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Dark Matters: Our Favorite Photos of 2024

Was 2024 the best year ever for night photography? It sure seemed like it!

In April millions of people prepared and traveled for the Great American Eclipse, which did not disappoint. Over the course of 2024 the sun released more than 50 X-class solar flares, resulting in solar-maximum aurora displays worldwide, some of which dipped well below the Mason-Dixon Line. And Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) delighted many of us in early autumn.

The year 2025 will also be big for us, not only with more stellar celestial events, but also because it marks our 10th year of sharing and celebrating and educating about night photography and all the adventures that go with it. We’re looking forward to a full schedule of both new and favorite destinations to keep us all seizing the night.

Until then, we reflect on 2024. We were fortunate to lead 21 workshops and tours, for which we visited nine national parks, seven islands and five international destinations. Now, in these last few days of this year, we honor the tradition of sharing our ten favorite night images with you. Will comets, eclipses and auroras be included in our top 10? Will they make yours?


Chris Nicholson

Yellowstone National Park. Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

In September I photographed in Yellowstone National Park’s Norris Geyser Basin at night for the third time ever. The first time was way back, at a point in my career when I wasn’t yet good enough at night photography to create an image I’d care to show anyone. The second time, clouds rolled in and obscured every star in the sky. This third time, however, was … wow!

The atmosphere was dry and the sky was clear, revealing countless stars twinkling overhead. The air was a perfect temperature—cool enough so that the steam from fumaroles and hot springs was apparent yet not overwhelming. The lack of any breeze kept the steam from blowing away and prevented ripples from disrupting the perfect star reflections in the water.

Beautiful random patterns of runoff offered plenty of possible compositions, but I waited most of the night for the Milky Way to drift over this spot, aligned with this little pond and little stream. I loved how all the elements of this inspiring landscape came together into exactly how I wanted to remember the moment.

Martha’s Vineyard. Nikon D5 with a Laowa 20mm f/4 shift lens. 15 seconds, f/11, ISO 6400.

In spring we brought a workshop group out to Martha’s Vineyard to photograph lighthouses. On the first night we visited Gay Head Lighthouse, and fogged rolled in. Not a problem! Lighthouses were built for weather, so weathery nights can be a great time to photograph them.

After the group left for the hotel, Gabe and I stayed out to shoot more. Gabe in particular had an idea he was chasing, and he needed some time to execute it. That left me wandering around looking for images to create. While lighthouses are fun to photograph, after working a few angles, finding more compositions can become challenging. In those moments I search for anything in the area that I can juxtapose with the tower—a rocky shoreline, the keeper’s quarters, an oil house, etc. Here, I found these wonderful branches.

The way the bare branches crept into the scene, combined with the fog and the moody light bouncing around in it, made for a palpably eerie aesthetic. After one look at the LCD, I knew this would be one of my favorite lighthouse photographs.

Gabriel Biderman

Chicago, Chicago. Nikon Z 8 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 2.5 seconds, f/18, ISO 64.

There were plenty of images that I worked really hard to create this year. I used specialized gear, plotted exposures, and figured out where the sun and moon would be, but it was this accident of a shot that skyrocketed to the top.

Our Gateway Arch & Northern Route 66 workshop was probably the most underrated trip we offered this year. It was full of architecture tours, boat rides, skyscrapers, arches and plenty of Roadside Americana.

We always try to creatively capture the iconic symbols of the city or park we visit, and this Chicago Theater sign is definitely one. First I set up in the median strip of the street and composed several images capturing car trails. Then I accidentally triggered a 2.5-second exposure while I picked up the camera and tripod to adjust the composition. My finger went to the delete button but the image that appeared on the rear LCD gave me pause. Wow. That was a happy accident indeed.

I went on to try eight more intentional camera movement (ICM) shots but it was the “unintentional camera movement” that proved to be the most unique interpretation of the Chicago Theater for me that night.

Three Hours Outside the Ohio State Reformatory. Nikon Z f with a Nikon 19mm f/4 tilt-shift lens. Foreground: Four blended frames shot at 30, 15, 8 and 4 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 400. Background: 348 stacked exposures shot at 30 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 400.

Looks like it was urban night photography for the win for me in 2024! Our Rust & Ruinism tour was a dream come true, as we got night access to the Ohio State Reformatory (ORS), the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and Carrie Furnaces. ORS is the famous Shawshank Redemption prison, and while most of us spent the night ghost hunting and lighting the peeling-paint-walled cells, a few of us adventured outside to create a star-trail establishing shot of the front of this 138-year-old edifice.

This was a tricky shot, but my trusty Nikon 19mm tilt-shift lens was huge in helping me keep all the lines straight. I first exposed the highlights in a controlled manner so that nothing would be blown out. Then I figured out the proper sky exposure and let it rip for 3 hours while I went back inside the prison. I was absolutely thrilled with the blend and stack, and then I finished it with a black and white conversion in Nik Silver Efex.

Lance Keimig

Near the Wreck of the Steel Ship Gardar BA 64, Paterksfjordur, Iceland. Nikon D780 with a Tamron VR 15-30mm f/2.8G lens at 20mm. 13 seconds, f/4, ISO 6400.

Despite 2024 being an amazing year for viewing and photographing auroras, it was a frustrating one for me. During the massive G5 storm in May, I was leading a tour in the Faroe Islands, a place that could have been an incredible location to experience the northern lights. Unfortunately the sky was completely cloudy during the entirety of the auroral activity. Then, during the coronal mass ejection of October 10-11, I was home in Northern Vermont, which had 100 percent cloud cover. Again, nothing, nada, not one trace of green or pink. Just gray.

However, I finally received my just desserts with a couple of “full spectrum” aurora experiences in Iceland in September.

One night our group was photographing the wreck of an old steel ship, which has long been grounded at the end of a fjord outside the town of Paterksfjordur, when a pretty decent aurora developed. With a good-sized crowd working three sides of the ship, it was becoming difficult to make an image without other photographers in the shot. If you know Matt, you know that wouldn’t bother him, but I decided to wander off.

I walked about 100 yards away from the boat where I found a little spit of land that made for a great foreground, with the town in the background. It made for a strong composition with a great mix of green, blotchy clouds, and a vibrant splash of magenta thrown in for good measure.

Lawrence the Sheep, Djupavik. Nikon D780 with a Tamron VR 15-30mm f/2.8G lens at 15mm. 30 seconds, f/3.5, ISO 3200.

I don’t think this is one of the best images I made this year, but it certainly is one of my favorites, and for a very funny reason.

During the same Westfjords trip we were all busily photographing auroras outside the old herring factory at Djupavik. I was up on the hill behind the hotel, and one photographer in our group was in the small field below me, wearing a very bright orange puffy coat. I wasn’t about to ask him to move, so I figured I’d just clone him out later if he lingered in the spot. (He did.)

When I was processing the image in Lightroom, I selected Lawrence in his orange coat and used the Generative Remove tool, did not enter any AI prompts, and hit return, expecting Lawrence to be replaced with grass. Nope. Lightroom took it upon itself to replace him with a beautifully rendered sheep, complete with backlighting and a shadow, which was totally appropriate to the scene.

I still laugh every time I look at this image. What a happy accident.

Matt Hill

Ibex Dunes in Death Valley National Park. Nikon Z 8 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 67mm. Six stacked exposures shot at 5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 800.

In December 2024 we brought a workshop group to Ibex Dunes in Death Valley National Park. This was my second time to this off-the-beaten-tracks location, and I had a dream of photographing a moonset over the dunes with star trails and a long lens.

The weather was perfect—mild enough so the flat-ish hike across the valley floor from the parking area was uneventful—and when I approached the north end of the dunes, I spotted the mini dune I wanted to ascend to get some elevation for the foreground of the composition.

Using a 24-70mm zoom lens, I carefully chimped my way to the right balance of rippled dunes and starry skies. I made six 5-minute exposures to combine into a massive star trail image. In post, I chose the one foreground frame with the shadow lines that best revealed the sharp edges of the dunes. I then layered and blended in Photoshop and finished in Silver Efex.

Hands down my favorite image from 2025.

Great Basin National Park. Nikon Z 8 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. Foreground: 4 minutes, f/2.8, ISO 800. Sky/meteors: 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

I am a sucker for meteor showers. And no meteor shower thrills me more than a no-moon scenario with a dark sky for the Perseids. Add to that a G3 magnetic storm with massive auroras, and you have an incredible night for everyone and memories to last a lifetime.

Working on meteor shower composites with the camera not facing toward the radiant—in this case the constellation Perseus—allows for capturing much longer meteor streaks. And when aligned properly, they all point back to Perseus (which in this case was very, very out of frame).

But wow, don’t they look pretty? This composite includes one base image shot at a lower ISO for better image fidelity (mainly shadow details and lower noise). I ran all the images through Lightroom’s AI-based Denoise. Finally, I layered the 66 frames that I identified with meteors (out of hundreds) in Photoshop and then aligned the layers.

You cannot see auroras in this photo, but the gentle red on the clouds is from an aurora reflected from the opposite sky. It was a magical, breathtaking night.

