Ah, the Portland Japanese Garden: It’s a bit of a moveable feast for photographers in the Pacific Northwest. Open year round, the garden’s moods can shift depending on the season, sometimes by small, subtle degrees and sometimes in quite dramatic ways. After a long summer of warm weather and blue skies, recent clouds had inspired me to spend some time in the garden. Unlike past visits, I wasn’t really focused on the flora but instead on the stone pathways and its little alcoves and tucked-away areas.
I used my old familiar Canon 45mm tilt-shift, an optically excellent lens that allows me to use tilt and shift in creative ways, rendering different parts of the photos out of focus. I was going for a dreamlike, undefined quality. The darker processing was meant to further add to a nocturnal or even somnambulant tone.
These photos as well as other taken in the Portland Oregon Japanese Garden can be found in my Portland Japanese Garden gallery. More information regarding visiting the Portland Japanese Garden can be found here.
As always, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding prints, licensing, or anything else. I look forward to talking photography.
Without further ado, I present my small collection featuring liminal spaces in the Portland Japanese Garden.
On June 1, 2013, after a few weeks of sporadic aurora activity, I had decided to drive up to Mt Hood’s Trillium Lake to take some photos of the sunset, twilight, and night sky. Over the previous year I had noticed a steady uptick in the number of photographers that would set up along the shores at the lake, but this particular day/night was still in the halcyon pre-Instagram days, where the odds were, if other photographers were there, I would likely know them, and there was plenty of lake shore to spread out and work together.
Shockingly, I did not own a smart phone at the time. I know, I know…the times were different. About an hour after sunset, my wife, who was at home and had an Internet connection, called me to tell me that the KP had jumped up. I immediately looked to the north, and, could just make out faint glimmers of aurora activity in the blue twilight sky.
I settled in and started snapping photos. As the sky got darker the show became more and more clear: Red-pink vertical columns danced above Yellow-green blurs of aurora low on the horizon.
And then something strange happened.
To the northwest of Trillium Lake is an unnamed hill that’s about 500 to 1,000 feet higher than the lake itself. Slowly, over a couple of minutes, a bright band of glow worm-like light grew out of the hill and began to arc across the sky over the lake, so high that it was nearly touching the sky’s zenith. I angled my 14mm lens upward, trying to capture the full display, but it was impossible. I struggled to point my camera straight up; my ballhead and a knob or two on my tripod simply weren’t allowing me to do it. I could’ve reconfigured my center column to get the angle I wanted, but in the dark with limited time I decided to just shoot what I could.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I’d just met STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), years before STEVE was even STEVE.
And in just 5 minutes, the phenomenon was gone. The strong arc expanded, wavered a bit like it was flapping in the wind, and then it broke up, leaving the aurora display much lower on the horizon to continue on strong.
Strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) appears over Trillium Lake and Mt Hood, Oregon, June 1, 2013. To my knowledge this is the only photo I know of that features STEVE in Oregon.
The above panorama was assembled from 4 or 5 photos to give a greater field of view of the scene. I thought the result was better than any of the frames individually, as I was able to show the lake, a tiny sliver of actual foreground in the lower left corner, a nearby tree (on the left), and then a good amount of sky. (Just to illustrate, Polaris can be found about 4/5ths up in the center of the photograph, and Polaris is about 45 degrees above the horizon. I’m guessing my final result was 60 or more degrees of sky, along with foreground just a few feet in front of me.
I put together a quick gif that shows some of STEVE’s movement over a minute or two.
The galactic core of the Milky Way makes its first appearance of the year over a frozen Lost Lake, Oregon.
I took this panorama in January of 2015, one of the earliest calendar year captures of the Milky Way’s galactic core I’ve made over the past 6 or 7 years, particularly in Oregon, where the winters are rainy and cloudy. A thin layer of ice covered Lost Lake, which was pretty exciting, because at the time I’d never really seen any night photos of Lost Lake in the winter (and this is still true to some degree). I’m glad that on this particular morning, I forced myself to get up at 1 am and make the drive.
Sometimes getting outside of your comfort zone is the best possible thing.
Doing things that aren’t particularly fun is often rewarding, purely because no one wants to do them. Very few of us are good at getting up at 1 am and gathering our photography gear, trekking out into the cold and unknown, and taking good technical photos in bad conditions.
