It’s that time again. The year is winding down, wrapping up, and we look back on all of the things we did that we are proud of, and perhaps the things we didn’t do or places we didn’t go that are still on the bucket list. It’s a big world out there, with so many dark places to explore! Soon, as we turn the final calendar page, we’ll look ahead to the new year full of promise and opportunity, and of the many images waiting to be made.
Here at National Parks at Night, we have a tradition of looking back at a year’s worth of photos and picking our favorites to share. This also gives us a moment to reflect on how fortunate we are to be able to travel to such spectacular places with you, and to remember that the world is full of beauty and wonder.
We’ve had a banger for a year. We led 22 workshops and tours, explored nine U.S. national parks visited eight islands, led seven international photo expeditions, and planned a full schedule of both new and favorite destinations for 2024.
For now, as we wrap up and wind down the current year, we hope you’ll enjoy seeing our favorite images. And then we hope you’ll take a moment or two to find and share your own favorites from 2023 with us.
Chris Nicholson
Voyageurs National Park
Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Four stacked exposures shot at 4 minutes, f/4, ISO 800.
A favorite photo is not necessarily a best photo. This is a fact I run into annually, when I have to choose and write about my favorite two night photos of the year.
Artistically and technically, I think this photo is good, but it wouldn’t end up in my portfolio. I didn’t have an amazing foreground to work with—just the shape of the tree line at the water’s edge, and the glass-surface reflection of pristine dark skies. I worked with what I had, most of which was technique.
But I once heard a photographer say, “A good photograph shouldn’t be of something, it should be about something.” With that in mind, I tell you that while this photo is of trees and water and stars, it’s about something else: It’s about time with my 10-year-old daughter.
This past summer Maggie and I ventured to Minnesota to explore Voyageurs National Park. I rented a houseboat called Northern Lite, and we spent five days cruising the lakes and four nights sleeping on the water. We saw eagles and loons, otters and fish, sunrises and sunsets—and yes, stars and darkness. On the first night, she walked off the boat and onto the sand, chatting as usual, when she looked up, paused mid-sentence and said, “Whoa! Is that the Milky Way?!” Her joy practically lit up the lake.
This photo is about all of those things. It’s also about our last evening of the trip. In late afternoon we secured the boat to the shore of Grassy Bay. We changed into our swimsuits and jumped off the stern to swim in the cool waters of the cove. We made a steak dinner, then built a fire on the beach for roasting marshmallows. We played a trivia game inside, and brought the flashlight outside to search the shallows for crayfish and frogs and leeches.
The next morning, as the sun rose and wicked the mist off the water, I captained us out of the park and back to the marina, smiling, feeling great, knowing I’d just finished one of the best weeks of my life—and hoping that Maggie will someday look back and feel the same.
So when I look at this photo now, what I see is the tree line that sheltered our boat, the very water we swam in, the stars that shined while we slept—and the peace of knowing that Maggie and I shared a wonderful slice of our lives together. And that’s my favorite.
Joshua Tree National Park
Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Three focus-stacked, blended exposures shot at 5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 6400 (foreground); 5 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 6400 (middleground); and 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400 (background).
I love Joshua Tree National Park. I love the trees, I love the rock formations. But after a week of shooting there this fall—and after shooting there for about the fifth time in 5 years—I was feeling done with yuccas and boulders. So on my last day of the trip I wandered off looking for something different. While scouting at the end of daylight, I found this desert wildflower (a datura, specifically) tucked in a narrow valley, blooming peacefully along the trail. I knew I needed to shoot it under the night sky.
I hung around the spot for a bit, thinking through what I wanted to do, then I ate my sandwich dinner while sitting on a stone next to the flower, waiting for conditions to be right.
To get the composition I desired, I needed to get the lens only about a foot from the bloom, which meant I wouldn’t have enough depth of field for sharp stars. I also knew that once twilight was over, the valley would be void of light, leaving nothing to illuminate the main subject.
