That’s a Wrap: Recapping Our Livestream Night Photography Shoot in Pittsburgh

Greetings from Pittsburgh!

I’ve spent the last week here, visiting family, but also upping my night photography portfolio of this beautiful place. Pittsburgh has all the classic elements that make for a great urban night photography experience: rivers surrounding a downtown skyline, tons of iconic bridges, and plenty of vantage points along the riverfront or up in the hills to compose multiple interpretations of this scenic city.

I was having so much fun photographing Pittsburgh that I wanted to share it with anyone else who wanted to come—virtually, anyway. So this past Wednesday, for the first time ever, we did a live night shoot, livestreamed on Instagram. It ended up being an online night photography party!

The Shoot

I set up at one of the perfect viewpoints of Pittsburgh: Allegheny Landing, between the Roberto Clemente and Andy Warhol bridges. We livestreamed during twilight, the blue hour, which is the best time to balance the city lights with the night sky in one exposure. Big shout out to all of you who joined in, asked questions and enjoyed the shoot. For those who missed it, you can watch it here:

The Photos

Of course, that was just the shoot. Post-processing is half of the photographic process, and that’s the half I’ve been doing in the two days since. So now, with that done, I’m checking in to share the three photos I shot during the livestream, as well as a couple of others from my trip to hopefully inspire you to seize the twilight in your city!

The Movement

I shot my first frame about 10 to 15 minutes into civil twilight. The city lights and sky perfectly matched in terms of exposure. However, I wanted more movement in the clouds and water, so I waited another 10 minutes. Twilight illumination changes quickly—in that 10 minutes I lost more than 3 stops of light. Then I was able to get to a 30-second exposure, which gave me smoother reflections and a better sky. However, some of the brighter city lights were blowing out, so I took an additional shot at 1/2 second to blend in post.

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Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 8-16mm f/2.8 lens. Two blended frames shot at 1/2 and 30 seconds, f/16, ISO 200.

The Drama

The next goal was to start looking for different angles to shoot the bridge. I loved the drama of shooting under the bridge, so that’s what I tackled first. This proved to be a fairly easy shot to pull off, but I still needed two frames: a base exposure at 30 seconds and 5-second exposure for maintaining the brightest highlights.

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Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 8-16mm f/2.8 lens. Two blended frames shot at 5 and 30 seconds, f/16, ISO 200.

The Detail

For the last bridge shot, I got up on the deck and looked for a detail to home in on. I kept things simple and looked for even illumination that didn’t include a large swath of the sky (which was recording as just black at that point).

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Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 90mm f/2 lens. 2 seconds, f/6.4, ISO 400.

The Pano

I love shooting Pittsburgh at night, so I got out for a couple of other evenings too. One of my favorite photos from the trip was this five-image panorama I shot from a high vantage point that looks directly at Point State Park and the confluence of the three rivers (the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio). I shot this during the end of civil twilight and had to blend to maintain a few of the brightest highlights.

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Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 90mm f/2 lens. Five stitched frames shot at 4 seconds, f/13, ISO 200.

The Rotunda

I finally own a wide enough lens (the Fujifilm 8-16mm, which is a 12-24mm full-frame equivalent) to do justice to The Pennsylvanian, one of the most famous rotundas in the U.S. Built at the turn of the 20th century, The Pennsylvanian is one of the finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture. It served as a sheltered turning space for carriages transporting people to and from the nearby train station.

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Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujifilm 8-16mm f/2.8 lens. 2 seconds, f/10, ISO 400.

Wrapping Up

Let us know in the comments what you thought of the live shoot. The response so far has been great and we hope to soon share similar experiences. Make sure you are following us on Instagram—we typically do a live conservation every Wednesday at 8 p.m., and of course we’re always posting new images from our night adventures!

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.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Processing HDR Images for Urban Night Photography

While HDR is commonly associated with landscape photography, it can also be indispensable for low-light and night photography. From urban nightscapes to dimly lit interiors, opportunities abound for using this technique to overcome the limitations of cameras and create better photographs. As such, HDR extends the shooting hours and subject choices for the night photographer.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post titled “Casting Out Shadows: When HDR is the Right Choice for a Night Scene.” In it I described what HDR is, and I showed some examples of night photography problems that the technique can help you solve.

Now, in this video, I show how to process HDR night images by walking through two examples: an exterior photo at Bruges in Belgium and a low-light interior photo of Sagrada Família in Barcelona (which we will visit on our night photography tour this coming November).

