A Year of Shooting in the Dark: Reflecting on Our Fave Photos of 2016

A new year always brings the promise—or the hope—of change. And such is the case with the National Parks at Night blog. With a quick look at your calendar, you’ll know for sure that today is not Tuesday, but Saturday. The former was our new-post day since we launched this blog last January, but 48 posts later, we’re changing to the latter. We hope the weekends will afford you more time to relax with the words we write.

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The end of the year is always a nostalgic time to look back and reflect on your accomplishments. 2016 officially marked National Parks at Night’s first year in business, and we couldn’t be happier with how it went! We sold out all of our workshops, collectively explored over 20 parks, spoke at five major conferences, presented at countless camera clubs, and taught one of the most popular classes of the year—Night Photography Week—on Creative Live. And in between, we have been scheming to offer even more experiences and opportunities to learn with us in 2017!

As 2016 wraps, we’re also doing what many photographers do at this time of year: We’re reflecting on our creative endeavors, seeing ways we developed, and looking through our catalog to spot our favorite images. So join us for a stroll through 2016 as we share our favorite night photos from the year.

Matt Hill

While on our workshop in Arches National Park, Tim Cooper and I were finishing up at Balanced Rock when the clouds started to break. I thought about how wide my lens was and said to myself, "I have a feeling about this—let's see what happens." Looking over my shoulder when the image came up on the LCD, Tim said, “You’re a cloud whisperer now!” Boy, did I feel good. Sometimes experience helps you make better decisions, like placing the moon behind something, watching skies and manually closing the shutter just as the moon crests the edge. And sometimes fortune smiles on you. Thus goes the magic unpredictability of night photography. · Nikon D750 with a Nikon Fisheye 16mm f/2.8 lens; 7.5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 100.

This is my favorite image of the year, because it captures everything I feel about what we do. Exploring, creative risk-taking, appreciation for national parks and collaboration. I shot this in Capitol Reef National Park during our National Parks Week road trip in April. We were hiking back through Capitol Gorge after an epic night of photographing at The Tanks, when I turned around and saw the possibilities for this composition. Everyone was tired (and concerned about some weather rolling in), but they still were happy to pose and to help light-paint the rock face. · Nikon D750 with a Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8 lens; 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Tim Cooper

This shot made in Zion National Park was created with the idea of mixing the motion of car trails with the motion of the moving stars. To keep the western sky from overexposing, I was limited to a 10-minute shutter speed, so I chose to shoot multiple exposures to stack later in post-processing. I made three test shots to determine the overall exposure and test for time and intensity with light painting. The final image combines four different exposures of 10 minutes each with light painting in various areas with the Coast HP7 flashlight gelled with a Bastard Orange Filter. · Nikon D4 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens; four 10-minute exposures, f/5, ISO 400.

Before I even landed in Arches National Park, I knew I wanted to create a composition with this tree that my friend Doug Johnson had pointed out to me years earlier. The brilliant light of full moon illumination meant that I had to keep my exposures to a maximum of 3 minutes so that the overall scene would not become too bright. Because I had envisioned the North Star and its “rings” through the trees, I set my Vello ShutterBoss intervalometer to shoot 17 separate images at 3 minutes each. The old tree received extra illumination via my Coast HP7 flashlight gelled with a Bastard Orange filter. · Nikon D4s with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens; 17 3-minute exposures, f/5.6, ISO 100.

Lance Keimig

This image of the Mexican miner’s cemetery in Terlingua, Texas, is one of my favorites of the year for multiple reasons. First, Terlingua and the Big Bend region in general are unique in so many ways, including geology, geography and especially character. It’s one of my favorite places to visit, and this image is special to me because it is a remake of one that I created on my first visit to the area in 2007. The first time there, conditions were very different—the moon was full, and it was just before La Dia de los Muertos, the biggest day of the year in any Mexican cemetery. The original image was my favorite from the first trip, and the new one from this past March turned out to be my favorite from the 2016 trip. The composition is very similar, but the lighting and the sky were completely different. I was also working with my newly found friend, Hal Mitzenmacher, who was one of the workshop participants. The two of us worked together on the shot for about an hour, and I think Hal would agree that this hour was the highlight of the journey. · Nikon D750 with Nikon 24-120mm f/4.0 lens; 30 seconds, f/4.5, ISO 6400. Light painting from behind and from left with a Coast HP5R flashlight, as well as from both sides on the fence in front.

