Mt Pleasant Pt 2 and Soldier Creek

I went on a couple of camping trips recently, and managed to do some shooting! Somewhere around Mt. Pleasant, a friend of mine and I found this cool old cabin, which makes for a great foreground:


The cabin was behind a fence, and I wish I had been brave enough to hop over it and get closer--a 14 mm lens makes everything look pretty small. Some day I'll invest in a better lens; for now I've gotta go with budget equipment. -_- Anyway, Mt. Pleasant is pretty and fun. Unfortunately, this camp out happened on the last day of school, so I was already pretty worn out and sleep deprived...I didn't have the energy to do anything more than classic Milky Way shots. Oh well, I never get tired of those.

So last night, I headed to Soldier Creek campground with some other friends who were interested in going out shooting with me. The first couple hours of the camp out were a nightmare--we got there at about 2pm, and it was cold and windy and starting to sprinkle. By the time we got our tent up, it was pouring rain and thundering so exuberantly I was expecting to struck by lightning. So there we were, soaked, freezing and huddled in our thankfully rain proofed tent, trying to be optimistic but really thinking of bailing and going home. We held on, went out when the rain tapered off and attempted making a fire, got taken by surprise by another deluge, huddled a little more in our tent playing card games, and then finally the storms passed and the sun came out.


We got our fire built, made some dinner and s'mores, went walking around the lake, watched Iron Man on my iPad while we waited for it to get dark enough, poked our heads out the tent at about midnight and at last beheld a cloudless (ish) night sky in all its starry glory. So we hiked down the hillside to a little peninsula in the lake to take some pictures. I just have straight forward Milky Way pictures again--I attempted a panorama, but it failed. Like worse than I've ever failed before. Panoramas are taking a really long time to get the hang of, especially since you're literally pointing and shooting in the dark. Oh well. I got a composite shot, at least:


No star trails either--by the time I was ready to try one, the clouds were rolling back in. Next time, for sure! The real reason I wanted this particular campground was the lake--I've really really been wanting to try getting a lake with the stars reflected in it. Unfortunately, this lake was too active for reflections. And it'd been storming and windy earlier, and it's HUGE.


So it was a fun trip, and I got some practice shooting in. Still have a long way to go...but, as I keep telling myself, I've got plenty of time to master this particular skill. The stars aren't going anywhere. :)

White Pine Lake

This post is coming like 2 months late because I had an entire month full of professional development and it killed my soul. Killed it so bad I didn't make it out shooting for the rest of the summer. And also, this particular trip was strenuous enough to make me lazy with the rest of my precious summer. ~sigh~

Anyway, these pictures are from a camping trip with my Dad up at White Pine Lake. We backpacked in about 4 miles, set up camp, had a grand old time, and didn't really ever go to sleep. I took a couple sets of star trail pictures, and while my camera was doing all the work automatically, I set a timer and crawled into my sleeping bag and talked with Dad. We left the rain fly off the tent, so we had a glorious view of the stars overhead. They're magical, I tell you. I never get tired of seeing them.

We'll start with those star trail pictures:


Dad is in the tent in the photo on the right--the little light is his Kindle. I'm probably in there too, actually. You can be pretty sneaky with star trail pictures--you light paint the first picture, and then set an intervelometer to snap pictures every so many seconds for a half hour. I used the foreground of the light-painted picture, and combined the background of about 40-50 images to create the star trail effect. Me sneaking back into the tent is totally invisible!

I also managed my first ever decent panorama! These are SO hard to do, especially in the dark--you have to just cross your fingers and hope that you're pointing the camera in the right direction, that your pictures are overlapping each other and that you're taking enough of them.



The rest of my shots were just simple Milky Way pictures. In some I attempted light painting (mostly failure--the interesting stuff was too far away for a flash light to illuminate it), but I ended up taking a lot of composites--take a picture of the sky, and then take a looooong exposure of the exact same thing to try to get some interesting foreground details. Then you combine the two images in Photoshop. The scenery was gorgeous out there, but it was SO dark, even the long exposures didn't capture much light.


And finally, our view of the stars out of the tent:



It was a fun little trip, even though I paid for it dearly for a couple weeks after--my back did NOT like carrying all that weight up and down a mountain. :P

Mt. Pleasant

Summer is here! I haven't been out shooting in nearly a year, and, when a friend invited me to go camping with her in Mt. Pleasant, I grabbed the opportunity. It was last minute, so I was a bit unprepared for a few things, but it was a good warm up. And getting up at 2am and seeing the Milky Way in all its glory arcing across the sky... Well.


It was like seeing a beloved, long-lost friend!

But like I said, a warmup. Here's my attempt at a panorama. Don't look to close. I had to do a lot of photoshop gymnastics to get even this!


My friend was nice enough to get up with me (and her two dogs), and we tromped around in the dark seeking out the best vistas. Spent some time in this clearing on her property, attempting light painting and star trails. After such a long hiatus, it took a lot of work remembering all the tips I learned from Brad Goldpaint last year (and I couldn't find my notes until after I got back home). There were a lot of light painting fails that didn't make it onto the blog.


After the clearing, we took a walk down the dirt road to an outlook of the city Mt. Pleasant (thankfully small, otherwise the light pollution would've hidden the Milky Way). This is where I attempted that panorama that didn't work out so well. Mostly I just kept working on my light painting.


The glowing horizon in the top left image is NOT the sun rising--these shots were taken around 3AM. We're probably seeing the lights from Provo. The light pollution of Mt. Pleasant was small enough that I managed to squeeze both it AND the Milky Way into the same shot. Kind of pretty, these two enemies hanging out together.


I played around with the tent, too. I tried the tent+Milky Way shot twice--the first (not pictured) was a failure because I didn't center the camera correctly and most of the Milky Way was hidden behind trees, and also there was a dog jumping on the tent. You can't see the dog in the shot because I wasn't light painting at that particular moment, but the tent is super blurry. So I tried again on an empty tent, and got the shot below. And then when we finished up at 4am and attempted to go to sleep, I was too wired and had to try getting a shot of my view of the sky from inside the tent. It was a spectacular view!


It was a really fun little camp out, and it was great having some company! My goal this summer is to go out and shoot as much as I can, before work and winter make it impossible. This hobby takes only the most committed, and it's hard to make a shoot happen. Too easy to talk myself out it, to get scared of the dark and just stay in bed. But I comfort myself thus: the Milky Way isn't going anywhere, and I'm young. Most people who chase stars are a lot older (because they actually have money to buy the equipment, and some of them are retired? I dunno)--I have my entire life ahead of me to take night pictures.

That being said, I'm 2 weeks into my summer vacation and I've already managed to go out twice--just got home yesterday from a backpacking trip with my Dad to White Pine Lake in Logan Canyon. So, even if I DON'T make it out again this summer, I still have something to show off when school starts up again! The White Pine Lake pictures will be making an appearance soon.

Tony Grove

I spent the last day exploring Tony Grove in Utah with my parents. This place is full of opportunity, and I'm going to have to go back again soon! We hiked up the White Pine Lake trail about 2,000 feet to a giant meadow full of wildflowers for most of these pictures. Originally, I was going to scout out locations during the day and hike up White Pine Lake trail for fun. Then I was going to come back the next night to do some shooting. But then it turned out the day of my hike was the only clear night projected for the rest of the week. So I went on an 8 mile hike, came home for a few hours (during which I couldn't force myself to take a nap), and then went back at night for several hours of shooting. On the drive home, I counted 6 deer on the side of the road. But anyway, here are the fruits of my labor:

I tried out everything that I learned from the Brad Goldpaint workshop I went to in April. First I got some standard Milky Way/light painted shots.


Next I attempted another panorama, which seems to be a weakness of mine. I need to fix this one some more--I had to skew the bottom edges down and the Milky Way...well, if I don't tell, maybe no one will notice.