To solve these problems, I combined two techniques: I shot for both a focus stack and a starlight blend. The raw materials involved three frames, with separate focus points and exposures for the foreground, the middleground and the background. Once home I ran them all through AI Denoise in Lightroom, then blended each in Photoshop to create the final image.
Gabriel Biderman
Tongariki Night Skies, Rapa Nui
Astro-modified Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400. (Swipe to reveal the names of the celestial bodies in this image.)
Several dreams came true this year, with the most vivid being a visit to Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
I was once a young boy who loved mythology and ancient history, and that’s when I first saw the mysterious moai in a National Geographic magazine. I wanted to be an archaeologist and read as much as I could about moai, which unfortunately wasn’t much. But the seed was planted and the desire to one day stand among them never left me. When I found out we had access to the moai at night, under the southern stars, well, the trip couldn’t come quick enough!
We typically plan our Easter Island night photography tours for February, which gives us the clearest skies. However, at that time of year the core of the Milky Way isn’t visible until 1 or 2 hours before morning twilight. That’s not too much of an issue, as each night we get to see all the stars we never see in the Northern Hemisphere—and to be honest, I feel lost in the sky. It’s absolutely amazing. I feel like a young explorer, literally connecting the dots and seeing vivid nebulas and the Magellanic Clouds with my naked eye.
But remember, we still need a good foreground to balance the story. To me, nothing beats the moai for the epic foreground to connect to the constellations.
I shot this image at one of the most visited sites, Tongariki. We arrived at 4 a.m. and had about 2 hours to photograph the southern tail and core of the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, the Carina Nebula and more.
I’m so addicted to the southern skies and can’t wait to dip south of the equator again and again!
Highland Point Lighthouse, Cape Cod
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S lens at 22mm. 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.
Sometimes our best photos are ones closer to home. I was lucky enough to travel all over the world this year, but one of the workshops I was looking forward to most was Lighthouses of Cape Cod. It was a nostalgic trip for me, as I’d spent life on the Cape from age 4 through grade 4. Lighthouses were aplenty, and, like fried clams, they are the norm in the area.
Photographing lighthouses is tricky, and it requires different capture and processing techniques to master in order to truly capture the essence of one at night. One technique we were trying to incorporate was using tilt-shift lenses to get the correct perspective of these architectural delights. Shot incorrectly, many of these towers can look like the Leaning Lighthouse of Pisa. There are ways to “straighten your buildings” in post, but we instead focused on either shooting it correctly with a tilt-shift lens or shooting it as straight as we could with our regular lenses.
This photograph of Highland Point Lighthouse was my last shot of the night. I was using a Nikon 19mm tilt-shift for a long exposure on the other side of the lighthouse, so I went hunting for another angle with my 14-24mm, which is when I came across this idea.
While this shot might not have a dramatic wow factor, it stuck with me while assessing my best shots of 2023. Everything just aligns nicely. I treated my 14-24mm lens like a tilt shift and didn’t angle it up or down, which kept distortion to a minimum. I got closer and filled the frame with the fence and was very specific with where I cropped in on the house.
The beam of this lighthouse was created by including two flashes of the light during a 10-second exposure. To me, it looks like a perfect cover shot of a lighthouse at night that you would see in a magazine. I’m looking forward to photographing more lighthouses on the cape in 2024, when we run our Lighthouses of Martha’s Vineyard workshop!
Lance Keimig
Three Moai, Rano Rakaru, Rapa Nui
Nikon D780 with a Sigma 24mm f/1.4 lens, lit with two Luxli Fiddle LED panels. 20 seconds , f/2.8, ISO 12,800.
I was fortunate to begin my year with two back-to-back tours on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island––one with Gabe and one with Matt. It’s such a special place, and having nighttime access to the moai statues is a real privilege. Having multiple nights to experience and photograph the quarry where the statues were carved was a dream come true. It’s the best location on the island for photography because of the sheer number of moai and the variation in the terrain.