But, looking back on this moment three years ago, I don’t remember my irritating alarm clock buzzing me awake. I don’t remember the long drive to the trailhead; I only remember that the drive was filled with uncertainty about how I would get to my destination. Was the road even going to be open? What if there was a tree down blocking the road? How far would I have to walk? What if there was a tree that fell down behind me, trapping me on the mountain?
Luckily, the journey up there wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. And despite the cold of that night, sitting in the dark and taking photos was actually pretty pleasant (mostly thanks to what feels like thousands of dollars spent on high-quality outdoor clothing). This isn’t always the case, of course.
Just last month I found myself moonless-night hiking on an ice and snow-slicked trail to get to a destination for a shoot that was a bust. I was by myself, and I had slipped a few times, stretching some muscles just a bit further than they were meant to be stretched at my age. I was out of my comfort zone: weighed down by equipment, sweating, unsure about predators and nervous. Just plain uncomfortable.
I guess my point is that it’s getting harder to create original nightscape photos, as more and more photographers enter the landscape astrophotography game (which I advocate for, by the way). It’s harder and harder to find and photograph unique landscape under unique conditions, to carve out a unique niche and to be your own photographer.
But it’s not impossible.
And it often starts with doing the things that no one else wants to do.
Do you have any questions or comments regarding this blog or the photo featured in it? Feel free to add a comment below!
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
-Romeo Montague, “Romeo and Juliet”
“Wow, look at that z-light!”
-Me
Ah, zodiacal light, that confounding glow on the horizon long after the sun has already set. At times (particularly in the fall in the northern hemisphere) I have cursed it because it interfered with my view of the Milky Way, but more often than not I celebrate it.
Why?
Because I think it looks cool.
After you’ve taken tens of thousands of photos of the night sky you start to really appreciate unique events or circumstances, and even though I’ve photographed zodiacal light a number of times, it’s still (to me, anyway) a rare and exciting phenomenon. I still think it adds a lot of visual interest and an air of unpredictability to the standard night sky.
But what is it?
It’s billions-of-years-old space dust, lit by our sun! If that answer doesn’t suffice, check out EarthSky’s articles on the topic (found here and here), or even wikipedia’s.
So as an ode to these bright triangles of glowing interstellar dust, below I’ve assembled a collection of my zodiacal light photos, in almost no particular order below.
“Jupiter rising, Kofa Mountains,” the largest planet in our solar system, bathed in zodiacal light, hangs over the jagged peaks of Arizona’s Kofa Mountains.
The above photo (“Jupiter rising, Kofa Mountains”) was one of the rare times I had anticipated seeing zodiacal light in the night sky. Why? Because I had seen it in the same place the year before, and the weather conditions were similar. This time around, I knew Jupiter would be very close to the zodiacal light (it was more in the southern sky the year before), and I had hoped that the planet and the z-light would line up. My hopes came true.
The desert southwest is a great place to go to see zodiacal light in the wintertime: That clear, dry air seems to really allow for some great z-light displays. In this case, I set an alarm for a couple of hours pre-sunrise, got up and left my phone glowing in the bottom of my tent (see photo below), and then took these multi-row panoramas. The final field of view on these is somewhere around 180 degrees wide.
“A light on the horizon,” zodiacal light appears behind the Kofa Mountains, Arizona.
But dry conditions in places like the desert southwest aren’t required for taking these sorts of photos. Occasionally the skies clear up on the “wet” side of Oregon’s Cascades, giving us Oregonians a chance to view zodiacal light as well.
The photo below was one of the first times I had an opportunity to properly shoot zodiacal light and incorporate it into my composition. (Previously I had only haphazardly photographed it, not really realizing what I was seeing.) In the case below, I had researched where the sun would set, and I knew it would line up pretty closely with where I wanted it to be for the composition below. What I didn’t realize is that strong zodiacal light would persist well after sunset. Surprisingly, I’ve seen zodiacal light in this same location a number of times, despite the Oregon coast not being well-known for its clear skies.
“False dusk and falls, Oregon coast,” second-place winner in The World at Night’s 2014 Earth and Sky photo contest.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve really come to enjoy photographing the night sky in the wintertime, for various reasons that I won’t get into here. In the two photos below you can see the results from a night of winter shooting at the Oregon coast (the same location as “False dusk and falls, Oregon coast” above).
“Tributaries in the river of light,” zodiacal light appears off the Oregon coast in this familiar location. This photo received “special mention” in TWAN’s 2016 Earth and Sky photo contest.
