Star Photography | Ben Coffman Photography

Your comfort zone isn’t helping your photography

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!

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TWAN Earth and Sky Photo Contest (third place!)

Big news, everyone! I’m delighted to announce that my photo “A raising of the hackles” won third place in The World at Night’s (TWAN’s) 6th annual Earth and Sky Photo Contest. This is really exciting for me because, for one, I see TWAN as doing important work: It’s easy to point out the differences among all of us (and when I say “us,” I mean the people of the world), but it’s much more difficult to show how alike we are and to reveal how much we have in common. TWAN blends science and the arts to deliver the message that we all share the same night sky, not just visually in the form of stargazing but culturally as well.

Second, I look up to this organization and its members and photographers greatly. If you follow the link to the TWAN page take a moment, scroll down, and check out the contest judges and their work–impressive stuff.

Third, night-sky photography is still a niche form of photography, a subgenre of a subgenre, but it’s gaining in popularity every day. Even in the last five years, I’ve seen a major change of behavior among landscape photographers: They’re sticking around after the sun goes down. I was at a popular location at Mt St Helens Saturday night, and I swear I only saw two photographers leave after the golden hour. At least 15 photographers stuck around to shoot stars. Five years ago, those numbers would’ve been reversed. This TWAN contest represents the very best of my favorite type of photography and is an annual benchmark to see how high the bar has been raised. It’s an honor to be included.

The moon and the Milky Way rise over the eastern horizon of Crater Lake on a frozen winter night. Prints available. — “A raising of the hackles,” third place winner, Beauty of the Night Sky category, The World at Night 6th annual Earth and Sky photo contest. Big, beautiful prints of this photo are available for purchase here.

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The Pillars of Rome and Milky Way

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 Milky Way over Rome, Oregon. — 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.

The Milky Way arches over a rock at Pillars of Rome, Oregon. — 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.

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About Phaedra – An icy, foggy morning at Lost…

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. Click for full version. — 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.

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“Reclamation” – Behind the scenes of a night-sky panoramic…

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.

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Thundering water, singing darkness at Palouse Falls

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

-Pablo Neruda

A waterfall flows as stars sparkle overhead, rural Washington state. — Palouse Falls’ spring flows thunders at night; prints available (use the ‘contact me’ form).

These night photos are truly labors of love. When I think of all the mini-hardships I’ve endured…the freezing nights, the never-ending sleep-deprived hikes, the long drives in the dark (and the resulting collisions with wildlife), the hours spent standing around because the ground is too cold and too hard to sit on and I didn’t pack a chair, the nights I’ve forgotten to pack a snack, the mornings in which I can’t make it back home without stopping multiple times for terrible truck-stop coffee because it’s still too early for the little drive-thru coffee shops to open…sometimes I wonder why I do go out for these photos at all.

I definitely don’t take these types of photos for the money. In fact, it has been quite a while since I’ve sold a print of the night sky. I do it because these photos sing to my soul. I love taking them. I love processing them, re-processing them. I still find joy in these Buzzfeed-like lists titled “20 AWESOME photos of the night sky!” and find myself wasting 4 or 5 minutes scrolling through the entire list of photos taken by my contemporaries, even though I’ve seen nearly all of the photos before. I love looking at the photos of other talented photographers who go out and document their sky. I am particularly enamored by the southern hemisphere’s skies–they look so different than the ones I’m used to here in Oregon. When I see those Magellanic clouds and their upside-down galactic center I’m instantly transported somewhere foreign and exotic.

Anyway, the galactic center of the Milky Way will be retiring shortly (around here, anyway), but there’s still a lot of great night photography that can be done. And so tonight, some dark beer, college football, and some padron peppers stuffed with sausage and cream cheese and wrapped in bacon have won out over another night in the cold, camera clicking away. But I’ll be back out there before too much longer.

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Photographing Palouse Falls at night, a second-person essay

Your phone’s alarm clock jolts you awake. Your back aches, but you finally slept well for about an hour and a half, anyway.

You sit up, turn the alarm off, and put the phone in your right cargo pocket of your pants. It’s dark and finally quiet, save for the gusting winds gently rocking your car. Your mind clears, and your heart rate jumps. It’s time to shoot the stars.