Tim Cooper

Moyne Abbey, Courtyard Perimeter. Nikon Z 6II with a Laowa 9mm f/5.6 lens. 4 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 800.

This year two of my favorite images are black and white, and both came from our time in Ireland.

Western Ireland is such a great place for castles, friaries, abbeys and all sorts of old stone structures that lie about in various stages of decay. I’ve always been fascinated with these types of structures, and I can spend hours in them while imagining my past life of 1,000 years ago.

Like many of my images, I light painted this with a mix of stationary low-level LCD lights (Luxli Fiddles, in particular) and my Coast flashlights. The symmetry of this area captivates me, and I made a similar image 2 years ago without the lighting. I knew then that when I came back that I wanted another shot at this location.

While waiting to return, I imagined how I would create the lighting. I placed the Fiddles on stands behind the front-most pillar, each tuned away from the center of the courtyard. This supplied the main light. During the exposure I walked around with flashlights, filling in shadows and creating highlights on the back walls, to accentuate the difference between the two sides.

Entrance, Rosserk Friary. Z 6II with a Nikon 14mm f/2.8 lens. 60 seconds, f/4, ISO 200.

Sometimes the idea behind an image comes to me very slowly. Other times it hits like a lightning bolt. The idea for light painting the entrance at Rosserk Friary hit me immediately. On this trip, anyway. During my first visit I hadn’t even noticed this lovely architectural detail.

That is the main reason I love revisiting locations that really resonate with me—I always see the scene differently and often find something more interesting the second or third time around. I think the first time we visit a location, we can be overwhelmed by the obvious. We become engrossed in those images and find it difficult to think past them. Subsequent visits allow us to relax, to see past the obvious and to perhaps take more chances.

This image of the entrance was a bit risky. I could see in my mind’s eye what I wanted, but I didn’t know if I had enough time to complete all of the lighting. I shot multiple frames lit with a Coast HP7 flashlight, as well as one frame that I underexposed at blue hour to ensure that any areas I couldn’t light wouldn’t be featureless black. I light painted the remaining six images from different angles and with different brightness levels to move the viewer through the frame while highlighting the varied details seen from this viewpoint.


Your Turn

What was your favorite night photograph of 2024? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.

Then … enjoy the final nights of 2024 and all the nights of 2025. There are a lot more favorite photos waiting to be made.

Gabriel Biderman is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He is a Brooklyn-based fine art and travel photographer, and author of Night Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots (Peachpit, 2014). During the daytime hours you'll often find Gabe at one of many photo events around the world working for B&H Photo’s road marketing team. See his portfolio and workshop lineup at www.ruinism.com.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Night Grooves: Our Favorite Photos of 2023

It’s that time again. The year is winding down, wrapping up, and we look back on all of the things we did that we are proud of, and perhaps the things we didn’t do or places we didn’t go that are still on the bucket list. It’s a big world out there, with so many dark places to explore! Soon, as we turn the final calendar page, we’ll look ahead to the new year full of promise and opportunity, and of the many images waiting to be made.

Here at National Parks at Night, we have a tradition of looking back at a year’s worth of photos and picking our favorites to share. This also gives us a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are to be able to travel to such spectacular places with you, and to remember that the world is full of beauty and wonder.

We’ve had a banger for a year. We led 22 workshops and tours, explored nine U.S. national parks visited eight islands, led seven international photo expeditions, and planned a full schedule of both new and favorite destinations for 2024.

For now, as we wrap up and wind down the current year, we hope you’ll enjoy seeing our favorite images. And then we hope you’ll take a moment or two to find and share your own favorites from 2023 with us.


Chris Nicholson

Voyageurs National Park

Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Four stacked exposures shot at 4 minutes, f/4, ISO 800.

A favorite photo is not necessarily a best photo. This is a fact I run into annually, when I have to choose and write about my favorite two night photos of the year.

Artistically and technically, I think this photo is good, but it wouldn’t end up in my portfolio. I didn’t have an amazing foreground to work with—just the shape of the tree line at the water’s edge, and the glass-surface reflection of pristine dark skies. I worked with what I had, most of which was technique.

But I once heard a photographer say, “A good photograph shouldn’t be of something, it should be about something.” With that in mind, I tell you that while this photo is of trees and water and stars, it’s about something else: It’s about time with my 10-year-old daughter.

This past summer Maggie and I ventured to Minnesota to explore Voyageurs National Park. I rented a houseboat called Northern Lite, and we spent five days cruising the lakes and four nights sleeping on the water. We saw eagles and loons, otters and fish, sunrises and sunsets—and yes, stars and darkness. On the first night, she walked off the boat and onto the sand, chatting as usual, when she looked up, paused mid-sentence and said, “Whoa! Is that the Milky Way?!” Her joy practically lit up the lake.

This photo is about all of those things. It’s also about our last evening of the trip. In late afternoon we secured the boat to the shore of Grassy Bay. We changed into our swimsuits and jumped off the stern to swim in the cool waters of the cove. We made a steak dinner, then built a fire on the beach for roasting marshmallows. We played a trivia game inside, and brought the flashlight outside to search the shallows for crayfish and frogs and leeches.

The next morning, as the sun rose and wicked the mist off the water, I captained us out of the park and back to the marina, smiling, feeling great, knowing I’d just finished one of the best weeks of my life—and hoping that Maggie will someday look back and feel the same.

So when I look at this photo now, what I see is the tree line that sheltered our boat, the very water we swam in, the stars that shined while we slept—and the peace of knowing that Maggie and I shared a wonderful slice of our lives together. And that’s my favorite.

Joshua Tree National Park

Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Three focus-stacked, blended exposures shot at 5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 6400 (foreground); 5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 6400 (middleground); and 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400 (background).

I love Joshua Tree National Park. I love the trees, I love the rock formations. But after a week of shooting there this fall—and after shooting there for about the fifth time in 5 years—I was feeling done with yuccas and boulders. So on my last day of the trip I wandered off looking for something different. While scouting at the end of daylight, I found this desert wildflower (a datura, specifically) tucked in a narrow valley, blooming peacefully along the trail. I knew I needed to shoot it under the night sky.

I hung around the spot for a bit, thinking through what I wanted to do, then I ate my sandwich dinner while sitting on a stone next to the flower, waiting for conditions to be right.

To get the composition I desired, I needed to get the lens only about a foot from the bloom, which meant I wouldn’t have enough depth of field for sharp stars. I also knew that once twilight was over, the valley would be void of light, leaving nothing to illuminate the main subject.

To solve these problems, I combined two techniques: I shot for both a focus stack and a starlight blend. The raw materials involved three frames, with separate focus points and exposures for the foreground, the middleground and the background. Once home I ran them all through AI Denoise in Lightroom, then blended each in Photoshop to create the final image.

Gabriel Biderman

Tongariki Night Skies, Rapa Nui

Astro-modified Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400. (Swipe to reveal the names of the celestial bodies in this image.)

Several dreams came true this year, with the most vivid being a visit to Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

I was once a young boy who loved mythology and ancient history, and that’s when I first saw the mysterious moai in a National Geographic magazine. I wanted to be an archaeologist and read as much as I could about moai, which unfortunately wasn’t much. But the seed was planted and the desire to one day stand among them never left me. When I found out we had access to the moai at night, under the southern stars, well, the trip couldn’t come quick enough!

We typically plan our Easter Island night photography tours for February, which gives us the clearest skies. However, at that time of year the core of the Milky Way isn’t visible until 1 or 2 hours before morning twilight. That’s not too much of an issue, as each night we get to see all the stars we never see in the Northern Hemisphere—and to be honest, I feel lost in the sky. It’s absolutely amazing. I feel like a young explorer, literally connecting the dots and seeing vivid nebulas and the Magellanic Clouds with my naked eye.

But remember, we still need a good foreground to balance the story. To me, nothing beats the moai for the epic foreground to connect to the constellations.

I shot this image at one of the most visited sites, Tongariki. We arrived at 4 a.m. and had about 2 hours to photograph the southern tail and core of the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, the Carina Nebula and more.

I’m so addicted to the southern skies and can’t wait to dip south of the equator again and again!

Highland Point Lighthouse, Cape Cod

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S lens at 22mm. 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

Sometimes our best photos are ones closer to home. I was lucky enough to travel all over the world this year, but one of the workshops I was looking forward to most was Lighthouses of Cape Cod. It was a nostalgic trip for me, as I’d spent life on the Cape from age 4 through grade 4. Lighthouses were aplenty, and, like fried clams, they are the norm in the area.

Photographing lighthouses is tricky, and it requires different capture and processing techniques to master in order to truly capture the essence of one at night. One technique we were trying to incorporate was using tilt-shift lenses to get the correct perspective of these architectural delights. Shot incorrectly, many of these towers can look like the Leaning Lighthouse of Pisa. There are ways to “straighten your buildings” in post, but we instead focused on either shooting it correctly with a tilt-shift lens or shooting it as straight as we could with our regular lenses.

