Black Hole Sun: Get Ready to Shoot the 2024 Eclipse with Our New E-Book

It certainly seems like we are living in a golden age of eclipses.

When we started National Parks at Night in 2015, we were in the middle of a rare tetrad of blood red lunar eclipses. We experienced the 2017 total solar eclipse in a variety of ways, with Gabe and Matt leading hands-on experiences in Idaho and Oregon, respectively, and me sitting on a blanket with my daughter in South Carolina.

Then in 2023 we seized our first ring of fire eclipse with a group trip to Capitol Reef National Park, and with another group learning PhotoPills at the edge of the eclipse path in Joshua Tree National Park.

Then we prepared for the next big one: the Great North American Eclipse of 2024. It’s happening this coming Monday, April 8.

To help get you prepared, we’re excited to announce our brand new e-book, There Goes the Sun: A Guide to Photographing a Solar Eclipse.

What’s in the Book

The book comprises 66 pages and is chock full of everything you’d want to know about shooting an eclipse. Including:

• a history of eclipses

• a list and explanations of the gear required

• notes on eye and gear safety

• results on testing different solar filters and their affect on color

• detailed instructions on scouting, shooting and processing

• a gear guide for all sorts of products to help in the cause

• and more!

Sample Pages

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Sample Tips

Here are three tidbits on eclipse photography that you can find in the book:

1. “If you manually follow the eclipse with a long lens, it’s a good plan to allow room for the sun to travel across your frame for some time and then readjust your framing when it nears the edge. This does, however, require attention to your camera throughout all the phases you will be photographing.”

2. “The sun moves its own diameter every 2 minutes. Setting a shooting interval for every 2 minutes will make sure that you capture many phases of the eclipse without any overlap.”

3. “For everything except totality images, you can probably edit one to taste and then synchronize that image with the rest. But for your frames close to or during totality, which you shot at different exposures, you’ll need to edit them separately to get them to match.”

Get Your Copy Today

Whether you’re new to photographing eclipses and need to know where to start, or whether you’ve done this before and want to level up, we have you as covered as a black-hole sun!

Get your copy of There Goes the Sun for $9.99 today by clicking below:

Then, when you’re done shooting the eclipse, we’d love to see your images! 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.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2024). 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

Shoot for the Stars with us in Kanab: Announcing the 2024 Nightscaper Conference

We’re heading back to Kanab! To one of the premier places in the United States for dark skies and spectacular, surreal landscapes.

This week we officially launched the 2024 Nightscaper Photo Conference, and we invite you to come shoot for the stars with us.

About Nightscaper

If you’re making plans for your 2024 fall Milky Way season, then include Nightscaper in your schedule and level up your astro-landscape night photography skills. This year’s conference will be held in the nights leading up to the new moon, providing perfect darkness to photograph the setting Milky Way in the earlier hours of the night.

You’ll join other passionate photographers, scientists and inspirational speakers in Kanab. The daytime conference leaves plenty of room for going out at night with speakers, as well as with friends new and old. Speakers will also be offering local workshops before and after the conference, so you can put together a pretty awesome night photography experience in one of the best places in the world for doing so.

The Nightscaper conference goes on for four days, starting each day in late morning to accommodate those who were out shooting the night before. Daily lunches are included, as well as one dinner.

Tickets

Tickets for the 2024 conference went on sale this past week. We are offering Conference + Replays tickets for those who can travel or Replays-only for those who cannot travel but still want all that education and inspiration.

• $549 ($200 off the full price) for in-person tickets: use code “EarlyBird”

• $349 ($50 off full price) for replays-only tickets: use code “EarlyBirdReplay”

Early Bird tickets will be available only through March 31, so grab yours at a discounted rate while you can!

Speakers

We are very excited to announce speakers for 2024 conference. Several from last year are returning: Kristine Richer, Mike Shaw, Jess Santos, Bryony Richards, Gabriel Biderman, Matt Hill and Chris Nicholson.

In addition, we will be welcoming:

• Alyn Wallace, 2021 speaker and author of Photographing the Night Sky

• Alyssa Pagan, science visuals developer for the James Webb Space Telescope

• Katrina Brown, a master of creative light painting and time-lapse

• Michael Frye, renowned landscape photographer and author of five books, including Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters and and The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite

• Rafael Pons, the bard of PhotoPills

• Tim Cooper and Lance Keimig of National Parks at Night

• and the original nightscaper, conference founder Royce Bair!

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For more information, visit our About the Speakers page.

And keep checking back, because that won't be the last of the names you’ll see. We'll be adding a few more speakers, and we’ll keep you posted.

