Night Photography
by Michael Frye | Sep 16, 2015 | Night Photography
Wagon wheel behind the Dechambeau Hotel, Bodie. I loved this wagon wheel poking out of the ground, and worked with one of our participants, Jeff, to light this scene. We started with an exposure for the sky, then lit the wagon wheel, getting close with a flashlight outfitted with a homemade snoot to try to light only the rim and spokes. Then Jeff lit the shed on the right from two different angles, and I lit the two-story buildings from both sides.
As promised, here are a few photos from the nighttime sessions during our recent Bodie, Inside and Out workshop.
The lighting for each of these photographs was rather complex, and required blending several exposures together. In each case I started with a frame for the sky (my standard pinpoint-star exposure: 15 seconds at f/2.8, 6400 ISO), then used separate frames (at lower ISOs and smaller apertures) to light different aspects of the scene. As I’ve described before, the individual exposures were blended together in Photoshop using the Lighten blending mode, and sometimes adding layer masks to hide stray light.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 11, 2015 | Night Photography
Tufa and Milky Way, Mono Lake, CA, USA
The last few weeks have been very busy. We just finished our Bodie workshop, which was tremendous fun. I’ll post some images from the workshop when I get a chance to process them, but in the meantime here’s a photograph from last Saturday, just before the workshop started.
I wanted to photograph at South Tufa at Mono Lake, but was worried that it would be too crowded, since it was Saturday on Labor Day weekend. And when Claudia and I pulled into the South Tufa parking lot at sunset we were astonished at the number of cars: the entire, large parking lot looked full.
We managed to find a place to park, and headed out to the lake, figuring that since it was getting dark most of the people would leave soon. And indeed, the place emptied out quickly, except for a few photographers intent on night photography. By ten o’clock, when I made this image, there were only three other people around – all photographers of course.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 28, 2015 | Night Photography
Tufa and stars (with Perseus and the Pleiades), Mono Lake. I lit the tufa formations with a flashlight during the 15-second exposure; it only took a brief pass with the light to provide sufficient illumination at 6400 ISO and f/2.8.
As I said in my last post, we had remarkably clear skies during our recent Starry Skies Adventure workshop, despite the proximity of the Walker Fire. But 24 hours before the workshop started the situation was uncertain and changing quickly. We didn’t know what would happen with the fire, and whether we’d see any stars through the smoke. Some workshop participants decided to take a rain check (smoke check?), which was completely understandable under the circumstances. But most people chose to come anyway and take their chances. In the end we had a great time. There were moments, while standing under the stars in the clear, cool, night air, when the fire seemed like a vague, distant memory.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 23, 2015 | Night Photography, Workshops
Helicopter over the Walker Fire from Highway 395, last Sunday evening
Our Starry Skies Adventure workshop turned out to be a little more adventurous than we thought. Just before we left our home in Mariposa last Saturday to head for the workshop I checked the satellite photos online. The Rough Fire near King’s Canyon National Park had been sending smoke north, so I was keeping an eye on it. But my last-minute check revealed a new smoke plume just to the southwest of Mono Lake. Uh oh. Our workshop was based in Lee Vining, on the west shore of Mono Lake, only a few miles from that smoke plume.
I could see the smoke from this new fire on one of the Yosemite webcams. I found that it was called the Walker Fire, and that it had started the night before near Walker Lake, but I couldn’t find any up-to-date information about the fire’s size and location. When Claudia and I left home about 3:00 p.m. the Tioga Road (Highway 120) through the park was still open. But when we got to Tuolumne Meadows we found that the fire had closed the road between the eastern entrance of the park and Highway 395. What do we do now? We decided we had to drive around over Sonora Pass and check out the fire in person. That meant five extra hours of driving, and a long night ahead of us.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 9, 2015 | Night Photography
Lightning over the San Joaquin Valley from the Sierra Nevada foothills, California, USA
This summer I’ve often heard my fellow Californians making comments like, “Weird weather we’re having,” or “Interesting weather, isn’t it?” Yes indeed. Typically most of the state receives no precipitation from May through September, but this summer we’ve had lots of subtropical moisture drifting northward into the state, triggering showers and thunderstorms. The rains have mostly been light and scattered, so haven’t made any real dent in the drought, but have created interesting conditions for photography.
Last Thursday forecasters predicted another subtropical surge approaching, but we didn’t see much sign of it at our house. Then Claudia and I got into our hot tub around 10:30 p.m. (our nightly ritual before going to bed) and immediately noticed distant flashes of lightning. We couldn’t figure out where they were coming from at first; maybe the west? So I got out of the tub to check radar images, and saw that the nearest storms that could possibly be creating lightning were near the coast! That seemed impossibly far, but then last summer at Mono Lake, during our Starry Skies workshop, we saw distant flashes of lightning, and they turned out to be in eastern Nevada, 200 miles away. So yes, it was indeed possible to see flashes from lightning in the coast ranges, only 80 miles from our house.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 3, 2015 | Night Photography, Travels and Stories
Lightning over the Sierra Nevada foothills, Mariposa County, CA, USA
We had some pre-Fourth-of-July fireworks here Wednesday night. At about 11:00 p.m. I let our dog Rider out before going to bed, and noticed flashes in the sky to the south. Sleep could wait! Claudia and I headed to a nearby viewpoint on Triangle Road, and saw lightning in three separate storm cells to the southeast, south, and southwest.
When watching thunderstorms you often only see cloud-to-cloud lightning, but on this night we could see some distinct bolts hitting the ground. I watched closely to try to determine where the most lightning activity was taking place. My first try didn’t work, but then another spot further to the right seemed to become more active, so I pointed my camera there, locked the tripod, and captured a series of 30-second exposures (each at f/9.5, 800 ISO). This photograph is a blend of five separate frames capturing seven or eight lightning bolts.
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