This full-dome view of the night sky at the Oregon coast shows the winter Milky Way, airglow, and strong zodiacal light that nearly reaches the sky’s zenith (right side).
The photo below was another memorable occasion for shooting zodiacal light, mostly because it was on a sub-freezing morning at Joshua Tree National Park during my first visit to the park. This particular shot was
Zodiacal lights shines brightly during the pre-dawn of a winter morning at Joshua Tree National Park. In this case, the planet Saturn bathes in zodiacal light, while the bright star Vega shines on the left side of the photo.
And finally, here’s one from the dry side of the Cascades. Again, Jupiter played around in the zodiacal light for me, which is always a nice bonus.
Zodiacal light shines over the playa of the Alvord Desert in eastern Oregon.
Summertime at Crater Lake tends to be either perfectly clear or hopelessly cloudy, and the few days I spent at the lake this past summer were no exception. In reality, what I was seeking was a perfect mix of clear and cloudy, enough clouds to blow up with color in the pre-dawn light and provide some mysterious drama, but enough clear patches to have a sprinkling of stars shining through. Of course my best-of-both-worlds hopes didn’t materialize, so I’ll happily attempt to get that shot another time: it’s just another excuse to make a trip to Crater Lake.
Technical details:
This is three exposures taken chronologically as follows: The first was taken for the stars, the second was taken for the sky, and the third was taken for the land, all before the sunrise.
Other notes:
In the next couple of weeks I’ll be announcing my 2016 workshop schedule, which will include either one or two workshops at Crater Lake in which I’ll cover my techniques for sunset, twilight, and full-on night photography. I’ll be covering these techniques via lecture in a classroom setting, then field work at Crater Lake National Park, and then back to the classroom for post-processing.
If you’re interested in learning these techniques from me, I urge you to sign up for my workshop newsletter over here. These workshops are set up in a small-group format, and I try to teach my techniques both as a technical and as an artistic (fine art) endeavor.
Additionally, if you prefer to strap on some snowshoes and capture Crater Lake with a coat of white snow, I am available for private lessons this winter at Crater Lake–message me for details.
Crater Lake’s rim glows in the pre-dawn light as stars sparkle overhead. Prints available here. Click for larger view.
I don’t often get an opportunity to photograph Oregon’s beautiful southern coast, so when my crowded schedule cleared a bit earlier this week I seized the moment and made the long drive. Known for its numerous state parks and its indefatigable sea stacks, the southern Oregon coast is a seascape photographer’s playground.
During the light of day, the dirt trails that cut through Samuel Boardman State Park are safe enough, if you pick your route carefully, can avoid tripping over exposed tree roots, and have shoes with good enough grip to avoid dirt-skiing down a hill and launching into the churning ocean.
But as is often the case, at night the coast’s hidden coves and thickly wooded trails turn inky black and shadows become impenetrable. The speed of foot travel becomes highly dependent upon the luminosity of your headlamp, and some scrambling, including climbing ladder-like tree roots upward, is required. And if you’re like me, occasionally, when you shut off your headlamp and wait for your camera’s long exposure, you’ll wobble and gyrate in the dark, feet rooted in place to ensure that you don’t take an ill-fated step in the wrong direction in an effort to check your balance.
In other words, this isn’t a place to visit with someone you even remotely suspect of harboring a grudge against you. Luckily for me, I was joined by Matt Newman, a talented southern Oregon photographer who had a little more experience with Samuel Boardman’s trails than I had and was willing to show me around a bit.
Technical details:
This is a blend of three images all taken in low-light conditions. The first was a very long exposure taken half an hour post-sunset with a neutral density filter to ensure that a certain amount of natural long-exposure saturation occurred in the twilight sky. The second was taken just a few minutes later without an ND filter to ensure that some of the darker areas of the photo had adequate shadow detail. The third exposure was taken just for the stars.
Breaking waves sound like thunder as the sun sets on a misty evening in Oregon’s Samuel Boardman State Park. Click the photo for full size. Prints available here.
I just got back from a week-long roadtrip around southeastern Oregon with my family. We had a great time despite breathing a lot of desert dust, doing a little damage to both our car and our tiny camping trailer (southeastern Oregon is not kind to people or vehicles in general), and getting skunked (photographically speaking) for the first half of the trip.
