Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night

Glenn Randall

Dusk to Dawn

A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night

Dusk to Dawn

A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night

Glenn Randall

www.glennrandall.com

Project editor: Maggie Yates

Project manager: Lisa Brazieal

Marketing manager: Mercedes Murray

Copyeditor: Maggie Yates

Layout and type: Hespenheide Design

Cover design: Aren Straiger

Front cover image: Glenn Randall

ISBN: 978-1-68198-306-6

1st Edition (1st printing, June 2018)

© 2018 Glenn Randall

All images © Glenn Randall unless otherwise noted

Rocky Nook, Inc.

1010 B Street, Suite 350

San Rafael, CA 94901

USA

www.rockynook.com

Distributed in the U.S. by Ingram Publisher Services

Distributed in the UK and Europe by Publishers Group UK

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932110

All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in Korea

This book is dedicated to the champions of wilderness, both celebrated and unknown, who have fought to preserve the wild places that inspire nature photographers to create their art.

Front Cover Image: The Milky Way over dunes at Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado. September 25, 2016, 8:51 p.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM. Seven focus positions, focus-stacked images aligned and blended in Photoshop, 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400. Two F&V HDV-Z96 flat-panel LED lights fitted with 85B warming filters provided the light on the foreground.

Back Cover Image: Aurora over Mt. Monolith, Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory, Canada. March 17, 2015, 2:33 a.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, 6 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1Preparing for Night Photography

Hiking at Night

Finding Clear Dark Skies

2Tools for Night Photography

Camera and Sensor

Lenses for Night Photography

Tripods

Accessories for Night Photography

3Essential Skills for Night Photography

Achieving Critical Focus

Composition at Night

Exposure at Night

Controlling Noise

White Balance

Holding Detail in the Land

4Planning a Milky Way Shoot

Planning a Shoot of the Milky Way Over Longs Peak

Planning Milky Way Panoramas

5Shooting the Milky Way

Shooting the Milky Way in a Single Frame

Shooting Milky Way Panoramas

Finding the Nodal Point

Multi-Row Panoramas

Camera Settings for Panoramas

6Processing Night Landscapes

The Color of the Night Sky

Editing Images Taken on a Moonless Night

Combining Two Images in Photoshop

Selecting Complex Shapes in Night Images

Brightening the Sky and Darkening the Land Near the Horizon

Processing Night Panoramas

7Advanced Techniques for Night Landscapes

Light Painting

Focus Stacking at Night

Reducing Noise with Stack Mode>Median

Using Star-Tracking Camera Mounts

8Photographing Star Trails

Exposure for Star Trails

Composing Star-Trails Images

Editing Star-Trails Images

Retouching Jet Streaks

Blending the Images to Create the Star Trails

Closing the Gaps

9Shooting the Aurora

Preparing for an Aurora Shoot

Exposure for the Aurora

Composing Photographs of the Aurora

Processing Photographs of the Aurora

10Photographing Meteor Showers

Photographing Meteor Showers

Shooting and Processing an Image of the Geminid Meteor Shower

11Photographing Lunar Eclipses

Assembling a Composite Image of a Lunar Eclipse

12Photographing Moonlit Landscapes

Exposure for Moonlit Landscapes

Processing Moonlit Landscapes

Acknowledgments

The roots of this book date back to August 2011, when I saw a slideshow by Colorado landscape photographer Grant Collier. His images of the Milky Way glowing over landscapes in Utah opened my eyes to the potential of the latest digital cameras to make stunning images at night. Thanks, Grant! Over the next seven years I learned from, and was inspired by, the writings and night photographs of a number of other landscape photographers, including Adam Woodworth, David Kingham, Floris van Breugel, Ian Norman, Michael Frye, Patrick Endres, and Royce Bair. Thanks to all of you for sharing your insights through your articles and books. I’d particularly like to thank Roger Clark, a professional astronomer and ardent night photographer, whose extensive website provided a great deal of technical information on the best cameras, lenses, and field techniques for night photography. Dr. Stan Solomon, senior scientist at the High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Professor Scott Bailey at Virginia Tech provided helpful insight into the complex physics of airglow. I’d like to thank the staff at Rocky Nook, particularly my editor, Maggie Yates, whose eagle-eyed, thoughtful, and meticulous editing helped make this book the best it could be. Most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Cora, an atmospheric scientist whose perceptive questions, boundless curiosity, and insistence on scientific rigor encouraged me to go beyond a superficial understanding of whatever topic was at hand, and whose tolerance of long absences made it possible to create the images in this book.

Foreword

The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

—LORD BYRON

One of the fundamental principles of nature photography recommended to those aspiring to learn the craft is to make images during the golden hours, the brief window of time following sunrise and preceding sunset when the sun is at a low angle in the sky, bathing the landscape in warm light. It is certainly good advice, but it suggests that photographers ought to be occupied with some other pursuit once the sun has set. To the contrary; reading this book, you will discover the magic of photography after dark.

Night photography is not new. From the earliest days of the medium, its pioneers attempted to capture the heavens. What has changed in recent years is the ability of digital cameras to produce sufficient image quality from long exposures to do creative justice to the splendors of the night sky. Early digital cameras did not perform well in dim light or with long exposures, producing significant digital noise—similar to grain in film—when shooting at high ISO equivalents or exposure times longer than a few seconds. Each successive generation of digital camera sensors has improved this performance. Today, some digital cameras can produce long-exposure image quality far superior to what was possible with film, and astrophotography is more accessible than ever before.

Delicate Arch and the Milky Way, Arches National Park, Utah. May 3, 2016, 2:01 a.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM. Land: 30 seconds, f/1.4, ISO 6400. Sky: 10 seconds, f/1.4, ISO 6400. A single flat-panel LED light with an 85B warming filter (brand unknown) provided the light under the arch.

Aurora over the Tombstone Range, Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory, Canada. March 17, 2015, 2:33 a.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, 6 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

As the editor of Outdoor Photographer magazine, and having worked in photographic publishing for two decades, I have witnessed firsthand the revolution that digital technologies have brought to the art and science of imaging, and with those new capabilities, the explosion of interest in night photography. My profession has also afforded me the honor and pleasure of collaborating with many of the most illustrious names in the field. What is striking about this community is the generosity of spirit and willingness—even eagerness—of nature photographers to share what they’ve learned, and to teach and inspire. Glenn Randall is one of those photographers who has a talent not only for making remarkable images but also for clearly communicating the techniques he uses to achieve those results. As a professional photographer for nearly 40 years, with over 200 magazine articles and 12 books to his credit, Randall is an exemplary artist and a passionate instructor.

In this book, Randall covers every aspect of the practice, from the technical decisions for making successful long exposures after sundown to other important considerations, including preparation and safety, location scouting, and gear selection, all of which are essential for making memorable images as well as for enjoying the process. You’ll learn general techniques you can use with any night sky, whether you want to capture sharp stars or star trails, as well as specialized approaches for specific subjects like the Milky Way or meteor showers, and advanced methods such as light painting to incorporate landscape elements in your celestial compositions. Randall also provides in-depth instruction for processing your night photography images, a vital step that should not be overlooked.

This is the most comprehensive guide to night photography that I’ve yet seen, and one I will reference to improve my own work.

Wes Pitts

Editorial Director, Outdoor Photographer Magazine

Aurora over Sukakpak Mountain and the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River, Brooks Range, near Wiseman, Alaska. March 11, 2016, 12:17 a.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Introduction

Today, a mysterious and fascinating new world is opening up for landscape photographers. In the past, landscape photography largely ended when the last light of dusk faded from the sky. Today, it’s only beginning. The latest digital cameras have made it easy to create images of the landscape at night that film and early digital photographers could only dream of. Equipped with off-the-shelf cameras, more and more photographers are venturing into the night, far beyond the comforting glow of city lights, and returning with spectacular images unlike anything seen before. Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night is your trail map for this new photographic wilderness. It will teach you how to plan, shoot, and process professional-quality images of the Milky Way, auroras, lunar eclipses, meteor showers, star trails, and landscapes lit solely by moonlight. Throughout the book, I’ll emphasize ways to integrate beautiful depictions of the night sky with equally compelling renditions of the land below it to create landscape images that evoke a sense of place—and a sense of wonder. Equipped with the knowledge in this book, readers will be prepared to create their own nocturnal masterpieces.

In the film and early digital eras, landscape photography at night was pretty limited. Sure, you could shoot scenes by the light of the full moon, which often ended up looking like daylight shots with a few odd white streaks in the sky. Or you could do long exposures—many minutes or hours—on moonless nights and let the stars create elegant trails across the entire frame as the Earth rotated. But no film was capable of recording the night sky as we see it, with bright stars that appear to be stationary, unless the camera was mounted on an expensive, heavy, and bulky star-tracking equatorial mount, a piece of hardware normally used for telescopes.

The earliest digital cameras were even worse than film at recording long exposures in dim light. The latest models of both DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, however, have overcome the limitations of their predecessors. The sensors in these astonishing cameras are so sensitive to light that they have made it possible to record the night sky as we perceive it, with apparently stationary stars. They can capture the faint glow of the Milky Way, the brief flash of a meteor, and the intricate structure of a shimmering auroral curtain. During the day, your eyes are still much better than the best sensor. At night, however, the opposite is true; the extraordinary sensors in today’s cameras can reveal colors even the most dark-adapted eyes can barely glimpse.

The Milky Way over 14,270-foot Grays Peak, seen from the summit of 14,267-foot Torreys Peak, near Georgetown, Colorado. August 8, 2012, 10:07 p.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

Hallett Peak and Dream Lake by moonlight, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. December 5, 2017, 8:26 p.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L III USM, 15 seconds, f/5.0, ISO 4000.

I remember clearly my own introduction to the amazing capabilities of these new cameras. It was August 2012. I was about three-quarters of the way through my Sunrise from the Summit project, a seven-year quest to photograph sunrise (or occasionally sunset) from the summit of all 54 of Colorado’s Fourteeners, peaks reaching 14,000 feet in height. Now it was time to put my new digital SLR, a Canon EOS 5D Mark III, to the test on a very different kind of image: a shot of the Milky Way taken from the summit of 14,267-foot Torreys Peak.

I waited for a day with good weather that would be followed by a night with no moon. When a weather window arrived, I drove to the trailhead in the afternoon and hiked the steep, strenuous trail to the summit. I met a few people heading down as I was heading up, but when I reached the summit I was alone. I shot sunset, then settled down to wait, trying hard to stifle an instinctive sense of unease. Old mountaineering habits die hard, and I’d never deliberately lingered on the summit of a high peak as the light vanished from the sky. Slowly, the few remaining clouds dissipated, and the stars began to come out. Then the glowing heart of the Milky Way, the center of our galaxy, emerged from the darkening sky directly over Grays Peak, another Fourteener.

Star trails over the Tenmile Range from the summit of 14,265-foot Quandary Peak, near Breckenridge, Colorado. February 13, 2015, 6:33 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, 30 frames, 4 minutes, f/4, ISO 400.

Never before had I seen the most spectacular part of the Milky Way from such a dark and elevated perch. The sight was breathtaking. I left the summit about midnight as the best part of the Milky Way set to the southwest. Two hours later, I reached my truck. Two hours after that, I collapsed into bed after a 21-hour day.

I examined my images later that afternoon and saw for myself how the latest generation of digital cameras had opened up a whole new photographic genre: landscape photography at night. Images that were close to impossible in the film era were now within the grasp of any knowledgeable and reasonably well-equipped photographer willing to venture into the dark.

This book will prepare you for your first photographic journey into the night and for many adventures beyond that. It is not, however, a book for complete beginners. I’ll assume readers know the fundamentals of photography and the basics of image storage, organization, and editing. I use Adobe Lightroom for cataloging and RAW editing, and Adobe Photoshop for more advanced techniques like combining two different exposures of the same scene. I’ll show you how to use those two programs to perfect your night images, but this book will not be a complete guide to either program. I will provide sidebars on some key topics to help bring less-experienced readers up to speed.

This book details techniques for shooting grand landscapes at night. These are images where the land and sky are equally significant. This book will not cover astrophotography, the proper name for photographs of deep-space objects taken through telescopes. Astrophotography is a specialty all its own. It requires a significant additional investment in hardware. If you have a relatively recent DSLR or mirrorless camera, on the other hand, you can probably get started in night photography without purchasing any additional equipment. If you’d like to learn to photograph galaxies and nebulas through telescopes, I recommend Thierry Legault’s book, Astrophotography, published by Rocky Nook.

Your photographic voyages of exploration will be more successful if you have a clear sense of your destination. For daylight landscape photography, my destination always seemed obvious: an authentic image that captured the magnificence of the natural world the way I saw it. I wanted my viewers to know that what they saw in my prints was what I saw through the lens. When I began photographing at night, however, I realized that my photographic path had grown misty. My eyes, no matter how well dark-adapted they were, could barely glimpse the colors and details my camera so easily recorded. Should I suppress those colors and create near-monochrome images that resembled what I actually saw? Or should I celebrate the camera’s ability to reveal an unseen world and show night scenes in color as the camera recorded them? I experimented with desaturating my night images or converting them to black-and-white, and concluded that while they might be closer to a literal representation of what I saw, they came nowhere close to evoking the emotions I felt when I was standing there.

Perseid meteor shower over the Titan, Fisher Towers, Utah. August 11-12, 2016, 8:32 p.m. to 5:08 a.m. Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM. Land: 10 seconds, f/16, ISO 100 (shot 17 minutes after sunset). Sky: composite of 73 frames, 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400. The meteor-containing layers have been rotated around Polaris so that all Perseid meteors appear to originate at the radiant. Some meteors were sporadics.

I returned to the idea of rendering night scenes in color, but quickly ran into another conundrum. The colors my camera recorded sometimes seemed jarringly out of sync with what I imagined those colors ought to be. We all have a lifelong association of the sky with the color blue. Sky blue is a memory color, one of those colors where we tend to substitute what we want to see (e.g., an idealized, pure blue) for what we actually saw. It’s also a color we tend to have strong opinions about in terms of what looks right. Look straight up on a clear day at noon and the sky is always some shade of blue. Look straight up as the light fades from a clear sky after sunset and the last color we see is blue. When light returns with the onset of dawn, the first color we see in the sky straight above us is blue. Naturally, we imagine that the night sky must be blue, even if we can’t actually see the color. Indeed, on a night with a full moon, the sky really is blue, and your camera will record it as such. On a moonless night, however, the sky is not blue. Its exact color varies, depending on atmospheric conditions and the distance to major cities, but it is often some shade of green. You may be shocked at the color of the sky that your camera records on a moonless night since it is so wildly at odds with what a lifetime on this planet would lead you to expect. Do you continue to celebrate your camera’s ability to record the unseen, or do you change the color of the sky to the blue you were expecting, a color that feels right?

These are tough