This photograph of Highland Point Lighthouse was my last shot of the night. I was using a Nikon 19mm tilt-shift for a long exposure on the other side of the lighthouse, so I went hunting for another angle with my 14-24mm, which is when I came across this idea.

While this shot might not have a dramatic wow factor, it stuck with me while assessing my best shots of 2023. Everything just aligns nicely. I treated my 14-24mm lens like a tilt shift and didn’t angle it up or down, which kept distortion to a minimum. I got closer and filled the frame with the fence and was very specific with where I cropped in on the house.

The beam of this lighthouse was created by including two flashes of the light during a 10-second exposure. To me, it looks like a perfect cover shot of a lighthouse at night that you would see in a magazine. I’m looking forward to photographing more lighthouses on the cape in 2024, when we run our Lighthouses of Martha’s Vineyard workshop!

Lance Keimig

Three Moai, Rano Rakaru, Rapa Nui

Nikon D780 with a Sigma 24mm f/1.4 lens, lit with two Luxli Fiddle LED panels. 20 seconds , f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

I was fortunate to begin my year with two back-to-back tours on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island––one with Gabe and one with Matt. It’s such a special place, and having nighttime access to the moai statues is a real privilege. Having multiple nights to experience and photograph the quarry where the statues were carved was a dream come true. It’s the best location on the island for photography because of the sheer number of moai and the variation in the terrain.

The challenging aspect of photographing at Ranorakaru is that visitors are confined to a series of narrow trails due to the fragile nature of this archeological site. This makes for limited composition and lighting opportunities.

In this particular scene, there was a very limited angle that allowed me to align the three moai in such a way that they did not overlap each other and still be able to illuminate them effectively. To light the two figures in the foreground, I placed a Luxli Fiddle with a grid attachment on a stand downhill and camera left. I placed a second Fiddle further along the trail to light the third moai, also with a grid and tilted up to avoid spilling the light on the ground in front of the statue. The crescent moon was rising in the background and outside of the left part of the frame, and it provided wonderful illumination for the clouds that would have otherwise deadened the sky.

I also confess to using Generative Fill in Photoshop to remove the low railings along the path in the lower left portion of the frame. They were in shadow, but I still found them a distracting modern anachronism that took away from the feeling I wanted to create with the image. AI Denoise enabled me to use ISO 12,800 with relative impunity in this very dark environment with virtually no light pollution. I’m a nervous skeptic when it comes to most things AI (Beware the Cylons), but it has been a tremendous boon for photographers this year.

The Pleiades from Hurricane Ridge on a Smoky Night, Olympic National Park

Nikon D780 with a Sigma 24mm f/1.4 lens. 13 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

During our September workshop in Olympic National Park, we visited Hurricane Ridge twice. The wildfire smoke was so thick on the first night that we went back down to sea level before the sky was even dark. On the second night the winds shifted, and the air was mostly clear on the ridge, but as we climbed the trail to the top of Hurricane Hill, the wind shifted once more and smoke filled the valleys to the north and west.

I’d been looking forward to returning to Olympic since Chris and I did a backpacking workshop to Shi Shi Beach in 2018. I was mostly excited about photographing the sea stacks on the beaches, so it’s ironic that my favorite image from the trip is from the mountains high above the Pacific.

The execution of the image was straightforward. There was no moon, but the last lingering twilight and we did have some light pollution from the towns of Sequim and Port Townsend to the northeast. I kept the shutter speed to 13 seconds to avoid stars trailing with the 24mm lens. I stopped down to f/2.8 but I wish I had stopped down a bit more and gone with a higher ISO.

The combination of the smoke and the light in the sky made for some great soft colors, and the magnificent star cluster known as the Pleiades was perfectly positioned to juxtapose against the fir trees in the foreground. Tennyson referred to the Pleiades as a “swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid” and that description was never more apt than on that smoky night in the Olympics. Sometimes the simplest of images can be the most rewarding.

Matt Hill

Meteors Over High Dune, Great Sand Dunes National Park

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. Two frames shot at 5 minutes, f/2.8, ISO 800, stitched in PTGUI Pro (foreground), blended with 32 frames shot at 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, stacked and masked in Photoshop (meteors).

In August 2023 I ascended to High Dune within Great Sand Dunes National Park. This was my fifth visit to the park and my holy grail was to make a meteor shower composite over the sand dune field.

Due to adverse weather conditions during the meteor shower peak, we could not climb the dunes as a group, and that made me sad. But keep in mind it’s an 800-foot uphill slog on sand, which begins at 8,000 feet of elevation. Some were relieved.

After the workshop ended, I gave it a shot solo. The weather was promising, and I packed as lightly as possible. I brought my Novoflex Triobalance and a Novoflex BasicPod hiking kit, plus 1.5 gallons of water, my panorama rig, and two cameras and two lenses.

For this image I made a two-panel vertorama—one panel predominantly of the dunes and the other of the sky, both during twilight. The lights from below are campers having a small but very fun party.

Much to my chagrin, the quantity of meteors that evening was not nearly as great as the night of the peak. So I took Tim’s advice and composited in the sky and meteors from the night of the peak. All these images were photographed in the same direction using the same technique and lens.

I do wish I could have shot it all on the same night, but you can choose to make the best of variables out of your control. This became the composite I’ve been dreaming of making.

Ranu Kau Caldera, Rapa Nui

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 at 24mm. 17 frames shot at 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800, stitched in two rows using PTGUI Pro.

When I began earnestly making panoramas, it was because the complexity of the method thrilled me. Nowadays I use the methods as means to achieve visual goals, and especially for natural perspective control for wider fields of view.

I don’t mind if someone notices it’s a panorama, but I don’t want them to be distracted by the method. With this in mind, here is a 17-image panorama composite that covers about 220 degrees of width and about 100 degrees of height. I use a 24mm lens when I want a natural rendition and have the time to make a multi-row pano sweep, which in this case was an ironic miscalculation my part because I ended up having only one chance at this because of the weather.

The location is Rano Kau caldera on the island of Rapa Nui. We got up at 3 a.m. to attempt this Milky Way bend over the crater—and got rained out. The second attempt was our last chance. We got lucky in between rainstorms and grabbed this moody moment of power and grace. I had to work fast. And I got this one mosaic captured before we got wet again.

I enjoy this image so much that I see it every day as a metal print from Bay Photo Lab.

Tim Cooper

Aurora, Flakstadoya, Norway

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 15mm. 2 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

The Lofoten archipelago is one my favorite landscapes in the world. I am completely enamored with this unique island chain located in northern Norway. The jagged and picture-perfect peaks here rise thousands of feet nearly straight up from the bays and inlets, and this rugged and striking landscape has produced more than its fair share of its iconic images. Especially in winter.

As I look back on the images I made in 2023, this one stands out as a favorite. Chasing the aurora borealis is always fun, and even a mediocre display of light is still exciting. This night Matt and I were scouting the island of Flakstadoya, and the evening’s display was phenomenal. In typical fashion, Matt and I stood nearly next to each another while capturing very different takes of the sky and landscape.

Like scent and sound, pictures can produce very strong memory recall. Every time I see this image I am transported back to that magical night. But that is not the only reason it’s one of my favorites.

This image also fulfills one of the goals I strive for in all my landscape photographs: capturing a sense of place. While it’s an easy concept to discuss, and to understand, I’ve found that I fail more often than I would like in trying to convey my impression of a place. I feel this image is one of my few that truly captures the essence of Lofoten. Or at least the way that I romantically see and remember this stunning island chain.

Burishoole Abbey, County Mayo, Ireland

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, lit with a Coast HP7R flashlight. Seven 4 minute exposures for star trails and four 4 minute exposures for light painting. All exposures at f/4, ISO 100.

Light painting has always been my favorite part of night photography. Creating a scene that has never existed before is thrilling. It’s starting with a nearly blank canvas. It’s a challenge. A real challenge.

Here at Burishoole Abbey in Ireland, I was determined. Lance and I had visited and photographed the abbey before and he created a fantastic image of this section that I had always admired. On this visit I was eager to interpret the same scene in my own way.

My goal was to have the tombstones seemingly glow from within while highlighting the texture of the abbey’s stone work and the wrought iron fence in the foreground. Many different angles of light would be required to achieve this look. It would take a bunch of experimenting. It would be—again, challenging.

In the end it took over 15 attempts just to determine the basic light angles and duration of flashlight illumination for those separate angles. Once I felt confident, I needed another four separate exposures lasting a minute each to paint all of the aspects of the scene I wanted to highlight.

Due to the time needed to inspect and analyze the light painting between exposures, the star trails from my light painting frames wouldn’t stack properly. So, leaving my tripod in place, I shot another seven frames at the same exposure of 4 minutes, f/4 to create the star trail frames for the final stack.

All in all, the entire scene took around 1.5 to 2 hours of time. That was 2 hours of a blissful “no-mind” state that night photography can often produce. I love light painting.

Your Turn

What was your favorite night photograph of 2023? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.