One of our stops put us in Rome, Oregon, a tiny valley hamlet along the Owyhee River. There wasn’t much to the place, really. There’s a boat put-in for the river, a general store with gas and some camping (and one of the top-5 worst cups of coffee I’ve ever sipped), and a chunk of land north of town called “The Pillars of Rome,” where surprisingly unique and interesting rock formations erupt from the ground and tower over the dusty landscape, which is mostly filled with scrub brush and cows. The crumbly clay structures have a number of fossils embedded in them and apparently were a landmark to pioneers, who likely paused for a moment to admire their grandeur before deciding that there was no way they were going to homestead anywhere near there.
Because our gazetteer had a tiny camping symbol at the BLM’s boat put-in, we assumed we could trailer-camp there, although a gate at the gravel road’s entrance and a sign near a grassy spot stating “Do not place tents on grass – Day Use Only” hinted that maybe our gazetteer was wrong. The only other option was camping at the general store half a mile down the road. We decided to roll the dice and camp at the boat put-in anyway, knowing full well that there was a chance that I would return from shooting in the middle of the night with the car and find that the gate would be closed, thereby preventing me from getting back to our camp trailer and my family. It wouldn’t have been the first time I would’ve slept in my car, but luckily it never came to that, as the gate was still open when I got back.
And this was a good thing, as the general store, for some reason, had lit their camp area to near-daylight proportions with the use of two extremely bright sodium-vapor lights. The lights were so bright, actually, that when they turned on a little past sunset, I thought the BLM’s boat put-in had lights in its parking lot. But no, these were lights from the general store. Half a mile away. I’m not sure how anyone in the general store’s RV park got any sleep without blackout curtains and sleep masks.
Despite the obnoxious lighting practices of the general store, Rome has some extremely dark skies, which is great for photographers like me who enjoy photographing the night sky. The result of one of my photos is below.
Technical details: This is two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground, taken back to back, and blended carefully in Photoshop. This is the true position of the Milky Way at the moment in time in which the photos were taken.
The spring Milky Way wheels through the dark skies of tiny Rome, Oregon, where just north of town the rock formations “The Pillars of Rome” impose on the dry landscape. Prints available here.
Early the next morning, I got the panorama below after finding this location the previous day.
Moments away from becoming washed out by the dawning of a new day, the Milky Way arches over a sphinx-like rock formation at the Pillars of Rome, Oregon.
In late January I got it into my head that I was going to get my earliest winter Milky Way photo to date. So after a bit of research (mostly the Internet variety, although I did place a call or two as well) I discovered that the road to Lost Lake would probably be clear, so Chip MacAlpine and I headed up there to shoot some stars and catch sunrise. (Coincidentally, we also ran into fellow landscape photographers Justin Poe, Tula Top, and Terence Lee just before dawn.) Our plan for capturing Milky Way then sunrise went swimmingly until a curtain of fog descended into the lake, totally obscuring just about everything and turning a morning with some small potential totally gray.
The title of this photo comes from the Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra duet “Some Velvet Morning.” This song (not to mention Hazlewood and his body of work) has held my attention for quite a while. Simply put, the song’s weird. I’m not going to reprint the lyrics to it here, since I’ve embedded it below, but the lyrical content of the song is nebulous at best, and the song’s parts alternate between Ennio Morricone spaghetti western and (and I’m thinking of Nancy Sinatra’s part specifically here) psychedelic bordering on outsider. Wikipedia tells me that the song’s single peaked at #26 in January of 1968, which further blows my mind. And that moustache.
Wikipedia also tells me that Phaedra is a figure in Greek mythology whose name means “bright.” She’s also the granddaughter of Helios, the Greek god of the sun, which sheds a little more, ahem, light on the meaning of “Some Velvet Morning.”
As an aside, I think my favorite version of “Some Velvet Morning” is Lydia Lunch and Rowland S Howard’s. It’s a fairly faithful rendition, except for the scaled-down instrumentation, but there’s something about the way Howard times and emphasizes the word “straight” that tilts the song’s meaning just a bit.
Technical details: This is a blend of two exposures. The first was my sky exposure, taken during the crepuscular light when most of the Milky Way had disappeared. I then left my camera and tripod in about 18 inches of partially frozen lake water for half an hour before taking my second exposure, for the foreground. This foreground exposure also captured a bank of fog that rolled into the area, pretty much blotting out the entire scene in just a few minutes. The quality of the light changed pretty rapidly during the fog-out, so I had to make some creative decisions in the final photo, interpreting the scene as it would have existed had the crepuscular light and the fog existed in the same moment rather than half an hour apart. In other words, it was pretty fun putting this together.
The glow of twilight collides with a thick fog bank over a frozen Lost Lake. Mt Hood can be seen in the background. Prints available (check out my “night and stars” gallery or contact me for details). Click the photo for the full-size version.
If night-sky photographers were to have an off-season (and they could certainly use such a thing, to catch up on sleep if nothing else), the winter time would most likely be it, at least in the northern hemisphere.
From about November through February, much of the galactic core of the Milky Way (the colorful, dust lane-riddled part of our galaxy) lies below the horizon, at least where I live in Oregon.
Of course, the absence of this singular feature of the night sky doesn’t stop me from going out and taking photos. I could probably write a separate blog post on my and other night sky photographers’ fixation on the galactic center and how winter night-sky shooting may even be preferable to shooting during other times of the year, but I’ll save that for later. Suffice it to say, between the long nights and the cool temperatures (which are better for creating low-noise images), the winter’s a great time for night photography.
But I have to admit, like plenty of other photographers, that first glimpse of the Milky Way’s mysterious glowing center on my camera’s LCD is exciting.
So color me giddy when I was able to get my first glance of this feature of the Milky Way in 2015 last weekend. For this trip up to “the mountain” (Mt Hood, for those of you who don’t speak Portlandese), I was able to convince fellow night-sky photographer Chip MacAlpine to join me. Actually, “convince” is probably the wrong word, since it doesn’t take a whole lot of prodding for Chip to drop everything, sacrifice some sleep, and head out into the wilderness for some photography.
While we’re on the topic of “wilderness,” while technically it’s in Mt Hood National Forest, Lost Lake’s hardly feels like wilderness, especially from the vantage point of this shot. Because of the lack of snow this year, the road up to the lake’s still open, although I was warned by a ranger that fallen trees haven’t been removed. So I was a little worried that our trip up to the mountain was going to be foiled by a downed tree blocking the road, which luckily didn’t happen.
For me, the greatest obstacle in my way was the fact that I had just had surgery a week and a half before on my left elbow, which was still bothering me at the time. The next-greatest obstacle was the tiny window I had in which to actually get this shot. Half an hour isn’t a whole lot of time when you’re taking multiple long-exposure photos, and although I would’ve had a slightly smaller window of opportunity the following morning, the forecast was for cloudy skies. In short, I had half an hour to get this photo or I’d have to wait until the following month.
Technical details: For those of you wondering, this panorama was created with six vertical photos, all shot with the same fairly standard settings: 15 seconds at ISO 6400. My aperture was unrecorded. I made some basic RAW adjustments in Lightroom, before exporting the files to PS6 for stitching. After that, I did some cropping and a little bit of careful warping to correct for perspective. Then I did my usual post-processing workflow, which includes luminosity masks for self-feathered selections.
Title details: The title of this photo is an allusion to several things: First, it’s kind of a play on the lake’s name. Second, it refers to the galactic center of the Milky Way, which has been hidden for the past few months. And third, it’s a comment on my own healing process and what has been required for me to (hopefully) live a life with a little less pain in my day-to-day activities.
Prints details: This print will be available as a 20×40 limited edition print on aluminum. With 50 total prints made, pricing is variable depending on the print’s number in the series. Use the contact me form below-right for details. I’m in the process of ordering this one for my own house, and will post the photo as soon as I can make it happen.
The galactic center of the Milky Way slowly rises behind Mt Hood, as seen from a frozen Lost Lake in mid winter. Limited-edition prints available; contact me for details.
“The seventh wave recedes, Cape Kiwanda” Click to view larger. Prints available (use the contact me form below to inquire).
It’s summertime at the Oregon coast, and the sun set 20 minutes ago. The horizon still glows warm, a perfect soft breeze blows your hair from your eyes, and churning waves drum at the base of the sandstone cove where you’ve watched the sunset with friends. Somewhere around the seventh or eighth wave you hear a heavy, hollow ka-whump, and a six-foot wall of water jumps vertically, just an arm’s length in front of you, only to crash straight down. These are the sandstone bluffs of Cape Kiwanda, a strange juxtaposition of tranquility and chaos.
Portland Japanese Garden