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Bruges, Belgium. Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Three images combined into an HDR in Adobe Lightroom.

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Sagrada Família, Barcelona. Fujifulm X-T2. Three images combined into an HDR in Lightroom.

While walking through these two examples in the video, I reveal my secrets on editing images using Adobe Lightroom’s Merge to HDR feature. I discuss:

• the definition of HDR

• when you should use HDR at night

• how to shoot for HDR at night

• using Lightroom to process night HDR images

• maximizing highlights and shadows without making the photo look false

• and more!

You can see the video below or on the National Parks at Night YouTube channel. (Don’t forget to subscribe!)

Share Your Night HDR

Have you shot urban HDR at night, or are you now inspired to do so? We’d love to see your results! Feel free to share in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Tim Cooper is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. Learn more techniques from his book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

10 Essential Books for the Night Photographer's Library

One of my long-time hobbies tangential to night photography is collecting photography books, and monographs by night photographers in particular. I’m not often in a position to buy original prints of photographers’ work that I enjoy, so books are a great way to have easy access to that work.

Yes, I could look at their photographs online, but it’s a very different experience to view images on paper rather than on a screen. There’s something inherently more satisfying about holding a well-printed book in your hands and settling down in a comfortable chair in good light, and just sitting with the images. No distractions.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a student of the history of night photography, as one of my favorite topics to write about is my “Muses From the Past” series on the pioneers of the genre. Books have been my primary research tool for this project, as many of the lesser-known photographers of yore don’t have much of an internet presence!

Additionally, over the course of my years of researching the subject, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of out of print photo books by photographers both famous and obscure. I have pretty much every how-to book on night photography that’s ever been published, and a good number of biographies and autobiographies of photographers.

I have to confess that I only recently unpacked all of my photo books after having them in storage for over a year while renovating my house. I haven’t taken time to sit and look at them in quite a while. Shameful, I know––what with all of these extra months at home recently. But spend time with these old friends I have, and will again.

In this post, I’ll share some of my favorites with you, and some resources you might wish to explore should you get the chance. Here in chronological order are 10 of my favorite night photography books. Many are out of print and some are rather scarce or expensive, but some can be acquired quite reasonably.

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Paris de Nuit, by Brassai, 1932

The first book of exclusively night photographs, Paris de Nuit, was initially published in photogravure in 1932. The Hungarian painter turned photographer Brassai captured candid views of the seedy underbelly of Parisian nightlife at an extraordinary time in the city of light. The version I have was published in 1987, also as photogravure, and is much better and truer to the original than the even more recently published reprint. The next two books on this list were inspired by this one. It is a must for any night photo library.

London Night, Howard Burdekin and John Morrison, 1934

I was unaware of these two and their amazing work until a friend gave me a copy we found together at a used bookstore in San Francisco. The London Night introduction quotes the introduction to Brassai’s book, and it’s also printed in photogravure. Never reprinted, copies have recently become scarce. Another must-have.

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A Night in London, by Bill Brandt, 1938

Bill Brandt was in Paris—working as Man Ray’s assistant of all things—during the time when Brassai was photographing for Paris de Nuit. He was so inspired by Brassai’s work that he recreated one of the photographs of a Parisian streetwalker using his wife as a model. A Night in London has also never been reprinted, and copies start at about $2,000. Nope, I don’t have my own copy, but I’ve spent some time with one at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Truth be told, I prefer Burdekin and Morrison’s version of London at night.

Diesels and Dinosaurs, Steve Fitch, 1976

Perhaps the original “urban explorer,” Steve Fitch began documenting his travels in the American West at 21, but the Diesels and Dinosaurs project took root on family trips in a 1951 Buick when he was a child. Long out of print, and hard to find, this book of roadside attractions/distractions paved the way for later photographers such as Troy Paiva (Lost America).

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Photographs, Richard Misrach, 1975-1987, 1988

Richard Misrach is considered one of the most important American photographers of the second half of the 20th century, and he was one of several Bay Area photographers responsible for the explosion of the night photography scene in the 1970s and 80s. This hard-to-find paperback of his early work includes medium format black and white night images of the California desert and Stonehenge, and large format color images from Greece, Louisiana, Los Angeles and Hawaii. Photographs also marked the beginning of his decades-long “Desert Cantos” series. Misrach does not have much of an internet presence; unless you can see original prints in a gallery, books are the best way to see his work.

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Frontier New York, Jan Staller, 1988

Jan Staller’s Frontier New York collection is of night and twilight images of the industrial wastelands on the outskirts of New York, in square format images shot on color negative film in the late 1970s and early 80s. These images, along with those from the next book on the list, have influenced my own work more than anything else. I first saw both books in Steve Harper’s Night Photography class in San Francisco.

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Night Walk, Michael Kenna, 1988

The great Michael Kenna’s first book. Night Walk is one of many, making it hard to choose which one(s) to mention in a “top 10” list. Included are early 35mm images from Venice, France and his native England, especially the mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire that Brandt had photographed in the 1930s.

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Steam, Steel, and Stars, O. Winston Link, 1987, 1998

There are several books of O. Winston Link’s iconic train images made along the Norfolk and Western line from 1955-60, but Steam, Steel, and Stars concentrates on the night images, and is readily available. Originally published in 1987 and reprinted in 1998, both versions are available on the used market. I have the later version.

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Washington by Night, Volkmar Wentzel, 1992

Volkmar Wentzel’s images on Washington, D.C., were made in the late 1930s while he was working in the darkroom for National Geographic. He too had been inspired by Brassai’s Paris De Nuit, and the images in Washington by Night were originally published in a 1941 edition of National Geographic. The book wasn’t published until 1992. Affordable copies are available from online booksellers, including Amazon.

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Night Work, Michael Kenna, 2000

Kenna has published more than 30 books, but this and Night Walk are the only ones that include exclusively night photographs. Night Work is a survey of Kenna’s nocturnal images from 1978-2000, and it includes an interview with Tim Baskerville of the Nocturnes.

I could go on and on. It was difficult to exclude quite a few important works from this list. They range from personal favorites by friends and colleagues, such as Troy Paiva’s Lost America, Tom Paiva’s Industrial Night, Ken Lee’s Abandoned Southern California or William Lesch’s Expansions, as well as critically acclaimed work such as Robert Adams’ Summer Nights or Neil Folberg’s groundbreaking film/digital composites in Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land. There are so many more. Jeff Brouws’ Starlight on the Rails is a loving record of the work of many of the other mid-century train photographers aside from O. Winston Link. I covet them all.

With many of these being so rare, where can you find and buy them? Aside from Amazon and eBay (eBay tends to be overpriced for books) here are a few great stores for photography books:

• the venerable Photo Eye in Santa Fe

• Timothy Whelan Photography Fine Photographic Prints and Books in Rockport, Maine

• East Village Books in Manhattan

• Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts

• Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

• Arcana: Books on the Arts in Culver City, California

• Green Apple Books in San Francisco (a small chain of great local bookstores where you could easily spend an afternoon)

Want to look but not buy? There are several under-appreciated but outstanding photography libraries you can visit, including:

• Photo Resource Center in Boston

• Maine Media Workshops + College in Camden

• the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

I have to warn you though, photography books are addictive. Start with one or two of the volumes on this list, and before you know it, you’ll own most of them. When you travel to a new city, you’ll add used bookstores to the list of places you have to visit. And that’s a good thing.

Note: You can see these books and many more on a brand new page of the National Parks at Night website: our Photography Bookshelf. Here you can peruse the volumes that the five of us love and recommend. You can also find links to learn more and/or purchase all the books mentioned above.

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.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Three Legs to Stand On: Helping You Choose and Use Your Tripod

Tripods hold a singular place in the growth of a photographer. Often at first they’re considered an obstacle to working quickly—if they’re considered at all. Then eventually they’re considered a necessary evil, grudgingly worth in dollars maybe somewhere between a filter and a small lens. Then later, we realize the true value of standing on three legs.

Eventually most photographers come to appreciate how a tripod makes them better. It makes them more stable, sure—but it also makes them more deliberate, more calculated, more consistent, more creative. A tripod becomes an ally.

We begin to view lesser tripods as deficient, and we see quality tripods as worth double what we think we can afford to pay. A great tripod—a BMW tripod, a Lexus tripod, heck even a Rolls-Royce tripod—comes to feel essential.

The investment is wise. A good tripod will last far longer than today’s in-vogue digital camera, and will even outlive the efficacy of many lenses. It will go places with you. It will be solid, it will be your rock. It will pick up scratches and scars, growing proudly haggard as your skills and artistry develop and flourish. It will be with you through the long and glorious haul toward becoming the photographer you are meant to be.

But that all needs to start with buying a good one. Whether entry-level or expert-level, a tripod must be reliable and must meet the task of supporting your collection of cameras and lenses and the way you want to use them.

That can be a hard charge in this world of more tripod options than we can count—not to mention the hundreds of heads, and the innumerable accessories. So National Parks at Night is here to help. We have put together a 71-page e-book titled Three Legs to Stand On: A Guide to Tripods.

In the book you’ll find:

• a primer on how to choose a tripod

• an article on how to get the most from your tripod

• a personal story about a lost tripod that found its way home

• tripod field tips from all the NPAN instructors

• a buyer’s guide breakdown of over 60 tripods, heads and accessories

• and more!

Just like our recent guide to photographing meteor showers, we’re offering Three Legs to Stand On as a pay-what-you-want publication. Feel free to download it for free, or to indulge us with payment of what the book is worth to you.

Either way, we’re happy you’re interested, and we’re thrilled if we can help you decide which tripod to buy next and how to best use it in the field.

You can download the e-book by clicking here:

Seize the night! Seize the legs?

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Live, in Front of an Online Audience: National Parks at Night!

In early March, Gabriel Biderman and I jetted over the Atlantic to run our first international trip of the year, to the Lofoten Islands of Norway. Two weeks later we returned to a very different life.

For the past two and a half months we haven’t been traveling for workshops—neither Gabe nor I, nor our business partners Matt Hill, Tim Cooper and Lance Keimig. We miss being in the outdoors at night, so much that we made a video about it. We also immediately missed interacting directly with the community of night photographers, both inside and outside the ranks of our workshop alums.

In an effort to reach out, and as part of the global collective effort to give us all something to do in the confines of our homes, we launched a series of weekly livestreams, as well as an online post-production course. Since March 23, we’ve been online at least three times per week, either on YouTube or Instagram, chatting with workshop alums and other night photographers, engaging in public Q&A’s with industry experts, teaching Lightroom and helping folks with their images, and more.

We’ve shared notices of these endeavors on our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts, but have yet to mention anything in our blog. Today, that changes. Below you can see a rundown of all the online programs we’ve been offering this spring, along with our plans for the immediate future.

#BlogChat

Our #BlogChat livestream on YouTube is something that had been in the works for a while. Every week for more than five years we’ve published a post in this blog. But there is always so much more to say than can be fit into a thousand or two thousand words. So now we chat about it online, too, and we field questions from the live comments. Yay for more words!

On Tuesday nights, Matt sits down in his studio in Catskill, New York, and leads a conversation with whoever wrote that week’s blog post. We started with a week of five straight #BlogChats centered on posts from our archive, and since then have conducted a weekly online discussion of that week’s topic. We intend for this is be a consistent program, even when we’re back on the road.

Some topics we’ve covered so far:

• Make Printing Part of Your Process

• Returning to Nature, Returning to the World: Where We're Ready to Go

• Six Steps to Shaking Up Your Night Photography

You can see all our #BlogChat videos here:

To receive a notification from YouTube whenever we go live, be sure to subscribe to our channel!

(Yes, I am, right this minute, writing a blog post about a video program about our blog posts. It does not escape me that this is very meta. Is it possible that this week’s #BlogChat will be a video about our blog post about videos about our blog posts? We’ll see!)

Ask NPAN Anything / Conversations

Instagram is the social media service designed for photographers, so of course we have always dedicated a lot of time to our profile and image grid there. What we hadn’t done was engage via the platform’s live capability. Two months ago, that changed.

At the beginning of April we launched Ask NPAN Anything, a weekly Wednesday-night exchange between Gabe and one other instructor, and whoever was watching on Instagram could chime in with questions about … well, about anything. We’re always open books, happy to discuss all topics related to night photography, national parks and dark skies. We’ve been doing that for half a decade in our “Five Questions” blog series, and Instagram is the perfect alternative format for doing that live.

Each week featured a theme. One time Gabe chatted with me about national parks, another time he chatted with Matt about night portraits, another time he chatted with Tim about post-processing—and all of these were open to questions from anyone watching.

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Then Gabe had an idea: What if we invite one of our friends to join us for a conversation? He reached out to JC Carey of Nikon, who was happy to come online and talk about Nikon cameras and lenses, his amazing work with strobes and his adventures photographing at night.