Follow Us for News

We’ll be rolling out event more information throughout the spring and summer, including:

• more sponsor and speaker announcements

• morning add-on post-production classes

• speaker workshops

• lodging info

• and more!

Stay tuned in to our conference news by following the Nightscaper social media accounts:

• Instagram

• Facebook

• Twitter

Also, be sure to sign up for the Nightscaper email list to receive all conference updates right in your inbox.

Finally, join the Facebook group to share your night photos and to chat all things night photography.

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Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2024). 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

We're Going Live! Announcing 4 Online Courses for 2024

We all love being in the field to shoot, but we all also know that opening the shutter is only half the task of creating a great photograph. The other half is processing.

To help with that second half, National Parks at Night periodically offers online post-processing workshops, and today we’re excited to announce the next rounds of those. Moreover, not only are we announcing new sessions for two popular courses we’ve run in the past, but we’re also launching two brand new courses!

The two returning courses are Lightroom Live and Photoshop Live, both of which lead attendees through the basics of mastering these two incredible tools of the digital darkroom. The two new courses take things a few steps further, with Black and White Live and Processing Night Panoramas Live teaching attendees how to master the ins and outs of these specialty areas.

We’ll be hosting all four of these online courses this spring. Each will take place on weekday evenings, two evenings per week, for two weeks—for a total of eight hours of group education over four nights. We also limit each course to 12 attendees, to ensure time for individual attention to questions and answers. Along the same lines, after the course each attendee will be offered a half hour of one-on-one time with an instructor of their choice.

For more information about each of these online workshops, continue reading below. (And in each section, check out our free tip!)

Black and White Live

Black and white imagery has always had an aura of timelessness, drama and sophistication. Using this scheme at night is no different. Since photographers shooting in monochrome cannot lean on color to provide information in any given scene, we are forced to concentrate on other building blocks to evoke emotion, to tell a story or to capture the drama. This four-night online workshop will guide you on the journey through all of that and more.

This course will teach many aspects of the digital black and white process, from tips on capturing the best raw materials in the field to processing with what we consider the best software for the job, Silver Efex Pro.

You’ll also learn what creates a great black and white image, how to understand and control tonal contrast, how to apply local enhancements to create glowing images, and more.

Black and White Tip from Lance

If you’re setting out to create black and white images, learn to see that way in the field. Your camera can help you, as if you set it properly, then it can preview your images in black and white right on the LCD. In the camera settings, change Picture Style (Canon), Picture Control (Nikon) or Creative Style (Sony) to Monochrome or Black and White. This will help you avoid passing up photographing a scene because it lacks interesting color. One example of this would be an urban night scene illuminated exclusively by sodium vapor lights. In color, those scenes are usually quite unappealing, but they often look great as black and white.

Processing Night Panoramas Live

Stitching panoramas can be challenging enough with daytime photographs—the complexity increases even more for images captured at night. If you’ve ever struggled with stitching panorama panels, this is the course for you. We will teach how to process simple and complex night panos in Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and, most importantly, in PTGUI Pro.

In this online workshop you’ll learn not just how to stitch basic panoramas, but also how to blend twilight and star-point panos in Photohsop and PTGui, how to stitch vertoramas with both star-point and star-trail toppers, how to understand and choose different projections, how to create “tiny planet” photos, and more. The course will also feature a full demonstration of the best stitching software out there, PTGui Pro, with a focus on how to use it for night panos.

Pano Processing Tip from Matt

When stitching a vertorama in PTGUI Pro, be sure to choose among the transverse projection variants. Then click and drag to place the true horizon on the center horizontal line. (If the horizon is behind a landform, align with that instead of the skyline.) Chances are the final result will look just like you envisioned … perhaps better!

Lightroom Live

For 99.9 percent of the photography world, the process of post-production starts with Lightroom. Yet so many photographers feel that they don’t fully understand the software, let alone know enough to wield its full potential.

With a strict focus on the Library and Develop modules, in this online course you'll learn how to add keywords, create collections, globally adjust your images and fine-tune your masterpiece with local adjustment tools.

And as a bonus, you’ll get our video Lightroom: Correcting Your Catalog Chaos.

Lightroom Tip from Gabe

Most of our night skies have atmospheric haze, especially from the horizon to 20 degrees above, which is where the core of the Milky Way tends to reside most of the year. Lightroom’s Dehaze slider was built to cut through haze and provide more separation in the lower-contrast areas of the scene—but it also works wonders on dark night skies! A little Dehaze can go a long way in making your stars and the Milky Way pop. Watch out though, because Dehaze also increases saturation and can make your skies too purple or blue, so be ready for a potential color adjustment afterward.

Photoshop Live

Photoshop is a challenging program to learn on your own. And it’s also massive. But don’t worry—as a night photographer, you don’t need to learn every tool, setting and checkbox in order to harness the program’s power. Having a good foundation of the program and some basic knowledge of key features (as well as intricate knowledge of some subtle features) will help you develop the skills necessary to create advanced night photography composites and finely crafted images.

Our areas of focus will be understanding the architecture of Photoshop, strategies and best practices for using layers, mastering advanced local adjustments, masking, and much more!

Photoshop Tip from Chris

Photoshop has lots of selection tools. Magic Wand. Quick Selection. Object Selection. There’s a tool for selecting the sky, or a subject, or a focus range, or a color range. Which is best? All of them! Each of the selection tools has their pros and cons, and situations where they outperform their counterparts. Therefore, learn how to use each of these tools and practice with them all. You’ll learn the situations that each excels in, and then you’ll always know which to use in different scenarios.

Come Learn With Us Online

Wherever your next passion for learning lies, we hope that one of these online courses can help. For more info on each, click here:

• Black and White Live

• Lightroom Live

• Photoshop Live

• Processing Night Panoramas Live

We look forward to seeing you there!

Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2024). 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

Embracing Clouds in the Night Sky

­­Everybody loves a clear night sky. It can be existential to feel the draw of an endless dome of stars, take in a brilliant Milky Way or be fortunate enough to catch a dazzling display of northern lights. Across the globe, photographers and non-photographers alike marvel at the magic of the night.

What then do we do when clouds move into our star-filled nights? Give up and go home? Heck no. We can change our approach. Embrace the clouds! They can be every bit as magical as the Milky Way or a display of auroras.

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Faroe Islands. Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 27mm. 2 minutes, f/22, ISO 80.

Shifting Gears

One of the greatest pitfalls of landscape and astro-landscape photography is getting stuck on pre-conceived ideas. You may enter each night with an idea of exactly what you’ll see and how you’ll photograph it. This comes from being flooded with imagery from the most iconic places across the world captured under the most perfect conditions. So as we are getting ready to head out, we have already envisioned how our shots will look, and that is exactly what we expect and hope to happen.

So when the clouds roll in, obscuring our beloved stars, it’s time to shift gears. It’s really just a simple matter of moving your mindset from needing to capture a clear night sky to allowing yourself to experiment with the conditions above you. Don’t get caught in “I have to recreate this scene as I have seen it before”—instead embrace “What would it look like if I tried this?”

This mindset could be applied to most types of photography, and indeed it’s a worthwhile consideration for many situations. But for now, let’s focus on clouds at night. Once you pivot from preconceived notions, it’s easy to begin to experiment.

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I was expecting to capture circumpolar star trails over Park Avenue in Arches National Park when the clouds set in. Shifting gears, I exposed for 5 minutes instead of a full hour, which would have resulted in very few stars and blanket of clouds. Nikon D4S with Nikon 16mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. 5 minutes, f/2.8, ISO 400.

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Knowing that the clouds were sticking around all night, I chose to spend my time light painting this scene in Big Bend National Park rather than concentrating on the sky. Notice that the light-painted foreground dominates the scene while the sky is relegated to being the secondary subject. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm. 3 minutes, f/8, ISO 800.

Creating Cloud Trails

You can use clouds moving across a dark sky during a long exposure to create a very dynamic image.

For starters, try different shutter speeds. In some cases a 30-second exposure might do the trick, while in others you might need a 3-minute exposure to achieve the desired look.

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Stopping down to f/10 from our typical wide nighttime apertures of f/2.8 or f/4 allowed me to expose for 2 minutes. This in turn provided time for me to light paint the moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Nikon D4S with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 60mm. 2 minutes, f/10, ISO 200.

It’s hard to say what shutter speed is best, because it varies in different conditions. Try different speeds to determine what may look best in your current situation. In the following example I tried multiple shutter speeds when shooting the Múlafossur Falls in the Faroe Islands.

Múlafossur Falls, Faroe Islands. Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 18mm. f/14, ISO 50.

Since we are more concerned with the look of the clouds as opposed to getting pinpoint stars, we have more leeway in our exposure times.

For example, many folks think that night skies should be captured only at either a relatively short shutter speed (8-15 seconds) to render the stars as points or a very long shutter speed (15 minutes or more) to render them as long trails. While this is sound practice for clear skies, the presence of clouds allows for more flexibility. The main consideration here is the look of the clouds rather than the length of the star trails. Even a shorter speed of 2 minutes renders the stars as small streaks and is enough to let the viewer know the image was made at night.