You pick up your wallet and put it in your back pocket; your flashlight goes in your left cargo pocket; your keys go in your right-front zipper pocket; your headlamp goes around your neck. Everything’s organized, sequenced; you’ve done this routine dozens of time and can do it with your eyes half closed, in the dark. You open the car’s back door to put on your shoes and step out into the gravel parking lot. Cold air rushes in, defogging the windows. The dome light on your car doesn’t come on–you turned it off a couple of years ago to help save your night vision.

Upward, the sky’s filled end to end with gleaming stars. You take a brief second to admire them, and refocus. You put on your long-sleeve shirt. You pick up your trusty 15-year-old wool sweater that you were using as a pillow and put that on too. You throw on your jacket, which has your shutter release in the right pocket, gloves thin enough to work your camera’s controls in the left pocket. You put on your neck gaiter and stocking hat and slide your headlamp up from around your neck onto your head, over the stocking hat. The headlamp’s still off–you’re still trying to save your night vision, always trying to work in the dark as much as possible.

You grab your backpack and tripod, close the back door of the car, and beep it locked with a twinge of guilt at possibly disturbing campers who were keeping you awake just a few hours earlier.

You start hiking. Quickly the terrain goes from safe and well-traveled to right along the edge of a gaping canyon. Below you–maybe 100 feet–is a 200-foot waterfall flowing at its spring rate–a high volume. The waterfall’s roar blots out every other noise in the night. The white noise of waterfalls and wind occupies nearly all of your senses; your eyes see only basic shapes in the blue-black geography around you land and pinhole lights in the sky. Cold creeps into your body at your extremities.

You can feel a small rumble beneath your feet. You set your tripod down, and as you release your grip you can feel it humming. You inch closer to the edge of the cliff, thinking about the crumbling piles of basalt several hundred feet below. You wonder about how long ago they fell. Two thousand years? One hundred fifty years? Five years? News reports of recent earthquakes in southern California and Mt Hood flash into your brain. You wonder how long the rock below your feet would stay put if the earth started to shake.

You look through your eyepiece; because you’re shooting with a wide lens, the edge of the cliff is in the bottom of your frame. You need to move closer. You turn on your headlamp (there goes your night vision, but you’re not going to risk getting any closer in the darkness), double-check the edge of the cliff again, take a deep breath, and move your tripod as close to the edge as possible. Holding onto your tripod with your left hand so that it doesn’t fall off the cliff, you carefully check the bubble level to make sure its level.

You turn your head lamp off and vow to not take a single step–certainly not a step forward, but also not to the left or directly behind you, where the ground falls away to a large crack, and then, of course, a long tumble.

You aren’t prone to vertigo, but your head swims in the pitch darkness. You can’t escape the feeling that you’re floating in space. The ground is a flat, detail-less black. You renew your vow not to take a single step, to keep your feet planted exactly where they are. Don’t… move…

You line up the shot–your eyes have adjusted, thankfully, and you can just barely differentiate the deep black of the canyon from the not-quite-as-deep black of the horizon.

You trip the shutter, in the dark, alone, and start counting along with the timer…one…two…three…

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Star photography on Mt Hood, March of 2013 retro-blog

One of my 2014 resolutions is to do more blogging about my night photography, so I’m going to get an early jump and coin a new (to me, anyway) term: retro-blogging!

The night in question? March 3, 2013. Gary Weathers and I charged the camera batteries, layered up, and strapped on some snowshoes for a sunset-to-night hike in the Mt Hood National Forest. The purpose? Some night photography of Mt Hood.

I had night hiked to Mirror Lake before, but I had always wanted to keep charging up the ridge by Tom, Dick, and Harry Mountain (also known as TDH). This adds in about another 900 feet of elevation gain (making the total elevation gain 1,700 feet). But it also adds in nearly unequaled views of Mt Hood, with Mirror Lake below.

The hike wasn’t too intense, although the elevation gain was enough to cause me to start peeling layers in an attempt to avoid sweating too much. A late start (as a result of having to park about a mile away from the trailhead) meant that we were about to miss sunset, so we paused halfway up the ridge for some photos. The skies were a little too “clean” (free of clouds) for our liking, but the soft contours of untracked snow made some interesting leading lines in the foreground.

Mt Hood in the snow, at sunset. — A sunset shot on the way up. 14mm, 1/15 sec, ISO 100, aperture unrecorded

After our break, we re-packed our gear and continued up the hill. As soon as the sun set, the temperatures dropped noticeably, and the wind at the top of the ridge almost instantly froze the sweat on my skin. A thin veil of haze moved into the valley, softening the landscape. This haze was one of two endless sources of frustration for Gary and I–the second being the extraordinarily bright lights all over the mountain, which were even more obnoxious when reflected in the haze.

We spent about three and a half hours at the top of the ridge, freezing, trekking dangerously close to cornices, exploring different compositions, and waiting for the haze to clear. We had clearer moments, for sure, but it never did really lift. Lamenting our fates, we headed back down the mountain, pretty sure that we hadn’t gotten anything really usable that night.

A snowy shot of Mt Hood at night, with stars above. — Exploring the ridge, near TDH. 14 mm, 30 sec, ISO 3200, aperture unrecorded

I pose for a photo at night with Mt Hood in the background. — Gary helped me light a selfie before we headed back down. Before you make fun of the look on my face, you should try posing for a photo for 30 seconds WHILE NOT MOVING. 14mm, 30 sec, ISO 1600, aperture unrecorded, lit by Gary Weathers with a flashlight

The words "Mt Hood" are light painted at night, with Mt Hood in the background — What mountain is this again? Oh okay, now I remember. 14mm, 30 sec, ISO 1600, aperture unrecorded

On the way back down, we stopped mid-way, at the same point we had stopped on the way up. For some reason, the air seemed to have cleared slightly. We found a couple of small trees, half-buried in the snow (we had both photographed them on the way up), and we took several minutes to shoot photos. I liked the way the light pollution played on the frost in the trees, but I had a terrible time working with the ambient lighting. The lights from Government Camp lit the hillside almost to daylight, and nearly all of my photos from this spot were ruined by unfixable lens flare (one of the problems with shooting with an ultra-wide lens). In fact, only one was usable.

Light pollution domes over the city of Portland, Oregon at night. — This is looking back at Portland. You can see our trail heading up the ridge. You also get a good idea of just how much light pollution the city puts off. 14mm, 30 sec, ISO 4000, aperture unrecorded

A snowy Mt Hood sits with stars above it. — My only “clean” shot of the mountain from this spot. 14mm, 30 sec, ISO 3200, aperture unrecorded

This was my least favorite of the five images I submitted to The World at Night’s (TWAN’s) Earth and Sky Photo Contest, and it was the one that did the best. Go figure.

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Star trails over Yosemite Falls

Getting There

There’s no secret to this location–this is upper Yosemite Falls, right in the Yosemite Valley of Yosemite National Park. If for some reason “see Yosemite before I die” isn’t written on a piece of paper in your possession, you should probably change that. The park was incredible.

Getting the Shot

This is 35 exposures (25 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 1250, 22mm, shot on my Canon 17-40) stacked in Starstax (gap-filling mode). I highly recommend this free software, available online. Stacking shorter images (rather than taking one longer image) has several advantages, including less noise in the final image and the ability to remove a frame or two if something bad unexpected occurs (such as airplanes, car headlights, etc) during your exposures.

Basically, I pulled up next to this meadow at about 11 pm, set up my camera, took a few test shots to check my composition and my settings, double-checked my focus, and then I set my intervalometer to take 50 exposures. Then I walked back to my car, kicked back the driver’s seat, and tried to enjoy a short nap. About 10 minutes in, someone pulled up behind my car and sprayed the entire meadow with their headlights, disturbing my nap. I ended up tossing that exposure in the trash. After about 30 shots, a blanket of high clouds moved in, eventually covering the sky (and shifting my white balance, which was set to auto). I threw away many of those frames as well.

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“Sentries of the white city”

Yikes! I totally forgot to mention this thing that’s totally worth mentioning: Last month, my photo “Sentries of the white city” was selected by Oregon photography business Pro Photo Supply as the winner of their monthly photography contest. The theme was “snow.”

A brief interview and the image can be found here. In the interview, I mention a little about the process of taking the photo.