Next I finally tackled a star trail picture! I didn't get to practice this one at the workshop, because my intervalometer wasn't compatible with the camera I'd rented. Star trail pictures are time consuming--basically you have to take a sequence of 30-second exposures (about a half hour's worth) Unfortunately, two things went wrong during this process. First, about 17 minutes in, an idiot with a headlamp wandered onto the scene. A drunk, biking idiot. My Dad doesn't think a drunk person could navigate a rocky mountain trail on a bike in the dark. But he was slurring and talking to himself and weaving, so I stand by my theory. His headlamp was featured in about 5 shots, but only the landscape portion, which I didn't need. The 2nd thing that went wrong was the camera battery died about 25-ish minutes in and I didn't know about it because I was elsewhere in a camp chair passing time with my parents. Despite all that madness, I love my first star trail picture! (a composite of 45 images instead of 60)


And last of all: Composites. The sky portion was a 30-second exposure, and the landscape portion is a 2:30-minute exposure. The sky is a bit lighter in these pictures because the moon (4 days past full) was just starting to rise. Of course, it wasn't high enough to show ME what I was pointing my camera at. These are literally shots in the dark. Educated guesses. Tony Grove Lake is nestled in the center of the shots, kind of in a valley.


And that's all I've gotten done this summer. In a month, I'll be back to work and it's going to be hard to go out shooting. I'm hoping to go out at least two more times before the REAL madness begins!

Hardware Ranch

So after that Arches Workshop, I've been super excited to go out into the night again! I got a new camera and happened to be visiting my parents, where there happens to be a lot of dark sky nearby. So these shots were taken at Hardware Ranch, in Northern Utah. Most of the light painting is courtesy of my Dad. :)


This one is a panorama. It looks a little deformed because I didn't actually take enough pictures to cover everything--the end result fresh out of Photomerge was kind of bell shaped and I used the transform tool to drag the corners down a little. Either way, I'm still pretty happy with it.


I think I did the light painting on this one, before my Dad offered to help. When we went out there, I mostly wanted a chance to see how my new camera and lens performed on the night sky. I didn't plan anything at all, but it turned out that there were some nice trees and fences and stuff for foreground light painting.


The left image was taken around 11:45 pm or 12, and Milky Way core hadn't quite cleared the hillside yet. The image on the right was taken closer to 1 am.

When we got home (2am-ish), I noticed the constellation Scorpius at the end of the driveway--that's the constellation that kind of points to the brightest part of the Milky Way. So then I was curious to see if my camera could still pick out the Milky Way, even in the light polluted neighborhood. As it turns out, it could!



In fact, while I was taking the shot, I could vaguely see the Milky Way myself. Maybe because my eyes were used to the dark, or because I knew what to look for. It was cool. :)

All images taken with Canon EOS 6D, Rockinon 14mm F/2.8 lens. Settings: 30 seconds, ISO 4000, F/2.8

Arches Night Sky Workshop

Here some of the pictures I took at a workshop with Brad Goldpaint at Arches National Park. It was a really awesome experience, and I'm so excited to go out this summer and do some more.


This one is a panorama I took of Mesa Arch at Canyonlands. I tried to take a couple of other panoramas, but they didn't really work out. I think this one is probably the best picture I managed to take at the workshop.

I took these pictures on my own at about 5am the last day of the workshop. We didn't go out because it rained, but I woke up at 4am, saw stars out, and went charging off. I pulled off at the first parking lot I came to and got about an hour of shooting the Milky Way in before the sky started lighting up. That's why the sky looks so blue in these two shots!

We learned a lot about light painting at the workshop. Specifically, how you should move your flashlight when you're light painting, and also that you should always use incandescent flashlights. We were curious, so we tried taking a shot with an LED flashlight too.

Incandescent Light

LED Light

Finally, we also tried a lot of bracketing--taking the same shot a bunch of times at different exposures then putting them together in Photoshop. I have a LOT of bracketed shots left to go through--it's kind a time-consuming pain. Here's one of them: