My fiancée loves sleep. She’ll give anything up to sleep.
I, however, am the exact opposite.
At midnight on Saturday I capped off a long day of relaxing at a Tiki bar and eating sushi by chugging some coffee and heading out to Glacier National Park. The sky was clear as could be and the moon was just a small sliver in the sky, sitting out of the way.
I started these night trips to the park last year after discovering astrophotography. Sometimes my dog, Jackson, sits in the backseat while I shoot just outside of the car. Sometimes he stays home. I don’t blame him.
I stopped at a number of spots in the park, following the winding Going-to-the-Sun Road up to Logan Pass, where several peaks guard the windy mountain pass. If you’ve never seen the Milky Way in a totally dark area, far from any city light pollution, you have to. It’s an incredible feeling the first time your eyes adjust and the white glow of the galaxy pops out from the black of night. It’s even more fun to take pictures of it.
I tried a few different techniques, experimenting with a couple different lenses, blending and panoramic patterns and star trails. I’m working with a pretty slow f4 wide zoom to start, so working at high ISOs at that aperture is a challenge.
Shooting the Milky Way from Going-to-the-Sun Road.
For this shot I had to blend a four-minute foreground exposure with a 20-second exposure for the sky, both shot at 16mm and ISO 8000. For screens the result works, but I was lusting after a 2.8 or faster lens while I was out shooting. I blended the two with a simple mask in Photoshop and added some contrast to make the Milky Way pop.
Milky Way over Reynolds Mountain.
After that shot I headed just past Logan Pass to make a second attempt at a shot I took last year but wasn’t happy with. For this one I did use an old Minolta 24 f2.8 Rokkor lens, letting me let a little more light in. The foreground exposure was six minutes.
There’s something so serene about having the park seemingly to yourself at night. Occasionally another car passes in the dark, but for the most part you see no one, aside from the pine marten, fox and moose that passed by my car as I drove around. When I shoot star trails, I set up my camera and sip coffee while I read in my car. How nice is that?
The final destination was for a sunrise shot in Many Glacier, on the east side of the park. Dawn lit the world around 4:30 a.m., and I arrived at the Many Glacier lodge parking lot around 5 a.m., just as some red light began to illuminate the peaks around Swiftcurrent Lake. I rushed down a short walking path and got everything set up in time for this shot:
Sunrise at Many Glacier, Glacier National Park.
I had to bracket exposures because of the dramatic dynamic range in the scene. Expose for the sky and the shadows were pitch black, and expose for them and you lose all highlight detail. I’m really happy with the resulting image. I shot film at the scene as well, so it will be fun to compare those images when I get that developed.
As I drove home I searched for wildlife off the road but didn’t bother taking my camera out once.
When you’ve just shot light like that, what’s the point?