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.