The challenging aspect of photographing at Ranorakaru is that visitors are confined to a series of narrow trails due to the fragile nature of this archeological site. This makes for limited composition and lighting opportunities.
In this particular scene, there was a very limited angle that allowed me to align the three moai in such a way that they did not overlap each other and still be able to illuminate them effectively. To light the two figures in the foreground, I placed a Luxli Fiddle with a grid attachment on a stand downhill and camera left. I placed a second Fiddle further along the trail to light the third moai, also with a grid and tilted up to avoid spilling the light on the ground in front of the statue. The crescent moon was rising in the background and outside of the left part of the frame, and it provided wonderful illumination for the clouds that would have otherwise deadened the sky.
I also confess to using Generative Fill in Photoshop to remove the low railings along the path in the lower left portion of the frame. They were in shadow, but I still found them a distracting modern anachronism that took away from the feeling I wanted to create with the image. AI Denoise enabled me to use ISO 12,800 with relative impunity in this very dark environment with virtually no light pollution. I’m a nervous skeptic when it comes to most things AI (Beware the Cylons), but it has been a tremendous boon for photographers this year.
The Pleiades from Hurricane Ridge on a Smoky Night, Olympic National Park
Nikon D780 with a Sigma 24mm f/1.4 lens. 13 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.
During our September workshop in Olympic National Park, we visited Hurricane Ridge twice. The wildfire smoke was so thick on the first night that we went back down to sea level before the sky was even dark. On the second night the winds shifted, and the air was mostly clear on the ridge, but as we climbed the trail to the top of Hurricane Hill, the wind shifted once more and smoke filled the valleys to the north and west.
I’d been looking forward to returning to Olympic since Chris and I did a backpacking workshop to Shi Shi Beach in 2018. I was mostly excited about photographing the sea stacks on the beaches, so it’s ironic that my favorite image from the trip is from the mountains high above the Pacific.
The execution of the image was straightforward. There was no moon, but the last lingering twilight and we did have some light pollution from the towns of Sequim and Port Townsend to the northeast. I kept the shutter speed to 13 seconds to avoid stars trailing with the 24mm lens. I stopped down to f/2.8 but I wish I had stopped down a bit more and gone with a higher ISO.
The combination of the smoke and the light in the sky made for some great soft colors, and the magnificent star cluster known as the Pleiades was perfectly positioned to juxtapose against the fir trees in the foreground. Tennyson referred to the Pleiades as a “swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid” and that description was never more apt than on that smoky night in the Olympics. Sometimes the simplest of images can be the most rewarding.
Matt Hill
Meteors Over High Dune, Great Sand Dunes National Park
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 24mm. Two frames shot at 5 minutes, f/2.8, ISO 800, stitched in PTGUI Pro (foreground), blended with 32 frames shot at 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400, stacked and masked in Photoshop (meteors).
In August 2023 I ascended to High Dune within Great Sand Dunes National Park. This was my fifth visit to the park and my holy grail was to make a meteor shower composite over the sand dune field.
Due to adverse weather conditions during the meteor shower peak, we could not climb the dunes as a group, and that made me sad. But keep in mind it’s an 800-foot uphill slog on sand, which begins at 8,000 feet of elevation. Some were relieved.
After the workshop ended, I gave it a shot solo. The weather was promising, and I packed as lightly as possible. I brought my Novoflex Triobalance and a Novoflex BasicPod hiking kit, plus 1.5 gallons of water, my panorama rig, and two cameras and two lenses.
For this image I made a two-panel vertorama—one panel predominantly of the dunes and the other of the sky, both during twilight. The lights from below are campers having a small but very fun party.
Much to my chagrin, the quantity of meteors that evening was not nearly as great as the night of the peak. So I took Tim’s advice and composited in the sky and meteors from the night of the peak. All these images were photographed in the same direction using the same technique and lens.
I do wish I could have shot it all on the same night, but you can choose to make the best of variables out of your control. This became the composite I’ve been dreaming of making.
Ranu Kau Caldera, Rapa Nui
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 at 24mm. 17 frames shot at 10 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800, stitched in two rows using PTGUI Pro.
When I began earnestly making panoramas, it was because the complexity of the method thrilled me. Nowadays I use the methods as means to achieve visual goals, and especially for natural perspective control for wider fields of view.
I don’t mind if someone notices it’s a panorama, but I don’t want them to be distracted by the method. With this in mind, here is a 17-image panorama composite that covers about 220 degrees of width and about 100 degrees of height. I use a 24mm lens when I want a natural rendition and have the time to make a multi-row pano sweep, which in this case was an ironic miscalculation my part because I ended up having only one chance at this because of the weather.
The location is Rano Kau caldera on the island of Rapa Nui. We got up at 3 a.m. to attempt this Milky Way bend over the crater—and got rained out. The second attempt was our last chance. We got lucky in between rainstorms and grabbed this moody moment of power and grace. I had to work fast. And I got this one mosaic captured before we got wet again.
I enjoy this image so much that I see it every day as a metal print from Bay Photo Lab.
Tim Cooper
Aurora, Flakstadoya, Norway
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens at 15mm. 2 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 6400.
The Lofoten archipelago is one my favorite landscapes in the world. I am completely enamored with this unique island chain located in northern Norway. The jagged and picture-perfect peaks here rise thousands of feet nearly straight up from the bays and inlets, and this rugged and striking landscape has produced more than its fair share of its iconic images. Especially in winter.
As I look back on the images I made in 2023, this one stands out as a favorite. Chasing the aurora borealis is always fun, and even a mediocre display of light is still exciting. This night Matt and I were scouting the island of Flakstadoya, and the evening’s display was phenomenal. In typical fashion, Matt and I stood nearly next to each another while capturing very different takes of the sky and landscape.
Like scent and sound, pictures can produce very strong memory recall. Every time I see this image I am transported back to that magical night. But that is not the only reason it’s one of my favorites.
This image also fulfills one of the goals I strive for in all my landscape photographs: capturing a sense of place. While it’s an easy concept to discuss, and to understand, I’ve found that I fail more often than I would like in trying to convey my impression of a place. I feel this image is one of my few that truly captures the essence of Lofoten. Or at least the way that I romantically see and remember this stunning island chain.
Burishoole Abbey, County Mayo, Ireland
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, lit with a Coast HP7R flashlight. Seven 4 minute exposures for star trails and four 4 minute exposures for light painting. All exposures at f/4, ISO 100.
Light painting has always been my favorite part of night photography. Creating a scene that has never existed before is thrilling. It’s starting with a nearly blank canvas. It’s a challenge. A real challenge.
Here at Burishoole Abbey in Ireland, I was determined. Lance and I had visited and photographed the abbey before and he created a fantastic image of this section that I had always admired. On this visit I was eager to interpret the same scene in my own way.
My goal was to have the tombstones seemingly glow from within while highlighting the texture of the abbey’s stone work and the wrought iron fence in the foreground. Many different angles of light would be required to achieve this look. It would take a bunch of experimenting. It would be—again, challenging.
In the end it took over 15 attempts just to determine the basic light angles and duration of flashlight illumination for those separate angles. Once I felt confident, I needed another four separate exposures lasting a minute each to paint all of the aspects of the scene I wanted to highlight.
Due to the time needed to inspect and analyze the light painting between exposures, the star trails from my light painting frames wouldn’t stack properly. So, leaving my tripod in place, I shot another seven frames at the same exposure of 4 minutes, f/4 to create the star trail frames for the final stack.
All in all, the entire scene took around 1.5 to 2 hours of time. That was 2 hours of a blissful “no-mind” state that night photography can often produce. I love light painting.
Your Turn
What was your favorite night photograph of 2023? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.
Then … enjoy winding down 2023 and winding up 2024. There’s lot of night-seizing to be had!