This image from Death Valley National Park exemplifies what I love about night photography. It’s simple, yet powerful. The lone streetlight that illuminates the dirt road leading up to the employee dormitories behind the Furnace Creek Inn takes the strange and beautiful natural landscape and turns it upside down. Why is there a streetlight in the middle of nowhere? It just adds thick layers of mystery and surrealism. As I walked up the pathway and crested the hill, the light came into view and I immediately saw the shot. I made several different versions, but this was my favorite. I love the quiet simplicity of the scene, and the secret knowledge of what lays outside the frame makes it special to me. · Nikon D750 with Nikon 24mm f/1.4 lens; 30 seconds, f/8, ISO 400. Lit with existing streetlight and moonlight.

Chris Nicholson

One of my favorite spots to photograph in Olympic National Park is the Hoh Rain Forest. But until this year, I'd never tried it at night. This image required a few hours of work (including hiking!) and employing all the best practices of night photography. I needed to scout the location during the day, including setting up the composition and tripod placement, and walking through the scene to see how I could move around safely in the dark to various points for light painting. The final exposure was made hours later toward the end of twilight, using a Coast HP7R flashlight and 1/2-cut CTO gel. · Nikon D3s with a Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 lens; 4 minutes, f/16, ISO 1600.

During our Death Valley National Park workshop, we spent an entire evening on the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, shooting under black skies for a couple of hours until the moon rose. When the moon finally made its appearance, everyone was in awe; walking among the dunes under the light of a full moon is one of the best experiences in the park. At one point I saw attendee Karen taking a break from shooting and enjoying a moment to savor the experience. I quickly planted my tripod, composed, focused and called out, “Karen, please stand still for ten seconds!” I light-painted her from the side with just a quick swipe of my Coast HP5R. This image, I think, speaks to all we do as national park night photographers, and to all the five of us do as night photography instructors. It’s not just about the photography, it’s also about the experience. · Nikon D5 with a Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8 lens; 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 3200.

Gabriel Biderman

I’m constantly looking for new ways to interpret the night and have been playing with 360-degree cameras for several years now. 2016 was the year that the 360 technology took a leap forward for long exposures! This image was taken on the last night of our first workshop in Acadia National Park. I knew I wanted to get the Milky Way and myself as a “Little Prince” on the world. I was walking away and previewing the proper distance I needed to be and I loved how the red light turned me into a mysterious silhouette as well as lit up the tiny planet perfectly. · Ricoh Theta S Spherical Digital Camera; 1 minute, f/2, ISO 800.

I was suffering from shooter’s envy as all the other NPAN guys were teaching workshops in Arches & Death Valley national parks during the supermoon on November 14. So I called out an impromptu moon shoot with some fellow local nocturnalists in NYC. We used the PhotoPills app to figure out the best location to capture the moon rising over the trifecta of iconic NYC bridges. The challenge was that we had only about a four-minute window to see and shoot the moon before it was completely hidden behind thick blanket of clouds. I used a super telephoto lens to create a tight composition that emphasized the car trails over the bridges as well as the super size of la luna! · Nikon D750 with a Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 lens; 1/2 second, f/11, ISO 400.

Your Images

Now that we’ve shown you some of our favorite night photographs from 2016, we’d love to see yours! Head over to the National Parks at Night Facebook page and share the best shot of your year, along with some info about how you made it. We can have fun seeing one another’s work, then we can all get back out into the night to start creating our 2017 portfolios!

We hope that you had a creative and productive year, and look forward to sharing more adventures with you in 2017!

Gabriel Biderman 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

Casting Out Shadows: When HDR is the Right Choice for a Night Scene

The acronym HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. The term can refer to a computer program, or a photograph that has been processed by an HDR program, or the technique of taking multiple photographs with the intention of blending them together in an HDR program.

Let’s begin with the phrase “dynamic range.” Dynamic range refers to the amount of separation between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene. A scene low in dynamic range has a limited range of brightness tones (as seen below).