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Faroe Islands. Short exposures of 6, 8 or 10 seconds typically render the clouds as an awkward blur. The stars may be points, but the blur of the clouds is not enough to render a surreal quality. This exposure appears to be a mistake as the clouds are not sharp enough or blurry enough. Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2 lens at 27mm. 6 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.

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A 1- minute exposure gives the clouds enough time to streak across the sky. Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 27mm. 1 minute, f/4, ISO 400.

Clouds as a Compositional Element

Once we begin to add clouds into our photographs (day or night), we need to start thinking about them as an important compositional element. Their structure and placement within the frame are important. The cloud streaks will read as lines, and therefore we consider them just as we would any other lines in a photograph.

Horizontal lines crossing the frame from left to right or right to left tend to have more of a calming effect. They seem to be more at rest. Since these types of lines don’t add a lot of energy, they require a dominant foreground as a contrast, or you could further the calm mood by choosing a more subtle foreground.

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Horizontal lines tend to have a calming effect as they streak over dynamic Miami. Nikon D4S with a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 70mm. 30 seconds, f/10, ISO 800 (foreground) and 3 minutes, f/10, ISO 160 (sky), blended in Adobe Photoshop.

Diagonal lines and converging lines have much more visual energy. They are caused when clouds are moving directly at us (converging) or just off to our right or left (diagonal). This type of cloud movement can become very dramatic elements in our compositions. The use of wide- and superwide-angle lenses helps accentuate these lines.

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Clouds moving from the lower left of the frame to the upper right create diagonal lines over the Chisos Basin in Big Bend National Park. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. 2 minutes, f/11, ISO 800.

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Converging lines are created when the clouds are moving directly at you as in this scene from Glacier National Park. Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. 3 minutes, f/4, ISO 200.

Bettering Your Odds

Since our clouds will play such an important role in our final composition and it’s nearly impossible to predict the final look of an exposure, it’s important to shoot lots of frames.

I begin by experimenting with shutter speed. Once I find a shutter speed that renders the clouds in a manner I find complementary to the rest of the scene, it’s time to shoot that same shutter speed over and over again. Each frame will capture the clouds in a different position, so by shooting more frames, we increase the chance of getting a pleasing position for the clouds.

I shot the following photos at the same exposure. Notice how the clouds complement the scene more in some frames than in others.

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 33mm. 30 seconds, f/20, ISO 50.

Cloud Height and Moon

Another consideration when creating cloud streaks is the moon phase and location. Clouds in the night sky will be greatly enhanced with some moonlight. If there is no moon or city lights to illuminate them, the clouds will be far less visible and tend to simply obscure our sky rather than add an interesting element. A quarter to full moon is a good time to capture cloud trails over the landscape.

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The full moon to camera left illuminated the clouds as well as Going to the Sun Mountain in Glacier National Park. Nikon D850 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 21mm. 6 minutes, f/4, ISO 100.

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Shooting straight into the full moon over Lady Boot Arch in the Alabama Hills of California. Nikon D4S with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 14mm. 4 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 200.

Cloud type and height can vary dramatically, as will the effect in the resulting photographs. Lower-elevation clouds have a much stronger impact on the composition than higher-elevation clouds. The higher clouds tend to become more transparent during long exposures. This type of cloud can be a subtle element in your final frame.

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High clouds can be a subtle element when long exposures render them as more transparent, as seen in this photo from Zion National Park. Nikon D4 with a Nikon 24mm f/2.8 lens. 4 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 200.

Where to Find the ‘Best’ Clouds

Where can you find clouds? Anywhere, really. But those dramatic low clouds are more common the closer you get to the poles—that is, generally regions closer to the Arctic and Antarctic tend to have more low clouds, and the regions closer to the tropics tend to have more high clouds.

You’ll also find more low clouds around the ocean. This is why I love doing cloud photography in places like the Faroe Islands, where we’re running a workshop this coming May. Not only is Faroe close to the ocean (being a remote island, after all), but it’s also at a relatively northern latitude. That combination can make for nights filled with dramatic low clouds racing across the beautiful landscapes. You can see that in many of the photos accompanying this post.

High clouds are fun to work with too, so if you like that effect, know that you’re more likely to see them as you get to locations either closer to the equator or more inland from the ocean.

And of course you’re more likely to see low clouds in the mountains—because you’re at a higher elevation, closer to the clouds!

Post-Processing

Simply capturing the clouds may not be the end of the process. Often we’ll need to enhance them in Lightroom to bring out their true drama.

A common technique is to create a mask for the sky and increase Dehaze. This will add the needed overall contrast to the sky that brings out the structure of the clouds. However, along with this contrast comes a deeper saturation and darkening of the whole sky. The simple fix is when increasing the Dehaze slider, follow up with decreasing Saturation and increasing Exposure.

For this image from Faroe Islands, I created a sky mask in Lightroom and increased Dehaze to +55. This oversatured the blues and darkened the entire sky, so, still within the sky mask, I increased Exposure to +1.00 and decreased Saturation to -25.

Wrapping Up

I hope this gives you some motivation to stay out even when the sky isn’t clear. Don’t pack it up and go home when the clouds roll in. Embrace them! Experiment with different shutter speeds and lots of frames to create those beautiful cloud streaks across your night skies.

If this inspires you to shoot clouds at night (or if you’re already doing it), then we’d love to see the results! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight).

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

Even More Words: Updates to the Night Photography Glossary

In January 2022 we released an e-book titled The Night Photography Glossary. It’s a reference guide to over 250 terms about night photography, along with over 80 images to illustrate. Our hope was that the glossary would be a fun educational tool that would also help unify and standardize many of the terms that all us night photographers use to describe the many crazy things we do.

We also intended the glossary to be a living document, adding to it as updates seemed appropriate, or as our niche developed new techniques and adopted new fascinations.

To that end, we recently added 25 terms, and updated others! You can read the newly added terms below.

You can also view the full list of terms on our Night Photography Glossary page, or download the e-book version.

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New Terms in the Glossary

auroral corona · rays of auroras converging to form a cone or crown shape, sometimes visible when the zenith of an aurora is directly overhead

black moon · the appearance of an “extra” new moon during a specific time period; most commonly the “black moon” label is applied to a second new moon within one calendar month, though originally the term indicated the third of four new moons in one season

cityscape · a photograph that depicts a city skyline, usually photographed from a distance with a normal or telephoto lens

corona · the outer layer of the sun, visible during total solar eclipses

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The sun’s corona, visible during a solar eclipse. © Gabriel Biderman.

dead sky · a sky devoid of any visual characteristics other than blackness, due to complete, dense cloud cover unlit by any nearby ambient light sources

deepscape · a photograph that depicts a landscape in front of a deep-space object in the sky

double processing · processing the same image file with two different results and then blending the two resulting images; for example, a noise blend

earthshine · the dim glow of the unlit portion of a crescent moon, caused by sunlight reflecting off Earth and onto the moon surface

light pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by either sunlight or moonlight radiating from below the horizon (i.e., before sunrise or moonrise, or after sunset or moonset) and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “sun pillar,” “solar pillar” or “moon pillar”

lunar corona · a faint disc or small rings of light around the moon created by moonlight refracting through thin clouds

moonlight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed under moonlight with a sky photographed in darkness at another time of the night (i.e., before the moon rose or after it set) to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; also known as a “twilight blend”

moon pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by moonlight radiating from below the horizon before moonrise or after moonset and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “lunar pillar”

moonscape · a nighttime photograph wherein the landscape is illuminated by moonlight; [see photo]

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A moonlight blend. The foreground was photographed as the moon rose from the horizon, and the sky was exposed earlier in total darkness. © Matt Hill.

noise blend · a processing technique for combining two (or more) parts of an image that are processed differently for noise reduction, such as a foreground landscape and a background sky that require different noise mitigation

noise stacking · a processing technique for reducing apparent high ISO noise by analyzing multiple exposures of the same scene in noise-reduction software

planisphere · a handheld star chart for identifying celestial objects in the field

solar maximum · the period of the highest solar activity during the 11-year solar cycle, resulting in an increased frequency of sunspots, solar flares, coronal mass ejection and auroras

starlight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed with a long exposure under only starlight with a sky photographed with a shorter, star-point exposure to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; [see photo]

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A starlight blend. The foreground was exposed for eight times longer than the sky, and the two frames were blended in Photoshop. © Chris Nicholson.

sun pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by sunlight radiating from below the horizon before sunrise or after sunset and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “solar pillar”

twilight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed during twilight with a sky photographed in darkness to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; also known as a “blue hour blend” [see photo]

vertorama · though the term in its basic form may indicate any photograph in a non-standard tall format, it’s most commonly used to describe a technique wherein the photographer exposes multiple frames while tilting the camera vertically through a scene, then “stitches” those frames together in post-production to create one high-resolution image that is taller and more detailed than could be created with a single frame in the same camera; i.e., the vertical equivalent of a panorama [see photo]

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There’s More Where That Came From

Remember to see the full list of terms on our Night Photography Glossary page. Bookmark the page so you can return to it whenever you see a night photography term you’re not familiar with. Or, better yet, download the e-book!

Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2023). 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