Night Photography
by Michael Frye | Dec 11, 2016 | Night Photography, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Misty night, Gates of the Valley, Yosemite
After a long dry spell we finally got some rain. The first storm arrived Thursday, and then a second, wetter system reached us yesterday. Altogether Yosemite Valley received over three inches of rain since late Wednesday. It’s been warm, with the snow levels near 9,000 feet, so there was no new snow in Yosemite Valley, but that warm rain melted generous quantities of snow leftover from previous storms, so the waterfalls are roaring like spring.
Thursday’s storm cleared after sunset, so at about 9:00 o’clock I decided to drive up to the valley for some night photography. I arrived to find plenty of low-lying mist, with the two-thirds-full moon lighting the cliffs above. It was really beautiful, but the moon was high overhead, making the lighting challenging. Then as the moonset approached things got more interesting. Some higher clouds moved in, and those clouds started to catch some color from the setting moon. I couldn’t see that color, of course, but the camera’s LCD screen showed it clearly.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 5, 2016 | Night Photography
Light beam, Milky Way, and arch, Alabama Hills, CA, USA
Landscape photographers usually work alone, or with a few other people. Even during workshops, when we might have 10 or 12 photographers in the same general area, each person is usually working on their own compositions.
But in our night-photography workshops there’s often a lot more collaboration. It’s common for groups of people to work on photographing the same subject, taking turns with light-painting, and exchanging ideas about how best to light and photograph the scene. And often the collective wisdom produces some interesting ideas.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 30, 2016 | Night Photography
Mobius Arch at night, Alabama Hills, CA, USA
We just finished a nighttime workshop in the Trona Pinnacles and Alabama Hills. The forecast for our last evening wasn’t promising, calling for mostly cloudy skies and a 70 percent chance of showers. But I told the group that as long as it wasn’t raining there was still a lot we could do, and if we got just a few small breaks in the cloud cover the mix of stars and clouds could be really beautiful.
As sunset approached we headed out to the famous Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills. We photographed some interesting cloud formations in late-afternoon light, then at dusk set up our cameras to frame the arch with the sky above. The skies were mostly cloudy, just as predicted. Radar images showed showed heavy rain falling west of the Sierra crest. But from our position in the Alabama Hills, in the rain shadow created by the mountain wall, a patch of sky to our west-soutwest stayed partially clear, and remained that way most of the evening. Something about the trajectory of the wind and rain created that rift in the clouds and kept it in place.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 11, 2016 | Night Photography
DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. Hall at night, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
On the last night of our recent Starry Skies Adventure workshop we went to Bodie, which is always a great place for night photography. As the Milky Way moved into the southwest that evening it lined up well with these two buildings along Main Street, the DeChambeau Hotel and I.O.O.F. (Independent Order of Odd Fellows) Hall. I had never photographed this view of Bodie before so decided to try it, and was joined by several other people in the workshop.
I knew the lighting would be complicated, but that’s part of the fun of photographing Bodie at night. You can do relatively simple light-painting there, or, if you’re up for a challenge, try something complex. Here we wanted make it look as if the buildings were lit from the inside (even though the interiors were locked and inaccessible to us). That’s not really hard to do – just shine flashlights through the windows. The hard part was figuring out how to keep yourself out of the frame while doing so. The solution was to do each part of the lighting in a separate frame, and then mask off the unwanted areas of that frame (like a person holding a flashlight) in Photoshop.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 7, 2016 | Night Photography
Jeffrey pine and the Milky Way, Yosemite NP, CA
We conducted two more workshops last week, our second editions this summer of the Inside Bodie and Starry Skies Adventure workshops. We had a lot of fun once again, with great conditions and really nice people.
I made this photo on the first night of our Starry Skies workshop near Olmsted Point in Yosemite. Several members of our group and I framed views of this photogenic Jeffrey pine with the Milky Way and Half Dome in the distance. We made some exposures with just starlight, then tried to light the tree with a flashlight. Later we did some more complex lighting, but I ended up liking this simple version with just one flashlight aimed at the tree. We used a homemade snoot on the flashlight to narrow the beam and prevent too much light from spilling onto the rocks below the tree.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 28, 2016 | Night Photography
Star trails over the Methodist Church, Bodie State Historic Park, CA, USA
We’ve been able to take workshop groups into Bodie at night several times in recent years, which is always a lot of fun. But I’d never captured star trails there, mainly because star trails take a long time, and I’d wanted to spend my limited time there doing other things with the class. But during our last night session there a couple of the participants and I decided to try photographing what’s become a Bodie classic – star trails over the Methodist Church. The church works perfectly for this because you can line up the steeple with the North Star and create concentric circles overhead.
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