Example of a low dynamic range photo, from Death Valley National Park.

On the other hand, a scene such as this Moraine Lake photograph (below) contains a large range of brightness values. This huge difference between values is what makes a scene high in dynamic range. (“High contrast” is another phrase used to describe such a scene.)

Example of a high dynamic range photo., of Moraine Lake in Canada'a Banff National Park.

The problem, of course, is that even the best cameras cannot capture a scene with an extreme amount of dynamic range. In the example of the Moraine Lake photo, to reveal the detail in all of the tones, I made five different exposures of the scene by using different shutter speeds (1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15 and 1/8—all at f/11) and blended them together in an HDR program called PhotoMatix.

Final image created by blending five different exposures.

Night Applications

While HDR is a common technique in daytime photography, the definition of high contrast certainly describes many nighttime scenarios. Not all night scenes are high in contrast, though. A landscape illuminated by a full moon, for example, can be fairly low in dynamic range.

Low-contrast scene illuminated by the full moon, in Zion National Park.

But any scene that contains deep shadows and very bright highlights is a candidate for the HDR process—even if it's after dark. This scenario is especially common at night when we mix deep shadows and man-made light sources, such as city lights or car trails.

High-contrast scene mixing Las Vegas city lights and deep shadows.

Below is a final image I made in Las Vegas after shooting three separate exposures of 1 second, 2 seconds and 4 seconds (all at f/11) and blending them together in PhotoMatix. This process reveals details in the dark shadows while allowing the city lights to retain texture while remaining bright.

Final image after HDR treatment.

Cuyahoga Case Study

I don’t use the HDR process for every nighttime image, but when confronted with deep shadows, bright city lights or brightly lit buildings, I’ll certainly consider it. This is exactly what happened to me while scouting and shooting for our upcoming night photography adventure workshop in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I wanted to take a picture of the rail crossing and station at Boston Mill. In order to capture detail in the "Boston Mill" sign on the depot, I had to use an exposure of 8 seconds, f/8 at ISO 100.

At Cuyahoga Valley, an exposure of 8 seconds, f/8 at ISO 100 recorded detail in the highlights.

However, this exposure left the sky and foreground very dark. Therefore, it was time for HDR. I needed to create a few more exposures that were brighter so I could get some detail in the darker areas of the image. Varying only the shutter speed to alter exposures left my f-stop constant, which in turn created the same amount of depth of field in each image.

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Exposures of 15 seconds at f/8, 30 seconds at f/8, and 1 minute at f/8.

After viewing the histogram of the 1-minute exposure, I decided that the shadows had received enough light, and I didn’t need to open them up any more. Later, I took all four exposures and blended them together in PhotoMatix.

HDR blend of the four exposures.

Blending the images together kept the highlight detail of the Boston Mill sign intact while brightening up the shadow portions of the image.

At this point I had all the exposures necessary to reveal the desired detail, but I had not captured the car trails that I was hoping for. Leaving my camera in position, I waited for more traffic and made a few more exposures. To create the final image (below), I used Photoshop to add a few more exposures with car trails to the HDR blended image above.

The final image of the HDR frame (four exposures combined) layered with car-trail exposures.

When making images at night, we’re faced with all sorts of challenges. In the case of the Boston Mill shot, the difficulty lay in the extreme contrast between the lit sign, the dark foreground and even darker sky. By taking multiple exposures and blending them together in HDR I was able to control that high contrast.

Like with any photography discipline, a firm grasp of the basics and being familiar with your gear will carry you through many situations. Knowing a few cool techniques like HDR, however, can greatly expand the possibilities.

For more information about shooting and processing HDR images, check out Tim Cooper’s books The Realistic HDR Image and HDR Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots. If you are interested in using Tim’s HDR program of choice, click for a 15% discount on PhotoMatix.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Be Out in the Cold: Why Winter is Great for Night Photography

'Tis the season to photograph at night!

There is a reason we call it a winter wonderland. Snow can cover the world as we know it and turn it into something white, pure and surreal.

Most of us dread snow, as it can become a deterrent to get from point A to B. But remember, it was only a few years ago that we would dream of winter weather cancelling our schools so we could stay home and create people, igloos and all sorts of fantastical things in the snow and ice. There has been a recent uptick in ice castles made by farmers, ski resorts and cold-region locals who for one or two months during the winter open these spectacular ice worlds that are often lit up at night!

So as we get ready to celebrate the longest night of the year, I wanted to share some tips to hopefully inspire you to bundle up and create some wonderful winter wonderland images.

This was taken of a kota, or warm hut, in the Lapland region of Finland. I passed by this perfect scene a few times, but when I saw the animal’s footprint in the fresh snow I ran and grabbed the gear. I shot at a low angle to emphasize the footprint and make the hut seem a little larger than life.

1. Find a new way to photograph the holiday lights

If you drive or walk around your neighborhood, you’ll see lots of outdoor lights covering the many streets and houses. These can be fairly simple to photograph, especially when they are also under the streetlights, but try to find a new way to interpret them.

With your camera on a tripod, zoom your lens during the exposure to add motion, or perhaps go in close for a detail shot that throws the rest of the scene out of focus. The holiday lights that hang across the streets look better when we have car trails going through them. Places like Rockefeller Square in New York City can be difficult to shoot because of the mass amounts of people—good luck setting up a tripod! Look instead for quieter, neighborhood scenes that also epitomize the holiday cheer.

In an age when people can certainly overdo the holiday lights, I really was drawn to the simplicity of the paper bag luminarias that this house put out. I shot low and angled myself so the full moon was casting the dramatic shadow of the trees toward me.)

2. Get out there and play in the snow!

I still act like a kid when I see snowflakes falling. I can’t sled as fast as I used to but the snow adds such an added dimension to both day and night images—you have to shoot it!

Obviously be careful with your gear if you are shooting while it is snowing. Either have an umbrella or a camera/lens wrap with you to protect your equipment from getting too wet.

A few ideas:

• If the snow isn’t blowing too badly, shoot under an awning of a house that offers protection. Set up a time-lapse that shows the snow accumulating around the environs.
• Try to freeze the snow with flash as well as play with shorter exposures like 1/4-second to 2 seconds to create more confetti-like snow.
• Once the snow stops falling, head out to the park ASAP to try to capture some pristine snow -covered scenes. That fresh snow can add white-sand-dune-like surreality to an otherwise normal place. Shoot at a low angle to emphasize that rolling blanket of snow.
• Look for animal or human footprints and compose them to tell more of a story.
• Remember to overexpose by 1 to 1 1/2 stops to properly capture the white snow—otherwise our camera meters will turn the snow gray.

One of my all-time favorite snow scenes. Shot with a point-and-shoot camera as I came out of the subway in NYC. I stayed under the awning and leaned against the wall, turning myself into a tripod. I put the camera on burst mode and shot exposures between 1/4-second and 1 second. Of the 50-plus frames I took, 6 or 7 were sharp enough to use, with this one being the winner. The person and the umbrella became the final pieces to the composition.

3. Be more productive

The biggest reason I love the winter is because I can start shooting night scenes earlier and still go to bed at a reasonable time! With the sun setting around 5 p.m. for most of the continental United States, you can skip out of work early and do a quick 1- to 2-hour shoot and still be home for dinner with the family!

Or plan longer/weekend shoots with friends where you can really take advantage of the time. If you are comfortable with your night skills, bring two kits and be incredibly productive in the field! The ultimate would be to visit Alaska between December and February and have 20 hours of night photography per day!

I went out to Central Park with Chris Nicholson last year after the NYC blizzard. It was hard to find many snow scenes that weren’t walked through but I loved this classic shot of the San Remo building reinterpreted with the trodden snow, blowing clouds and city night lights. And we were both home in plenty of time to get a full night's sleep!

4. Keep warm and safe

The No. 1 reason most people don’t like to photograph in the winter is the cold. Add the cooler nighttime temperatures and you have nixed probably 80 percent of photographers, if not more.

But shooting in winter doesn’t need to be a physically miserable experience. Bundle up with layers, and wear wool instead of cotton.  The former will wick the sweat off your body. I’m a big fan of Smartwool products, especially for socks and a base layer.

Also, protect extremities like your feet and fingers—they get colder first. We just started using these amazing new Vallerret photography gloves. They are made in Norway and have a pocket to place hand warmers to ensure you can keep on clicking no matter what the temperature!