Then … enjoy winding down 2023 and winding up 2024. There’s lot of night-seizing to be had!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Hanging Ten: Our Favorite Photos of 2022

As time seems to accelerate with each passing year, we can look back at 2022 as when the world got its collective groove back. If 2020 is best remembered as the year we’d rather forget as the full force of Covid shut down the globe, and 2021 was a year of starts and stops as one variant after another reared its ugly head, then 2022 is the year we hit full stride and really got back up to speed.

Here at National Parks at Night, we ran a full schedule of workshops and tours, including a couple that had been twice rescheduled due to the pandemic. We ran 23 workshops and tours, six of which were international trips, including our first aboard a sailboat and our first to the Faroe Islands. We also welcomed some wonderful new people into the National Parks at Night community with our first Intro to Night Photography workshop in Death Valley.

It was a productive year for image-making too. Tim dug deeper into blue hour blends. Matt focused on rendering astro-landscapes through panoramas, vertoramas and little planets. Chris leaned into natural-looking foregrounds for night photos, whether blue hour blends, moonlit foregrounds, long exposures to fill in shadows, or employing Low-level Landscape Lighting (LLL) with a dim and cool light. Gabe leveled up his post-processing skills, getting more comfortable with blending, masking, stacking and compositing. I used new LLL tools to repurpose lighting skills I had developed a couple of decades ago.

It’s always a challenge to pick our favorite images of the year, but it’s also a great opportunity to look back at the images we made, to revisit the places we went, and especially to remember the people we traveled and worked with while making those images.

Below you see each of our top two picks from the night photographs we made in 2022.


Chris Nicholson

Moon Over Mount Baker

Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 800.

The Mount Baker Wilderness is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s part of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, in a stretch of Washington state’s North Cascades mountains, bordering the wilds of North Cascades National Park. Walking the trails is like walking at the edge of heaven.

Gabe and I brought a group to the area this summer. We stayed in a chalet in the mountains for a couple of nights, where we had access to some of the most beautiful alpine scenery in the U.S. On the second night we took a short hike, and I looked for an interesting way to photograph an area I’d shot twice before. The moon over Mount Baker was calling to me—the balance of moonlight between the sky and landscape was perfect—but I was struggling to find an intriguing foreground.

I walked a little further up the trail, turned a bend around some large glacial erratics, and came upon this expanse of ice and snow. Perfect! I had to climb one of those erratics to get the angle right. The boulder didn’t have enough room for both me and my tripod, so setting up was a little precarious—but worth the trouble.

I spent a lot of time this year working on natural-looking foregrounds to night photos, and using moonlight is one of the techniques I most enjoy. The serenity and dynamics that combine in this scene are a perfect example of why.

Star Trails Over Ocean Cliffs, Acadia National Park

Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 20 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 200.

From one corner of the mainland to the other, I moved from North Cascades in summer to Acadia in fall. On our last night in the latter, I brought Matt and a couple of our friends to one of my favorites spots in the park—one of my favorites for either photography or hiking or even just for enjoying the sound of waves swishing onto the cliff-bottom shores.

I made this photo while waiting to make another. I’d scouted a composition that required facing west, which is the last direction of sky to get dark at night. I wanted to stay productive while waiting, so I wandered around the rocks and eventually found this eastward view toward the entrance to Frenchman Bay.

Long exposures aren’t always easy to visualize, and that was the case with this setup. I wasn’t sure I’d like the image. But I had time, so I dilated it into this exposure. And when it was done, I was very glad I’d opened the shutter.

The scene was bathed in moonlight, so I didn’t need to do any blending or light painting to get detail in the foreground. There was so much moonlight, in fact, that the stars were getting a bit washed out—so I mounted a polarizing filter to make the moonlit sky pop a little better.

Once all that was done, executing the photograph was a matter of a simple 20-minute exposure and some easy tweaks in post.

Gabriel Biderman

Liberty Bell, Milky Way and Car Trail

Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 2 minutes, f/4, ISO 1600; sky: 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

I was incredibly fortunate in 2022 to travel 70,000 miles, to 4 countries, to 15-plus national parks, adding almost 50,000 clicks to my cameras. Needless to say, I explored and taught a lot under the stars.

One of the most epic trips was my 3 weeks in the Pacific Northwest where I visited all three of the national parks in Washington, none of which I had previously been to. I was excited most about the least visited one, North Cascades National Park.

Known as “the American Alps,” North Cascades is challenging to explore, but once you peel back the layers it just gets better and better. The craggy mountains reminded me of the ancient peaks of Lofoten. And of those, Liberty Bell, to me, won the prize as the most distinguished of the peaks. It doesn’t hurt that—in this photo, anyway—the Milky Way rises above it and car trails act as a mirror below the peak.

We brought our workshop here and figured we’d stay for an hour or 2, but we all fell so in love with this location that we ended up staying the whole night.

There aren’t many times that I choose one spot to set up and happily stay all evening. But we had so much fun. We were all careful to compose with the Milky Way and add the road below. Some of us composed horizontally and some vertically. Most of us were shooting noise stacks because after we took our twilight base shot it got really dark and we were pushed to ISOs of 12,800 and beyond.

We’d shout out whenever a car was coming up the valley, and you’d hear the triggers firing, as well as our giggling that we’d captured another successful image of several awesome elements coming together.

We could feel the world rotating and the Milky Way moving closer and closer to the peak. Should we stay to see how it looks coming out of the top? Will it look like a volcano erupting with space dust?

The answer is yes, but that is a picture for another time. This one was similar to many that our group shot, and I don’t care. It genuinely brings me back to Liberty Bell and the excitement we all shared when all the stars, cars and mountains aligned.

Auroras Over Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of my favorite places in the park system. The sand dunes, picturesque farmsteads, historic buildings and pristine dark skies keep me coming back for more. The people who live in the small towns that dot this Lake Michigan region are so warm and welcoming that I feel right at home.

I created this image during a workshop I teach for the Glen Arbor Arts Center. We experienced auroras on two nights! Sleeping Bear is at the 45th parallel, the halfway mark between the equator and the North Pole. That’s pretty far north for Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and the area is definitely prone to green, red and purple auroras.

This night was magical. We were chasing spiking and Steve auroras, and we settled on composing the light show and stars in reflecting pools of water. We were having a blast, but the composition was missing … well, the human element, to express how excited both the atoms and we were. So I set up the intervalometer and walked to the other side of the pool, careful to place myself close to the water so the reflection would be from head to toe.

Lance Keimig

Thurmond Train Station, New River Gorge National Park

Nikon D780 with an Irix 30mm f/1.4 lens. Two blended exposures of 15 seconds and 2 minutes, f/3.5, ISO 800.

I had long been aware of the semi-ghost town of Thurmond, West Virginia, as it reminds me of the sort of location used by O. Winston Link, train night photographer extraordinaire and one of my heroes. I had expected it to be a highlight of my visit to New River Gorge National Park, and the little town did not disappoint.

On the afternoon of the night I visited, there had been a tremendous thunderstorm, and all but emergency power was out in the area. Luckily for me, this also caused the few trains that passed through the town that evening to stop at Thurmond station and wait for traffic down the line to clear. Their headlights provided ample illumination and just the right atmosphere when combined with the heavy wet summer air lingering in the gorge after the storm.

I didn’t think that the train would stay put long enough for me to make some good exposures, but after a minute or two staring at the scene and feeling as if I’d been transported back in time, I hustled down the track to a point halfway between the resting engine and the red signal lights that were holding the train in place.

I set up low to the ground and quickly determined that multiple exposures would be required to hold detail in both the highlights and shadows. I made a number of exposures, leaving myself options to either manually blend a couple of layers or to make an HDR composite if that turned out to be the better option. It did. I was excited that a car approached from across the river, lighting part of the bridge and filling in some shadows in an otherwise dark part of the frame.

I spent the whole night enraptured by the little town, thinking of Link, and feeling so pleased to finally get to create images in his footsteps.

Eidi, Faroe Islands

Nikon D780 with a Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens at 15mm. 3 minutes, f/4.5, ISO 800.

During our pre-workshop scouting in the Faroe Islands, Tim and I took a slight diversion to the outskirts of the little town of Eidi to check out a soccer pitch near the coast that we had seen as we came down the mountain above the town. I was much more interested in the town, but Tim saw the potential of this coastal view.

We didn’t shoot that day, but we did come back with the workshop one night after a wonderful Ethiopian meal prepared especially for our group at Rose’s Cafe a few miles away.

We didn’t get to do as much night photography as we had hoped, in part due to the weather, and in part due to sheer exhaustion from the long, full days we were experiencing. It was in fact raining off and on this night, but the group toughed it out and we photographed at the water’s edge for about an hour and a half. At one point the clouds opened up with the moon rising behind them, and that combined with waves crashing on the rocky shoreline and a long exposure made for one of my favorite images from our 18 days in Faroe, and of the whole year.

The Faroe Islands were a new destination both for me and for National Parks at Night in 2022, and in a year full of outstanding adventures with outstanding colleagues, it stands out as my favorite recent trip and the place I’m most excited to get back to.

Matt Hill

Half Dome Forest Fire Tracked Vertorama

Astro-modified Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and FTZ Adapter; foreground tracked with a Benro Polaris. 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

When Lance and I were in the Eastern Sierra for a workshop this year, there were scattered forest fires that occasionally blew smoke in a direction that affected us. At Olmsted Point there is a spectacular view of Half Dome, and the Milky Way core was going to line up vertically over it. What an opportunity!

Alas, upwind of the iconic peak was a forest fire and the smoke was drifting right into the view. Some people might pout, stomp their feet, shake their fists at the heavens and shout, “I want clear skies!”

Not me. I saw that smoke and said, “Wow, now this isn’t something I’ve ever seen before! It’s something real that is happening now and tells a story of the drought and fire cycles. How can I make this work for an image?”

It was after twilight, but the fire and starlight provided enough illumination for exposures at ISO 12,800. And I wanted Half Dome, which is quite diminutive from that vantage, to really stand out. So I put on a 70mm lens and composed for a vertorama where the landscape and sky were exposed at the same settings to blend well.

I shot with my astro-modified Nikon Z 6 to pull out more of the reds and magentas. I exposed the sky first to see how well the stars poked through the low smoke layer. Using the Benro Polaris to track that image for 30 seconds was a breeze.

Liking the results, I recomposed the landscape frame to include the granite valley walls leading up to Half Dome, and then completed the two-panel vertorama.

Animus Forks Little Planet

Nikon Z 6II with a Laowa 12mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 18 blended frames shot at 1/4, 1 and 4 seconds, f/11, ISO 800; sky: 10 stacked images shot at 15 seconds, f/4, ISO 12,800.

When we arrived at the abandoned mine town in Colorado at 11,000-plus feet, I was awestruck. I wanted to try to get everything I saw and felt into one photo. Reasonable, right? Of course. A spherical panorama would solve that! And PhotoPills showed me that the Milky Way arch from mountain peak to mountain peak would make for a strong “Little Planet” edit.

So I set up a tripod along the river’s edge and embarked on the most ambitious panorama I’ve ever attempted. (Watch your inbox for a blog post dedicated to the process from tip to tail.) The short story is that I made an HDR multi-row panorama of the landscape, left my setup in place and walked away for a few hours. I came back when the Milky Way hit the right position, then made sets of pano images of the sky to noise-stack in post.

I stitched the landscape and sky images separately in PTGUI Pro, then blended them in Photoshop. I did this process twice to find just the right shape for the little planet projections.

It was a risky idea, but I am super proud of how it turned out. And it’s inspired me to attempt even more blue hour spherical panorama blends in the future.

Tim Cooper

Northern Lights Near Fredvang, Lofoten Islands, Norway

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, lit with a Luxli Fiddle panel light and a Coast HP7R flashlight. 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Sought after by photographers and night sky enthusiasts, the northern lights are a bucket list item for many folks. On our March trip to Norway, I was lucky enough to witness these amazing lights over one of the world’s great landscapes: the Lofoten Islands. While there are many places to view the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere, not all supply the dynamic mix of mountains and beaches that Lofoten provides.

Three days after the group arrived we were treated to our first aurora opportunity. Keeping an eye on several aurora tracking apps, we headed out with high hopes. As we were photographing at a local beach, they finally appeared. The mix of waves, mountains and clouds with auroras was beautiful, but it soon petered out. We decided to try another location in the hopes they would reappear.

I’ll never forget the excitement in the van as we recounted the beauty we had just witnessed along with the fun of chasing some more. Once we arrived at our new location, we quickly scrambled out of the van and got to work.

I remember snapping a couple of quick frames before I headed along a trail that led to an inlet. Turning around I saw the trail leading directly back to the glow of green. Beautiful!

To be sure I captured something, I snapped a few quick shots. Then I set up a Luxli Fiddle to illuminate the foreground. This panel light coupled with a handheld Coast HP7R flashlight brought out the texture of the grasses and helped define the trail. I was in heaven.

It felt like I shot a thousand images while watching the auroras dance and change shapes. Everyone had plenty of time to capture the magic. The northern lights are truly phenomenal and experiencing them with like-minded folks was a true gift.

Star and Car Trails Near Checkerboard Mesa

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 30 stacked frames shot at 30 seconds, f/4.0, ISO 800.

I love lines in my photographs. Both real and implied lines generate impressions that influence the feel of the photo. Converging lines suggest speed, vertical lines suggest stability and horizontal lines give a feeling of calm. My favorite lines, however, are curved ones. These lines are elegant. They are in no rush to get you through the composition, and they make you slow down and take in more detail.

Car trails and star trails are two very common types of lines we encounter in night photography. The National Parks at Night team will tell you that my love of car trails borders on an obsession. It was no surprise to Chris, then, when I found this scene while we were scouting locations for a spring workshop in Zion National Park.

Climbing up from the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway near Checkerboard Mesa, we were searching for dramatic red rock formations to use as foregrounds. The eastern side of the park is noted for its swirling sandstone and solitary trees, so these subjects were in my mind’s eye as we climbed the ridge.

Not finding my imagined scene, I switched from looking for a particular subject to seeing what the area offered. That type of “searching for a specific thing” has often made me miss great opportunities, so I am glad I was able to switch mental gears that night.

After walking around with an open mind I saw the road bisecting the peaks and leading straight to the sky. I was thrilled. In typical (for me) fashion, I made plenty of images to capture the best car trails and many more to capture the night sky. To round it off, I had to make several frames using different focus points to ensure that the foreground was sharp front-to-back at my wide-open aperture setting.


Your Turn

What was your favorite night photograph of 2022? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.

Then … have a Happy New Year!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 35 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images at www.thenightskye.com.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

10 Pictures, 10 Tales: Our Favorite Night Photos of 2021

2021 was a challenging year for all. But the overall themes that prevailed were hope and celebration, as many of us could finally rejoin the great outdoors with friends and family. At National Parks at Night, we were so thrilled to see our community in-person and to share sacred spaces under the stars.

Now, at the end of 2021, as in the past we look back on our year’s worth of images and note the ones that are most precious to us. Choosing your favorite photos can be a daunting project. What makes a 5-star image? Is it the technical work that went into creating it? Or the reminder of a very special night? Which photographs still continue to shine and what new gems have been uncovered?

As you read about each National Parks at Night instructor’s favorite two photographs of the year, the underlining theme is that each had the power to transport us back to that precise moment in time. The feelings that come rushing back can be a combination of everything that aligned to create the image. It transports us back and hopefully takes you on a similar journey.


Chris Nicholson

Stars Over Zumwalt Meadows, Kings Canyon National Park

Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Two blended exposures shot at 30 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 400 (foreground) and 20 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 8000 (sky).

When I was writing my book Photographing National Parks a few years back, I spent a lot of time in coffee shops in Queens, New York, where I lived at the time—as well as in coffee shops in my hometown in Connecticut and in other places I traveled—researching and writing about various places, including some I’d never been to. I recall writing about fantastical-sounding spots such as Cinder Cone in Lassen Volcanic National Park, and Grand View Point in Canyonlands, and Artist Point in North Cascades, and hoping that someday I’d get to visit them.

In the following years I was fortunate that my book carried me to these places and more. On multiple occasions I’ve stood gazing at grand vistas, thinking back to my days leaning over my laptop in some random Starbucks learning and writing about these places, and marveling at the journey that brought me to be there in person.

Another such place was Zumwalt Meadow in Kings Canyon National Park, which I wrote about sometime around 2013 and finally was able to visit in 2021. From my book: “Zumwalt Meadow is easy to hike to and around, and is pleasant to photograph, as well. The meadow sits on the valley floor, with lush greenery providing a softer aesthetic than found in most other areas of the park. The Kings River flows through the grasses, framed by the distinctive granite walls of Grand Sentinel and North Dome.”

Zumwalt sits near the end of the furthest mile of paved road in Kings Canyon. Lance and I ventured out there, scrambled about 30 feet up some talus, set up our tripods for a dusk foreground exposure, then waited under a peaceful, spectacular night sky for a starry background exposure.

For a long time I sat on a boulder, just watching this beautiful space on Earth roll into darkness, once again remembering where I’d been and feeling grateful for where I’d come.

Tuolumne River and Meadows, Yosemite National Park

Nikon D5 with an Irix 11mm f/4 lens. Two blended exposures shot at 4 minutes, f/4, ISO 2000 (foreground) and 25 seconds, f/4, ISO 8000 (sky).

My next favorite photo from 2021 is also a blue hour blend, which isn’t much of a coincidence because it’s a technique I deliberately tried to employ more during the year.

This time I was in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. It’s a beautiful location in the High Sierra region of the park—an area that for many visitors is practically ignored in favor of the oft-visited valley.

At 8,600 feet, Tuolumne is one of the highest-elevation meadows in the Sierra Nevada. The Tuolumne River quietly bisects the glacier-carved meadow, meandering among erratics and past scattered lodgepole and Jeffrey pines, supporting a teeming riparian ecosystem that’s practically an oasis in the beautiful yet rugged and vast sub-alpine landscape.

I was again with Lance, and we hiked into the meadow to a beautiful view of the Tuolumne River flowing toward the distant mountains. The moon was new, so I knew the landscape would be completely dark once twilight was over. Phrased another way, it was a perfect situation for a blue hour blend.

I set up my tripod and used the ultrawide Irix 11mm f/4 lens to fill the foreground with the river. I made a few exposures during dusk, then left the setup while heading off to shoot with a second camera for awhile. I came back once the stars were shining, and made several exposures over the course of an hour or so, capturing the Milky Way in different spots as it drifted along the horizon. I later composited two of the frames in Photoshop to create the final image.

Gabriel Biderman

Officer’s Row, Sandy Hook

Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/4 lens at 24mm. 30 seconds, f/11, ISO 1600.

My new year’s resolution for 2021 was a simple one: to get out more at night and photograph! I live in Brooklyn, New York, and spent most of 2020 indoors; I didn’t travel farther than my Vepsa could take me.

So in early January my wife and I decided to spend a weekend with a good friend of ours in New Jersey, right outside Sandy Hook. Part of Gateway National Recreation Area, Sandy Hook is a very popular spot in the warmer months, but in the winter when the temperature is below 20 F, not so much.

For the two nights I poked around with my camera, I was bundled up like an Arctic explorer. Everyone thought I was crazy for going out, but I would not be daunted. This was the first national park I had stepped into in over a year, and I was energized!

Officer’s Row is one of the most scenic spots at Sandy Hook, especially for the brilliant sunsets that light up the sky. I tried a variety of focal lengths, cropping in tight to one, three or five houses. It was nice, but almost too simple. I continued to move back to include more buildings and then I realized that the trees at the other end of the field stood in a row similar to the homes. By adding the trees, it created the perfect foreground to give a better sense of place. Officer’s Row is not just the homes they lived in, but the field where military folk played with their families.

It was a cold and lonely experience, but one that jump-started my 2021 relationship with national parks at night.

Reacquainted with the Night, Joshua Tree National Park

Sony a7S III with a Sony FE 12-24mm f/2.8 lens at 18mm. 13 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

I was thrilled to have my first road trip of the year be to a familiar and always inspirational place, Joshua Tree National Park. I was also excited to be sharing the experience with my good friend and co-teacher, Matt Hill. We both packed our kitchen sinks for what would end up being a 3-week road trip. Not only did I bring trackers, tripods and time-lapse devices, but I also borrowed every Sony A7 and A9 camera and most of their wide and fast glass.

Matt and I had 3 days to scout and enjoy the night skies as we prepared for an upcoming workshop. But with so much gear, I got stuck in “testing” mode and created very few images for myself.

After the workshop we stayed an extra night to team with Chris and Tim to record our OPTIC Imaging Conference presentation for B&H Photo. That was a long, focused night that required the four of us to play multiple roles from creative to producer and grip!

During a break in the filming Matt went to lay on one of Joshua Tree’s many boulders. He was exhausted and needed to re-energize by taking a few moments to be one with the stars.

I immediately took one of our Luxli Fiddle LED panels and boomed it up and over him. I love the spotlight effect that made it seem like Matt was bathing in the moonlight. For the camera, I chose a low angle to create a new horizon line that makes it seem like Matt is floating on a wave of rocks.

This could be one of my favorite night portraits I have ever made, because to me Matt is experiencing something I have done and that we all need to remember: Take a break under the stars and get reacquainted with the night.

Lance Keimig

Julie at Bass Harbor

Nikon D780 with a Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens at 29mm. Six composited frames exposed at a range of 2 to 30 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 100.

This image was made more or less as a grab shot as the last twilight was fading at Bass Harbor, Maine, during our PhotoPills workshop in Acadia National Park.

We had arrived just as the light was fading, and by the time the group dispersed and got to work, it was too late to get it all in one exposure. Not to be deterred, I did a six-frame bracket at 1-stop intervals. I was struck by the scene, and even in the fading twilight the light was gorgeous. Our workshop participant Julie had set up on the pier, and at first I was bummed that she was in my frame, but in the end I think that she adds to the image.

I’m attracted to the cool blue colors punctuated with one sodium vapor streetlight and a few warm lights in the houses, plus the stillness and the simple architectural shape of the shack on the pier. Julie adds another element, and marks the context for my memory.

To me, it’s a great example of how a photograph has the power to transport me to a different place and time. As I sit here typing on a cold December evening in Vermont, I’m taken back to coastal Maine in the height of summer, and all of the places spent over the course of a week with a fine group of people making images. It’s personal, and I like that. The viewer will make whatever they want or nothing at all of the image, but for me it is a place-keeper for a boatload of memories.

Tanguy Key

Nikon D750 with a Nikon 28mm PC f/3.5 lens. 15 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 6400.

After completing our Everglades National Park workshop in April, Chris and I took a couple of days to explore the Florida Keys. I am so out of my element in Florida. Culturally, geographically, meteorologically, Florida is just not in my wheelhouse. I admit, after a long New England winter it was nice to be wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt while those at home were still wearing down jackets, but still …

The drive from the Everglades into the Middle Keys took longer than we had anticipated, and longer than Google had promised, and the night-photo opps visible from the main drag were few and far between. I didn’t mind; I was just along for the ride and happy to experience this strange new environment.

This image was made at the foot of one of the causeways that connects the keys, where the setting comprised a vast expanse of sea and sky punctuated with sticks and stones and various synthetic detritus. The tropical colors and minimalist landscape reminded me of the French surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and I made several compositions that night in his honor that had a similar feel.

I’m smitten with this composition—the repeating shapes of the stones, the sticks, the horizon and the wires, and the graduated turquoise hues of water fading into sky all work together to make this one of my surprise greatest hits of 2021.

Matt Hill

White Pocket

Nikon Z 6 with an Irix Cine 11mm T4.3 lens, lit with a Luxli Fiddle. Eleven frames shot at 20 seconds, T4.3, ISO 12800, stitched in PTGui and post-processed in Lightroom.

Until this year, one of my bucket list experiences was an overnight at White Pocket in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument of northern Arizona. Boy am I lucky to have scratched this one off the list!

This location is on BLM land, and you can camp there overnight without a permit. If planning a visit, always check ahead of time, as it’s a major commitment to drive out there (in deep, deep sand). You might also consider hiring a local guide, like we did. They provided camp gear and food, and we drove ourselves in a high-clearance vehicle.

All disclaimers aside, this area is precious, wild, remote and located in dark, dark skies. Being there seems like being on the surface of another planet. The various colors and textures of rock are mesmerizing, and a joy to light paint.

I had been imagining this pano for years. Ever since my first daytime-only visit I’d been wanting to photograph the Vortex and Castle Rock paired with a low Milky Way.

When the chance finally came, I was with Gabe and we interpreted this scene in different ways. But we both had our tripod legs on the precipice of the Vortex, which dips down much more precariously than this image suggests.

The final pano is a PTGui blend of 11 images made from an ultrawide 11mm Irix Cine lens, in vertical orientation. As usual, I aggressively overlapped the images for a seamless stitch. I shot at ISO 12,800 to balance out the native T4.3 maximum aperture. And each 20-second exposure was halfway between Accurate and Default NPF exposure durations for crispy star points.

Lighting the monumental landform was tricky. I used a Luxli Fiddle to bounce light off the stone wall behind us—literally the only option as my angle of view exceeded 200 degrees.

This now hangs on my wall as a 72-inch Xposer print.

Bethesda Fountain, Central Park

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S lens at 34mm, lit with two Coast HP7R flashlights. 60 seconds, f/6.3, ISO 100.

During our New York City workshop with Gabe, it felt great to get back to my roots. Gabe and I had met and fostered our friendship over night photography in NYC, so returning to the noise and a cacophony of light sources was quite satisfying.

Bethesda Fountain is an icon within the world-famous Central Park. This was not my first time shooting here, but it was certainly the best lighting I’ve ever had. And that was due to teamwork!

Gabe and I placed our flashlights on the fountain’s edge to add sparkle to the gilded statuary. The light also filled in the dark areas in the water and under the body of the fountain. We placed the first light slightly left of camera, the second perpendicular and to the right. The result is, for me, a strong example of well-defined portrait lighting.

Of particular challenge was defining the falling water. The camera did capture all the info I needed, but some post-processing magic in Lightroom was required to render this version. Applying a Select Subject mask allowed me to control the highlights and contrast in the water. I added a Select Sky mask to darken the sky, and increased contrast. Finally, I darkened the bright clouds low to the horizon with a brush mask and emphasized the paths of the water cascading down to the final raised pool.

What you don’t see was the most “New York Moment” of all: the half-naked man collecting change from the bottom of the fountain during this exposure. Ah, New York, how I love you.

Tim Cooper

Desert Light, Joshua Tree National Park

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 12-24mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. Multiple blended exposures of 30 seconds, f/8, ISO 1600 (foreground) and 15 minutes, f/8, ISO 100 (sky).

With its amazing array of rock formations, desert flora and pure night skies, Joshua Tree National Park is a night photographer's paradise. I was fortunate enough to be there for the near simultaneous events of our PhotoPills workshop and our video production for B&H’s OPTIC Imaging conference.

While scouting, Chris showed me this narrow defile near Skull Rock and I knew it was not only a great spot for our PhotoPills workshop but also a perfect spot for me to do a light painting demo for the conference. The shoot was, however, going to be a challenge.

When first entering the narrow gorge I saw the desert scrub plant wedged between the rounded rocks and knew I wanted to backlight the plant so it would anchor the foreground and highlight the texture in the rock formations.

The first problem was that there was no way one exposure would give me enough time to light paint the foreground and the background. The second problem was that I was so close to foreground rocks that even an aperture of f/16 would not provide perfect sharpness throughout the scene. So I decided to break up the scene into several exposures.

On the first exposure I focused on the foreground rocks and painted from behind to bring out the texture and to backlight the scrub plant. On the second exposure I refocused on the middle ground and walked through the scene while illuminating the walls of the gorge. The light on the far peak was supplied by passing cars.

After many practice runs and several failed attempts I was finally able to light the entire scene as I’d imagined it. For the final exposure I focused on the sky to create the trailing stars.

While the bulk of time creating this image occurred in the field, I also spent a significant amount of time post-processing. The same scene taken with different focus points results in small changes to the size of the subjects within the scene. This means that I had to resize each frame in Photoshop so that all of the rocks were the same size in the final image. Then each frame had to be blended together to create the illusion of continuous lighting. The easiest part was blending the star trails with the foreground.

While many night images can be made with a single exposure, sometimes it's easy to envision a shot that requires a lot more work. I’m glad I took on this particular challenge as it turned out to be one of my favorite images of 2021.

Star Trails, Valley View, Yosemite National Park

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 12-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm. Foreground: three focus-stacked blue-hour images shot at 15 seconds, f/5, ISO 100. Sky: three exposures shot at 5 minutes, f/3.5, ISO 500.

Of the millions of photographs made in Yosemite National Park, some of my favorites are from the Valley View pull-off. The ever-changing volume of the Merced River revealing, hiding and reshaping the river's edge directly below the parking area has been fodder for an abundance of magical photographs. I was determined to add to that collection, hoping for an image that captured this view with the stars of the night sky.

My chance finally came in October when Matt and I led a group of night photographers for a workshop in Yosemite Valley. During our initial scout I was disappointed to find that the river had become so low from California's ongoing drought that this particular vantage point left much to be desired.

As luck would have it, our group experienced the break in California’s dry spell to a tune of over 6 inches of rain in less than 2 days. The aftermath of the rainfall was truly magical as all of the waterfalls were rejuvenated and the rivers sprung back to life.

After shuffling the schedule around a bit due to the rain, we were able to venture to the Valley View pull-off to begin a night of shooting. The swollen river produced a far more interesting foreground as it created new channels and connected the recently dried grass tussocks with the flow of the water.

Setting up near several of the workshop participants, we worked through the blue hour exposures (with focus stacking to accommodate the extreme depth of the scene) and waited for astronomical twilight to end.

Simply waiting and watching as the glow faded from the mountains was worth the whole excursion. After the show of color ended and we counted the lights of the climbers making camp on the vertical cliffs, darkness finally fell and we began our sky exposures. I chose to create star trails via a stack of three 5-minute exposures in the hopes of creating motion in the sky that would echo that of the river and that implied a mirror of the motion of the foreground grasses.


Your Turn

What was your favorite night photograph of 2021? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.

Then … have a Happy New Year!

Gabriel Biderman is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He is a Brooklyn-based fine art and travel photographer, and author of Night Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots (Peachpit, 2014). During the daytime hours you'll often find Gabe at one of many photo events around the world working for B&H Photo’s road marketing team. See his portfolio and workshop lineup at www.ruinism.com.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

10 Silver Linings: Our Favorite Night Photographs of 2020

If you were to wrap up everything that was 2020 into a single long-exposure frame, I’m confident it would be overexposed. (Too soon?)

But that’s not how we do it around here. We take our time. We are choosy. We are deliberate. We expose for the shadows, yet retain critical details in the highlights. We exercise the right to turn our tripod around 180 degrees and shoot the other way. Why? Because the next best shot is somewhere near the infinite focal point of our lives: night photography. 

Now we embark on the hardest quest of the year: to each choose only two frames to represent our favorite creative photographs from of 2020. Please enjoy the highlights from each of our agonizing selection processes. Keep in mind, we (mostly) love all of our photos. But these rose to the top.


Chris Nicholson

Comet Neowise, Monhegan Island

Comet Neowise, Monhegan Island, Maine. Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 25,600; 16 images stacked in Sequator.

One of the nice surprises of 2020 was Comet Neowise. It was a gift to anyone who had been longing to be outside under night skies again, especially photographers. It first appeared at night at the beginning of our July workshop in the Mid-Coast region of Maine, and it really started to shine during our subsequent workshop on Monhegan Island and in Acadia National Park.

It was on Monhegan that I made this image. Lance and I had been shooting on the island for two nights alone, then two nights with the group. On the last of those evenings, in the extra-late hours, I found myself alone on an extra-quiet trail along the rocky shore. I came upon this house and cottage, with the comet nestled quietly in between.

What I didn’t see through the dimly lit window was the perfectly framed head of someone sleeping on a pillow. That detail became apparent only when viewing the long exposure on my laptop display the next morning. Sometimes surprises make the image, and for me that was certainly the case here. Aesthetically I had liked the photograph before, but once I saw the sleeper, I loved it.

The open window and the sleeping would-be stargazer under the comet-adorned night sky all combine to tell the tale of what it felt like to be outside and at peace again.

Moon Over Mobius

Moon over Mobius Arch, Alabama Hills National Scenic Area, California. Nikon D5 with an Irix 11mm f/4 lens, light painted with a Luxli Viola. 20 seconds, f/8, ISO 3200.

In October I was finally able to visit and photograph Alabama Hills—a place I’d seen many photographs of, as Lance, Tim and Gabe have shot there plenty.

Night photographers are of course drawn to rock formations, and Alabama Hills offers a nearly infinite supply of them. Perhaps the most famous, especially for photographers, is Mobius Arch. The day I photographed it was (and still is) the only day I’ve been there, but I was able to shoot it in amazing late-afternoon light, and later in serene moonlight. Yet those two opportunities were hours and hours apart.

I’d spent most of the evening helping workshop participants in other spots, ranging from right next to the cars in the parking lot (where folks were shooting star-panos of the mountain range that flanks the boulder-strewn landscape) to locations far and off the trail (where others were shooting star circles over that same landscape). Only at the end of the night did I return to Mobius, with the last two participants alongside. The three of us worked quietly together, each honed on our own ideas of how to interpret the scene.

I worked on this particular take for about 20 minutes. I already knew the exposure and the light painting approach from previous takes. The trick, though, was following the moon as it set behind Mobius, inching the tripod along the ground, keeping la luna framed right at the edge of the arch from one exposure to the next, until I finally captured what I was hoping for.

Gabriel Biderman

Utakleiv Beach, Lofoten

Utakleiv Beach, Lofoten. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 lens at 17mm. 8 seconds, f/4, ISO 12,800.

I feel very blessed to have gone to such a special place as Norway prior to the world turning upside down.

Lofoten was an epic experience, but our nights were tricky. Clouds and snow were our constant companions. We kept an eye on the weather and the Kp index to try to predict our best chance at capturing the northern lights.

Finally we saw a good report. The forecast for the elusive aurora opening was going to be from 8 to 9 p.m.—a narrow window before the clouds would roll back in.

We knew the perfect place to go: Uttakleiv Beach. We had spent a day at Uttakleiv earlier in the trip, so we were familiar with the terrain. It has seaside mountains to give scale and water to reflect the night sky.

I’ve never seen a weather forecast be so on point. When we arrived, the overcast skies made the situation seem like a bust. But at 8:00 on the dot, the skies cleared and the magical green lights started their dance. For most of our group, this was the first time witnessing auroras, but to be honest, even for the experienced, this night was pretty special.

For one hour we danced with the northern lights, aiming our cameras as the auroras moved along the purple skies. It was truly magical. And it lasted, as predicted, for one hour. For all of us who shared a night under the northern lights, we’ll carry the experience forever.

Summit Bridge, Red Hook

Summit Bridge, Red Hook. Mamiya 7 with a Mamiya 65mm f/4 lens. 30 seconds, f/8, ISO 100 (Fujifilm Acros II).

Upon returning from Norway, my “adventures” consisted of my apartment in Brooklyn and the surrounding areas. As frustrating as it was not to be under the stars of our national parks, I fell back in love with my “backyard” and film.

I live in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. It is a quaint neighborhood where everyone is proud of their front garden. I battled my stir craziness during the pandemic by taking night walks in the neighborhood. I dusted off one of my favorite film cameras—my medium format Mamiya 7—and got back to the basics of shooting film. Brighter urban lights make film exposures fairly easy to determine. 2020 also welcomed the return of Fujifilm’s Acros 100 (now II), which has the least reciprocity of any film on the market and makes long exposure film shots relatively easy.

My walks would often lead me to neighboring Red Hook, which features a mixture of industrial buildings, wharfs, cobblestone streets and old-school residential homes.

Summit Bridge, a small bridge that takes pedestrians up and over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, unites our two neighborhoods. I’ve walked over it a thousand times, but this time all the elements of the scene clicked for me. I saw lines leading up to the beacon of light. Heck, there were lines galore! The lines of the steps connected with the lines of the rails, which intersected with the lines of the spear-headed fence, and the light reflecting on the brick building also leads the eye to the fence, which all leads back to the focal-point light.

I shot this just two weeks ago. The image is a perfect bookend for a year that started in a distant archipelago and ended very close to home.

Lance Keimig

Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon. Nikon D780 with a PC-E Nikkor 28mm f/3.5 lens. 8 seconds, f/8, ISO 100.

Probably like most people, 2020 was not my most productive year, photographically or otherwise. All in all, I count myself lucky though. We managed to hold a few workshops, stay healthy, and fill most of our 2021 workshops and tours. The at-home stress test with my partner Katherine only brought us closer together, despite both of us dealing with ongoing family crises. I’m coming out of this horrible year in better shape than a lot of people, and am grateful for it. Creatively, the year is a write-off, and that’s OK, all things considered.

Katherine and I went to Portland, Oregan, to help celebrate a friend’s birthday in late February, just as the COVID-19 scare was beginning. While there we got together with another old friend who took us out night-shooting in an industrial area that just happened to be near a brewery that Gabe said Katherine and I had to visit. (We did.)

One of the things I came to realize in this truncated year was that I really miss urban night photography. It’s where I started, and I plan to get back to it in a big way when COVID subsides.

This image might not have a lot of appeal to most people, but I love the simplicity of it. The repeating shapes, the backlighting, the shadows, the minimal colors. It’s the kind of image I used to make all of the time, and want to make again. I guess that I also like it because it represents the last moments of freedom before we were all overwhelmed by the pandemic.

Acadia National Park

Eagle Lake panorama, Acadia National Park, Maine. Nikon D750 with a Sigma 24mm f/1.4 Art lens. Five stitched images shot at 15 seconds, f/2, ISO 6400.

Chris and I were joking that I’d be submitting Comet Neowise images as obvious favorites, because that’s pretty much the last time I took a night photograph. I do have a couple of decent comet photos, but it was this pano of Eagle Lake in Acadia National Park (made during the comet’s peak) that I chose to share here. Many of you know that Acadia is one of Chris’ favorite parks, and I was very happy to have been able to spend some time with him there this summer as part of the two back-to-back workshops we somehow managed to pull off in Maine in July.

I’m generally not a landscape photographer, nor a big Milky Way shooter, but this was such a gorgeous scene, and such a peaceful place to be in such a calamitous time, that the memories of being there that this image brings back make it my second pick for my favorite images of the year.

I’m thinking now how snapshots to the non-photographer serve mainly as memory triggers to take one back to a time and place from the past. I guess the same can be true for professional photographers too, as that’s what this image does for me. It’s a bookmark in time, in this case for a brief reprieve from the nonstop barrage of bad news that was 2020. But—this year is coming to an end, and if we are diligent, and a bit lucky, as we round the corner into 2021, things will start to brighten, and new opportunities will await. I’m ready for them.

Matt Hill

Lance on the Racetrack

Lance Keimig on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park. Nikon Z 6 with a Venus Optics Laowa 15mm f/2 FE Zero-D lens. 20 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 1600.

If I could sum up 2020 with one image, it would be this pensive portrait of Lance on Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park.

That workshop seemed to be foreshadowing the year ahead of us. We were plagued with adversities. From sand storms to power outages to a scarcity of fresh food, only tenacity on everyone’s part brought us to a successful end. This included our alumni, the workshop leaders and the surprise guests (Gabe and Tim).

My consideration of this image includes the crisp starry sky, the crusty playa and the soft memory of where Lance lingered, considering what occupied his attention at that moment. In the distance you can see other people forming their own relationship with the night sky. Plus, the sign of perhaps other strangers arriving or departing in the car trail on the far side.

2020 will hopefully fade into insubstantiality as this instance of Lance’s pondering did. But hopefully the tenacity and lessons we bring with us will have a more permanent home in our decision-making process.

It’s my wish that we will employ more empathy. Take a little more time to consider the perspective that distance from “normal” offers. And to take the hope one can find in this and apply it to making the things we find important thrive.

Molly Diptych

Diptych of Molly on the Hudson River. Nikon Z 6 with a Venus Optics Laowa 15mm f/2 FE Zero-D lens, lit with a LumoPro LP180 speedlight and a Nanlite Pavotube II 6C. Left: 10 seconds, f/4, ISO 3200; right: 6 seconds, f/3.5, ISO 100.

If you could truly render your perception of another being into a descriptive portrait, how would you approach executing it? I ask myself this before many portrait shoots.

This particular diptych of night portraits was the culmination of something I hold very dear: the opportunity to collaborate with other creative people. Such as the subject of these portraits and the team around this shoot.

Molly, who posed for these, has layers upon layers of truths she finds crucial and things about the world she works tirelessly to improve. From social justice to art, her strength of character and determination were elements I wanted to preserve and to enhance.

Being a fellow artist and photographer, Molly was able to offer contributions that went beyond posing in front of the camera. Her willingness to collaborate, with clear ideas on how she wanted to pose, and her willingness to stand in the murky Hudson River on a warm July night all yielded a rich session with many images I love.

For a few years we were promising to make some art together. And this was really one of the first few chances. I’m happy. And I believe the diptych of Night Paper on the left and a light painting night portrait on the right speak to each other.

The best ideas really require getting other people involved to render the vision. The other people I want to thank are Kelly Mena for producing the video shoot preceding the Night Paper shoot, and my wife Mabel for being my stalwart creative support on the video and portrait shoots. And for that matter, practically everything else.

For me, 2020 will always be a time of exploring the realities and concepts behind isolation, safety and security. This portrait pair is one glimpse into a topic I want to explore even more.

Tim Cooper

Steam at Excelsior Geyser

Steam at Excelsior Geyser, Yellowstone National Park. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 20mm. Two blended images shot at 6 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 1600 (foreground) and 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400 (background).

During our Yellowstone National Park workshop in September, Chris and I brought the group to one of the largest and best-known thermal features in the park: Grand Prismatic Springs. It’s known almost exclusively for the glowing oranges and yellows of the algae and bacteria mats that surround the deeper blues of the spring. But even there, there’s much more than just one shot. And sometimes that other take can be the hero image.

While walking the location, I noticed a car coming down the road backlighting the profuse steam generated by nearby Excelsior Geyser. The play of light and shadow through the steam was simply fantastic. I knew I had to somehow capture it by the end of the night.

By the time the group left, the shot was much more challenging to make. When I exposed for the steam and car lights, the sky rendered pitch black. On the other hand, exposing for the sky overexposed the steam. This situation called for two different exposures at different times.

For the image of the sky, I waited for a break in the steam and exposed to capture Jupiter and the stars. For the next image I had to wait for an oncoming car to backlight the steam—which by that time of night took awhile. After several attempts I finally made the images I would use to create the final composite.

The backlit moving steam and the tree and mountain silhouette came together to create an ethereal image that, for me, perfectly captured the mood of the scene.

Colorado Silky Way

Silky Way over Last Dollar Road, Colorado. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Two blended images shot at 2 minutes, f/2.8, ISO 320 (foreground) and 8 minutes, f/2.8 ISO 160 (background).

The San Juan Mountains of western Colorado is one of my favorite places in the world. I’ve been running workshops there every year since 1995, and I never tire of the area or the scenery. When I am there, I am inspired.

I made this image during our workshop in October, at the end of our traverse over Last Dollar Road, one of the lower mountain passes in the area. Chris and I had chosen this location as a spot where we could photograph both the sunset and, later, the Milky Way. After an awe-inspiring drive, we arrived just in time to time to frame up some shots of the sunset and then plan our blue hour compositions. Once these were made, we left our cameras set up and waited for the end of astronomical twilight. The skies were perfectly clear and every participant made great images of the galactic core.

Upon arrival, I had envisioned my final shot as a tack-sharp image of the core, but after experimenting with shutter speeds, I decided on an 8-minute exposure instead. Eight minutes of exposure is generally too short to create desirable trails when using a wide angle lens, but with the longer focal length of 50mm the trails are perfect. The narrow view of this lens also compressed the foreground and magnified the core to create the look that some call the “Silky Way.”

Your Turn

So there you go—from Maine to California, and even to Norway, and from a plethora of places in between—our favorite photographs from 2020.

Now we’d like to see yours! Please share your favorite night image from the past year, either in the comments below, on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag @nationalparksatnight). And then let’s all march forward together into 2021, when we’ll find new nights and new inspiration.

Matt Hill is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. See more about his photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT