory of being blasted by the truck’s wash as it blew by. But capturing the light with my camera allows me to preserve the best part of this experience forever.