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Whatever gloves you use, bring several hand warmers that you can put inside for added warmth.

Boots that have a great tread are also important. You don’t want to slip on ice and take a spill. Walk carefully and use your tripod as a walking stick if need be—without the camera on it of course! And if you’ll be working around a lot of ice, Chris Nicholson swears by Ice Trekkers to keep you on your feet and your gear off the ground.

5. Experience the northern lights!

Summers have lighting storms and tumultuous thunderstorms, but the most spiritual and jaw-dropping weather phenomenon to photograph are the aurora borealis, or northern lights. It’s definitely on most people’s “bucket list,” and rightly so!

However, the northern lights are difficult to predict and of course generally located in the colder regions of the Arctic Circle. Alaska is probably the easiest location for most Americans to find the phenomenon, but you’ll still want to travel a good distance from Anchorage to really experience them at their best.

I’m a big fan of the northern Scandinavian region that includes Norway, Sweden and Finland. The fjords and Lofoten Islands in Norway offer incredible landscapes and water for the northern lights to reflect and bounce off. Don’t forget the trending glass igloos where you can stay indoors and watch the dancing green fairies in the comfort of your bed all night long!

Iceland is a close second and definitely has plenty of epic landscapes, but because it is located on the Gulf Stream, a lot of weather and clouds can cover the night skies. The Arctic Circle has fewer weather patterns and offers a reliable amount of crisp and clear nights throughout the winter months.

A big misnomer about the auroras is that they can be photographed only during a new moon. In reality, the lights are definitely bright enough to shoot and see under a full moon, plus you get the benefit of the moon lighting your foreground! If you shoot the auroras only under a new moon, you will have a lot of the same shots—silhouetted foregrounds and vibrant northern lights. I’d rather shoot during a partial moon—so I get some silhouettes, some light painting and some moonlit scenes at different times of the night.

The full moon rising with the aurora borealis dancing all around it—proof that you can shoot the northern lights during a full moon. ‘Nuff said.

So throw another log on the fire and layer up for a productive winter wonderland. And remember, there’s a bonus; This is the best season to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate after a long night out exploring!

Gabriel Biderman 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

Any Time of Year, A Great Idea: Giving Back to America's Best Idea

2016 was a great year for the national parks. The centennial really put the parks back into the minds of Americans, resulting in increased visitation and awareness. For more information, see the State of Utah's “Mighty 5” national television ads promoting their national parks, or the Suburu “What We Leave Behind” ad campaign, or the REI “Centennial Adventure” outreach, or the explosion of the Chimani park-guide apps, or the yearlong coverage of parks by National Geographic, or the serial “On the Trail” features on "CBS Sunday Morning," or the sudden popularity of the TV show “Rock the Park.” Et al.

So I’m intrigued to see what 2017 brings. Will interest in the parks remain at these levels, or diminish as the glow of the centennial subsides?

And what will the ramifications be? This year’s record attendance also produced some wears and tears, something the parks already had enough of before. The uptick in visitor fees may help pay for some of that maintenance and facilities backlog, but will next year’s probable downtick create an even greater shortfall for an already cash-strapped park system?

Who wouldn't want to help protect a view over heaven? Olympic National Park, © 2016 Chris Nicholson.

Another thought, which despite first appearance, I promise is related to the first: As national park photographers, as nature photographers, we sure do owe something to these wonderful places. They are our subject, our inspiration, our muse. As such, we should feel proud of them. We should feel protective of them. And we should feel an obligation to leave them better places than we found them, to ensure that they can be our muse again, and that they can inspire future generations of artists in our stead.

But how can we do this, aside from leaving only footprints (and hopefully not even those)?

Well, there certainly are means to do so. So as the old year winds down and we enter this season of giving and of giving back, I made a list of ways that we, as photographers, as lovers of these landscapes and wildernesses (and, of course, the pristine night skies that canopy them), can help support the national parks now and for the years and decades to come.

One way is to support the organizations dedicated to the cause of preserving these wild spaces. That support could be financial, but it could also be time volunteered, or it could be the creation of intellectual property (e.g., in our case, photography). Here are a few organizations to consider:

National Park Foundation

Chartered by Congress in 1967, the National Park Foundation is the official charitable partner of the National Park Service. The foundation raises private funds to support conservation and preservation efforts, to spread the word about the parks, and to inspire young Americans to learn to love these lands too. They also have a great free email newsletter that features articles about the parks. www.nationalparks.org

National Parks Conservation Association

These folks have been at it for a while, long enough to start getting ready to celebrate their own centennial. Founded in 1919, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) has been a strong and independent voice supporting our country’s greatest idea. Their efforts range from in-park support to legal defenses to assist public lands to lobbying for pro-parks policy and legislation in Washington, D.C.  They also publish the excellent National Parks magazine, a subscription to which is a benefit of becoming a member. www.npca.org

NPCA volunteers work to remove fencing near the western entrance of Yellowstone National Park to allow pronghorn antelope to reestablish historic migration routes. Photo courtesy of the National Park Conservation Association.

National Park Trust

The National Park Trust is dedicated to land acquisition and preservation, along with conservation projects in 45,000 acres of public lands in 33 states. Perhaps more importantly, they also work to cultivate a love of the parks in the youngest generation, through two national youth programs, the Buddy Bison school program and Kids to Parks Day—because, as they say, “kids need parks and parks need kids.” www.parktrust.org

In Texas' Big Thicket National Preserve, Ranger Alex Halbrook leads and teaches school children who are part of the NPT's Buddy Bison program. The educational outreach program provides parks, wilderness and STEM opportunities to K8 kids in more than 60 schools across the U.S. Photo courtesy of the National Park Trust.

Sierra Club

Founded by noted naturalist (and meme star) John Muir, and staunchly supported by Ansel Adams, the Sierra Club is certainly one of the oldest (perhaps the oldest) group supporting the preservation of the wild. They also claim to be the nation’s largest grassroots environmental organization, with 2.4 million members and supporters. They help protect over 250 million acres of wilderness, host over 20,000 outings and events per year, and their reach and government lobbying power is well respected. www.sierraclub.org

Friends of Parks Associations

Most (if not all) of the parks are associated with a local organization that supports that specific park. These tend to be the groups that benefit from merchandise sales at the park gift shops, and the ones that get their hands dirty helping to blaze trails, or restore plantlife environments, and so on. Examples include the Yellowstone Forever, Conservancy of Cuyahoga Valley National Park and Friends of Big Bend National Park. If you live near a national park, or frequent a specific one, orhave an affinity for a specific park for whatever reason, these micro-organizations are a great place to start helping. For info on the many that exist, see the Friends Group Directory collated by the National Park Service.

Volunteers help with plantings at Glacier National Park. NPS photo by Jacob W. Frank.

Also, keep in mind that another way to help all or any of these organizations is to spread the word about them. These days we all have our own media reach, so can share the links and stories of these groups on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Congress

On the federal level, national parks have been underfunded for years—the reported maintenance and repair backlog is about $12 billion. Not only does that endanger the parks we have, but is also a good argument for not creating new parks, which is an unfortunate side effect.

How can you help with this, other than donating time and money to those organizations that try to help fill in the financial gaps? Write to your Congressperson to encourage the restoration of lost funding. Despite the massive list of deferred maintenance, in the first half of this decade the National Park Service budget was reduced by 12 percent, or $364 million. That’s understandable during cash-strapped economic periods, but surely in better times we, as a country, can start finding ways to recommit to this important shared resource.

(Along the same lines, the NPCA offers a "Guide for Meeting With Legislators," should you be fortunate enough to do so.)

Annual Pass

Buy an American the Beautiful pass even if you don't need it. If you travel to the parks a lot, the pass is a no-brainer—you’ll pay it off in about 3-4 visits. For one year, the pass garners you free entry to all national parks, national monuments, national historic sites, national wildlife refuges, national forests and grasslands, and all units managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That’s a lot of places. But even if you visit just one park per year, buying an annual pass contributes directly to the system, helping to support something you obviously care about.

Photography

Finally, you can consider donating photos or photography to the park. Anyone reading this knows the value of a good photograph. If donating your work is not your thing for business reasons, I totally understand that. But if you’re the type of photographer who picks, say, one organization to help out, then a park foundation or association is a worthy one to consider. A place like Yellowstone doesn’t need the photo help, but smaller parks with minimal budgets, staff and infrastructure may appreciate the gesture, as would nonprofits that genuinely try to reserve their cash for their causes.

I read something recently that encouraged people to think of the parks not as "federal lands," but rather as shared resources, as national treasures. I further that sentiment by suggesting that because we co-own these places, we're all responsible for helping to sustain them.

Chris Nicholson is the 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

Recapping Our Final Workshops of 2016: Arches and Death Valley

Winding down 2016 also means that National Parks at Night is winding down its first year. (Which seems odd, because we're already working on our third year.) Part of that winding down was running our final two workshops of 2016, at Arches National Park in Utah and Death Valley National Park in California.

Both workshops were a lot of fun and productive, with pristine night skies and beautiful scenery. Check out below for some details.

Arches National Park

November 15-19, 2016,
by Matt Hill

Fifteen creative souls joined Tim Cooper and I in Utah at Arches National Park. With experience levels ranging from first-time night photography shooters to advanced artisans of the night, they all tackled the iconic Arches landscapes with enthusiasm and great cheer.

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The workshop started directly after the supermoon, giving us more and more access to darkness and Milky Way as the workshop proceeded, while still giving some stunning lighting from the waning full moon.

We visited many of the breathtaking vistas in Arches: Park Avenue, Balanced Rock, The Windows, North/South Arch, Turret Arch, Double Arch, Landscape Arch, Pine Tree Arch and the coveted (and often crowded) Delicate Arch.

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The weather played nice—it was warmer than expected during the beginning of the workshop. And we had clear skies most nights, except for some pesky clouds here and there. But what's night photography without a little adversity, right?

The students were eager to hone their skills for star point and Milky Way shots, for light panting, and for star trails and star stacking. We covered all those topics and then worked on combining them, in groups and individually. We're certainly proud of our students' accomplishments, and from what we heard at the end of the workshop, so are they. Mission accomplished!

One of our favorite moments in the workshop is always the group show at the end. Everyone gets to see how they and their peers have grown during the workshop. Here is a look at their wonderful work as a video (slideshow available on the workshop page for larger views of the photos). Enjoy!

Death Valley National Park

November 15-19, 2016,
by Lance Keimig

Death Valley is one of the most famous, but least known of our National Parks. It’s famous for being the hottest place on Earth, for having the lowest elevation in the U.S., and of course for the colorful name that leads one to think of a dying man lost in the desert sun, crawling across the desert in search of water only to find mirages, cacti and rattlesnakes.

Death Valley is not so well known simply because of the sheer scale of the park, and the incredible diversity of flora, fauna, geology and weather to be found there. Most people visit for a few days or a week, which is barely enough time to scratch the surface of this incredible wilderness in the Great Basin near the California-Nevada border.

I’ve been visiting Death Valley regularly for the last six or seven years, and have taught a couple of night photography workshops there before, but still have much to learn about and see in the largest of our national parks.

Using my Coast Portland focusing light on the Death Valley salt pans a couple of nights before the workshop began. Also note my Manfrotto Series 1 Traveler tripod, my Nikon D750 and Peak Design Everyday Backpack. Four sponsors in one photo, totally unplanned! See, we really do use this stuff! Photo by Chris Nicholson.

Fellow instructor Chris Nicholson spent a couple of days with me a year ago during my previous Death Valley workshop, but this was our first time teaching together. We arrived a few days early to scout locations, to get acclimated and to plan our strategy for the week. We feel that those few days before a workshop spent in a park are always critical to making the experience as good as it can be for the participants. It gives us a chance to get into the groove of working together and also to match the rhythm of place itself. Of course, this little bit of extra time is our opportunity to shoot for ourselves, and we did just that.

As with most of our workshops, we had a mixture of alumni and new faces, advanced photographers and novices. What was rather unusual was that we had only three women out of 15 participants. It was, however, a great group and everyone got along well and worked together to make the most of our experiences in the park.

We had planned for this workshop to begin right after the full moon so that we had bright moonlight at the beginning and increasingly dark skies toward the end as our group became more confident.

On the first night of the workshop, we hiked into a canyon to photograph the enormous Natural Bridge, which was a great place to start. It also worked out to be a fitting consolation prize for one of our group who had wanted to attend the Arches workshop but couldn’t sign up before it sold out!

After a few hours in the canyon, we ventured out into Badwater Basin for wide-open skies with salt flats in the foreground and mountains on the horizon. Recent rains had dissolved most of the famed geometric patterns in the salt pans, but new ones had already begun to form, and we spent time seeking them out.

We had planned to visit the Mesquite Sand Dunes on the second night, but the wind kicked up and made it impossible to go out to the dunes. Instead, we followed the Badlands Loop trail into the canyon below Zabriskie Point, and the group worked collaboratively to great success on light painting images. In the end the change of plans worked out perfectly. Chris and I had scouted off-the-beaten-path access to the dunes, but despite that, there had still been quite a few footprints—the No. 1 enemy of the photographer working with a sandy landscape. But the wind that blew in on the second night cleaned the dunes of every single footprint and dissipated by the next morning, leaving us pristine dunes to photograph on the third night. We couldn’t help but leave a few footprints behind, but did our best to walk in each other’s tracks.

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On the fourth night, we traveled just outside park boundaries to Rhyolite ghost town, just across the border in Nevada. Rhyolite is always a great location for workshops, as the remaining buildings are scattered over a large area, making it easy for the group to spread out and keep out of each other’s way. After making what I think is the best workshop group photo ever (above), we broke up into small groups, and happily spent the night among the ruins.

On or last day, we had our final presentations (below) and then a group lunch at the Furnace Creek Inn. That night, we went to the flats south of Salt Creek, which was a similar location to Badwater, but with some spots of shallow water that could be framed to reflect the starry sky.

By this time of the week the sky was completely dark, as there was no sign of the moon until quite late. Despite it being November, we were still able to photograph the tail of the Milky Way, which was a highlight for many in the group. Later we went to the Furnace Creek area to photograph the surrounds in the soft glow of the lights of the village reflected off of the landscape—an eerie scene that makes this one of my favorite places to photograph in the park.

There are many great locations that we didn’t get to—Racetrack Playa, the charcoal kilns, Ubehebe Crater and the higher elevations in the western side of the park. Somehow, I’m sure that most of our group will find their way back to Death Valley again someday to further their explorations.

Death Valley National Park Night Photography Workshop Student Slideshow ** This slideshow showcases the work of 15 students with a wide range of experience in night photography as they learned more about shooting the night sky and stunning landscapes of Arches National Park in Utah.

Thank you to the perk providers

We owe a special thanks to our partners for how they helped the attendees of both workshops, supporting our mission to share and capture the beauty of national parks (at night!). Nikon sent a generous loaner package of gear for attendees to use, including D5's, D750's, D810A's and lenses ranging from the 10.5mm to the 16mm to the 20mm to the 14-24mm (all among our very favorites for night-sky work).

Coast Portland generously supplied flashlights for all attendees to own and love. X-Rite supplied an i1 Display Pro to profile and calibrate our teaching laptops and projectors. Digital Silver Imaging provided a set of sample prints of NPAN instructor photos for students to view. TetherTools sent along a Case Relay System which Matt used to capture many timelapses and star stacks. And Manfrotto was along too, supporting all of the instructors' cameras.

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Nikon D5, D750, D810A and D500 bodies, plus AF fisheye-Nikkor 16mm f/2.8d, AF DX fisheye-Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8, AF-S Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8g ED, PC-E Nikkor 24mm f/3.5d ED, AF-S Nikkor 24mm f/1.4g ED, and AF-S Nikkor 20mm f/1.8g ED

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Tim and Matt a full of glee at Double Arch

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Chris using his Coast HP7R to focus on some rock formations in Death Valley's Furnace Creek area. Shooting with a Nikon F5 on his Gitzo 3541L tripodS.

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Matt rocking a Coast HP7R and a Peak Design Everyday Backpack 30L on the trail to Landscape Arch.

See more about Matt's photography, art, workshops and writing at MattHillArt.com. Follow Matt on Twitter Instagram Facebook.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT