Category Archives: Night

Wigglegram: Milky Way over Kalaloch Beach

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milky-way

Taken back in October 2015, when I camped near Kalaloch Beach in Olympic National Park in Washington State on my Nikon D700, f/2.8 at 14mm.

There’s a lot of things I love about gifs, but one of the things is that it allows you to capture a passage of time that you just can’t with a static image. This is 5 shots, each 20 seconds, of the Milky Way as it moves through the sky over the pacific ocean, over about a period of 2 minutes.

I don’t know if I can say enough about the night sky. People often ask whether or not it actually looked like this. And it’s hard to say “well, not quite”. Sure with it being a long exposure, it captures the milky way a little more brilliantly than may be seen with the naked eye, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not actually the way it looks. There is so much of this scene that can’t be captured by just our eyes, or even captured by a photo.

Sometimes we just assume that only the things the rods and cones can detect are what is real, but there are parts of the spectrum that aren’t visible to us but are there nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, except, yes, these photos are real, and they’re spectacular.

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Paris Underground

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Paris Underground 001

I took this photo 4 years ago in Paris, France, and I just found this sitting in draft form on my wordpress. (So consider this a #TBT, throwback Thursday.) The composition isn’t superb; the right side is lacking in something interesting, so it makes the image seem a little off-balance. What I really like about it is the timing. I’m impressed I was able to capture the image with with the gap in the train cars framing the fella in the back. I couldn’t tell you exactly what is happening with that dude, but hey, I like it.

I really liked that 20mm lens; it was small and compact, and at f/2.8, pretty dang fast. It does some weird distortions, so it’s not great for architecture or anything with a lot of straight lines, but you can fix some of that in post. But it’s great for discreet photos like this where you want a wide angle without standing out with a huge lens, and you can hand hold these slower shutter speeds without too much visible camera shake.

It’s been a while… Cape Perpetua & The Milky Way

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Hi all, thanks for waiting patiently by your computer, tablets or mobile devices for me to update my blog. I promise I am going to do right by you, and I will start posting more. And doing so regularly. (My doctor says that being regular is good.) Sometimes I feel like the words I write are just filler, but I like to think of it as fiber, which will help you digest each of the photos I post.

Just about all the photos I post are in JPEG format. It’s a lossy compressed image format, and is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, who set the standard for this format first in 1992. In all that time, the format and compression have improved, but sometimes, when I want to share a photo, a JPEG just isn’t gonna cut it. It’s just lacking something. Sometimes, you don’t want a still photo to be so… still. Here enters the GIF.

GIFs have been around since the mid-80’s, and they haven’t always been very good quality, but it’s beautiful what you can do with them these days. I took two photos, and aligned them in photoshop to make this lil animation. One is a nice silhouette (a word which I still need to use spell checker for) of the hillside and an awesome road sign, while the other image captures the glow from a car passing by on the road above.

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This is Cape Perpetua in Oregon. From my roadtrip in October. Oregon has so many beautiful oceanside campsites, it’s unfair. The reason I love these oceanside campsites are because 1) you can hear the waves as you drift off to sleep in your tent, b) you have an unobstructed view of the sunset and the milky way (when the weather is cooperative) and 3) you’re usually far away from light pollution.

 

Alright, thus ends this post. So, hopefully it’s not too long before my next post, but I appreciate you all waiting anyway!

The Milky Way over Mt Grinnell [Timelapse]

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I had previously shared a photo taken from one of my timelapse sequences I shot while I camped in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park. I finally got around to putting together the full timelapse that I shot while I was there. It was only a few days after the Supermoon, so I had only a short window of time to capture the Milky Way before the moon came out. You can see near the end of the video, as the moon rises from behind me, to light up the peaks and the rest of the scene.

I’ve always wanted to get a wonderful shot of the Milky Way with the mountains in the background, and a reflection off of a lake in the foreground. Unfortunately, due to the movement of the water in the aptly named, Swiftcurrent Lake, the reflections don’t come out very clear, but I guess that’s a project for another time!

This video was shot over a span of about 5 hours. I wasn’t quite as prepared for the cold as I thought I was, so my last couple hours, I was just trying to stay warm by moving and possibly dancing like nobody was watching. Luckily, it was pretty dark so I don’t think anyone else saw me. Next time, I’ll be sure to bring some gloves, a thermos of hot cocoa, and maybe a camp chair!

 

The Milky Way, a Shooting Star, and Mt Grinnell over Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park

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Mt Grinnell, the Milky Way, and a Shooting Star over Swiftcurrent Lake in Glacier National Park

Took this photo a month ago while camping in Glacier National Park. This is a still from a timelapse sequence I was shooting. I’ll be posting that video soon enough! In any case, I thought the lake and the reflection of the sky would be a nice foreground element, but with the water moving so much (the aptly named swift current), it does reduce the reflection quite a bit.