A Million Silent Worlds

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Those stars we can see through the haze of pollution and wash of city lights look white for the most part. But get up to altitude, to clear, dark air and you can see that stars come in many colors. I drove to Yosemite on Tuesday night and as I was descending into the valley stopped to admire the sky and the show the Milky Way was putting on away from the cluttered, confused sky above my home town.

I tried to photograph it but found myself in the dark, literally, just trying different settings on my camera to record something like what I was seeing. That’s what I got, something like what I saw, but not very much like, sadly. It was, in a word, amazing.

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The next evening as I was leaving the park, I stopped at the Wawona Tunnel parking lot to try to catch the silhouette of El Capitan with the amazing stars in the background. El Cap was covered with its own kind of stars, brave mountain climbers settling into their bivvies for the night. There was even one on the face of Half Dome in the distance.

I must find a technique for taking better photos in pitch black night, because what I eyes could see was inspiring…

Info: The first photograph was made with a Nikon D700 Digital SLR Camera, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens, on a Manfrotto 055XPROB Pro Tripod with a Manfrotto 488RC2 Midi Ball Head(3157N) and a Nikon MC30 Remote Cable Release in Mirror Up mode. Exposure at 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, 16mm, processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Noise Ninja Pro. The second image was the same except that I used a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR, and the exposure was 10 seconds at 70mm.

Scott

Posted on September 18, 2009 in Landscape Stories Share

  • That’s fantastic Scott! On my first trip to Yosemite I also spotted some brave climbers on El Capitan, and I absolutely love the inclusion of their small points of light in my own photo too. That there are so many lights on El Capitan here really works great with the starry sky. Nice work!

  • Thanks, Tyler. I’m hoping some day before too long we’ll find ourselves side by side in this magic spot!

  • mark

    I am amazed how many ‘lights’ there are on the mountain. Fantastic star-scape in the first shot. Inspiring stuff.

  • Thanks Mark. I think there must have been more people hanging out on El Cap’s north face than are apparent in this image, because this shows only the lights that came on during the 30 second exposure. I have some images of a bivvie in daylight I’ll post soon, so you can see what their rigs look like.

  • dan

    Amazing shot of the Milky Way! And wow I can’t believe people actually spend the night on El Capitan like that, scary.

  • WOW! The first picture on all the stars is amasing! It makes me wanna stay up long after sunset and go out in the night with my camera pointed straight up.

    Would it be possible to know how long you had the shutter open for that photo?

  • Thanks, Stoffs, and thanks for reminding me that I forgot to put the image info in this post.

  • As soon as I can make it there Scott, I’d love to go shooting in Yosemite. I’m terribly disappointed to have not made it down yet this fall and likely can’t before Tioga Pass and Glacier Point are inaccessible.

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