The next guest was Art Suwansang of BenQ, and everyone was able to ask great questions about monitors, calibration, etc. Then photographer Susan Magnano joined us to chat about being “stuck” living in an RV in the wilderness of Moab for two months during the COVID19 lockdown. This past week Ralph Lee Hopkins, a National Geographic photographer and the director of photography expeditions for Lindblad Expeditions, joined for a groupwide conversation about his amazing travels.

Because format and “the feel” of this livestream has changed a bit, we are announcing a new name for it: NPAN Conversations. Gabe will still host this every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET, and other NPAN instructors will still often be guests. Here’s a peek at what we’re planning for the next few weeks:

• June 3: Rafael Pons of PhotoPills

• June 10: To be announced, talking about tripods

• June 17: Lance Keimig, talking about night photography books

• June 24: Sandra Ramos, aka National Park Patch Lady, talking about getting to know the smaller units of the National Park Service

We also have long-term plans for guests that include a national park ranger, an astronomer and a street photographer, as well as industry experts in the fields of lighting, printing, lenses and more.

For all of these sessions, the floor will be open for questions, so be sure to join us on Wednesday nights on Instagram (@nationalparksatnight) or npan.co/instagram.

The Night Crew Image Review

One of the most important activities on many of our workshops is the Image Review. We gather during daytime to go over the photographs we’ve been making at night. It gives the group a chance to celebrate its successes and to learn from its challenges.

Now we have brought that experience online with The Night Crew Image Review. Each week we’ve put out a call for images, and then we’ve met with participants on Zoom to go over their submissions. We’ve seen some great work, and we’ve offered suggestions on everything from initial capture to cropping to post-production.

Moreover, we have simulcast the meetings live on our YouTube channel so that other photographers can hopefully learn from the experience and join in the chat discussion. You can see all the Night Crew Image Review sessions we’ve done here:

As of June, we’re changing the schedule for this program to once per month, on dates to be announced. You can still submit images at any time by visiting npan.co/imagereview. We’ll reach out when it’s your turn for the livestream group review so that you can join us on Zoom, and we’ll announce the simulcast on our social media channels.

If you need more immediate feedback, that’s actually a service we offer! We run one-on-one sessions with photographers on a regular basis, on topics as varied as:

• Catalog Clutter and Image Organization

• Gear Consultation, Camera Settings

• Image Review

• Lightroom and Photoshop

• Mentoring and Artistic Development

• Monitor Calibration

• Night Photography Techniques

• Pre-Workshop Education

• Travel Prep

This is a service we offer online as well as in-person when possible. For more information, visit our Tutoring page.

Lightroom Live

This is another idea we’d contemplated for a while, and this was the perfect time to launch it: an online course designed to teach Lightroom, the most important piece of software for photographers, focused on the two most important modules, Library and Develop.

You can see more about our Lightroom Live online course in this video:

We’ve run two sessions of Lightroom Live already, each with a full cohort of 12 participants who attended four two-hour classes. (We’re keeping these classes small to maximize the time that participants get with the instructors.) We recently announced two more sessions, each in June, each on weekends, each with seats available:

• Session 3: June 5, 6, 12, 13

• Session 4: June 20, 21, 27, 28

The course also comes with bonuses! When you register you’ll receive a download of our new video Lightroom: Correcting Your Catalog Chaos (which will be on sale to the public soon—stay tuned!), and at the end of the course you’ll receive an hour of one-on-one time with the instructor of your choice.

See our Lightroom Live online course page for more information and to register today.

Other Endeavors

During all this non-travel time, we’ve been busy with other projects as well. Of course, we’ve still been writing blog posts, on topics ranging from the new Nikon D780 to a new intervalometer to ideas for long exposures at home and more.

We also recognized that five years of blog posts, over 200 in total, are a little unwieldy to look through when they’re organized only by date. So we created a brand new page on our website where you can see all our posts organized by topic. That’s about 300,000 words of free night photography education. We hope you enjoy!

We’ve also been busy on the publishing front. In April we released an e-book titled Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers. It covers everything you’d want to know about the subject:

• which meteor events to target

• dream locations to photograph meteor showers

• how to scout, shoot and edit a meteor shower

• a gear guide for being perfectly equipped in the field

You can get more info and download the e-book here.

(Psst, psst! Want to know a secret? We’re also in the final stages of publishing our second e-book of the spring. Want a sneak peek?)

Wrapping Up

Of course, we have some more plans too. We’ll let you know as soon as they’re ready.

In the meantime, we’re excited to see you online! For more information and to stay updated about all of our livestream programs, visit npan.co/live.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT