Ready for a Virtual Adventure? Announcing the 2024 Night Photo Summit!

We are thrilled to announce the 2024 Night Photo Summit!

This fourth annual virtual conference spans 3 days and highlights what’s new and exciting in the intersecting worlds of night photography, national parks and dark skies.

Since 2021 the summit has evolved and grown to gather photographers, artists, authors and astronomers from around the globe to share their passion for all things nocturnal.

The Night Photo Summit is here to scratch your itch, and promises education, inspiration and just plain fun. The nights may be cold now, and the Milky Way core might be hiding below the horizon, but with that comes the promise of a not-too-distant spring and the promise of new opportunities to get back out there and make stellar images.

Until then, we’re here with a cadre of new speakers and new topics to whet your appetite and to sow new ideas for the coming year. The summit is also a great way to connect with old friends and to make new ones, with multiple opportunities to network and socialize with both speakers and attendees.

Join us February 2-4, 2024, to experience 3 days of dynamic presentations from more than 35 luminaries who will light up your nights and your imagination.

SPEAKERS

We have felt immensely blessed to be able to work with so many top-notch speakers for the summit, and this year is no different. In addition to a few returning presenters, attendees will get to learn from and interact with 19 inspiring new voices.

The 2024 speakers include Sean Bagshaw, Royce Bair, Benjamin Barakat, Yuri Beletsky, Gabriel Biderman, Forest Chaput de Saintonge, Tim Cooper, Joshua Cripps, Alan Dyer, Daniel Freeman, Michael Frye, Kim Henry, Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn, Matt Hill, Melissa Kaelin, Marybeth Kiczenski, Lance Keimig, Tim Little, Pete Mauney, Andrew McCarthy, Brandon Nesbitt, Chris Nicholson, Eric Pare, Jessica Rojas, Jess Santos, Mike Shaw, Anthony Sleiman, Chris Smith, Babak Tafreshi, Adam Woodworth and Dan Zafra, with more to be announced in the next couple of weeks.

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SESSIONS

This year’s summit features sessions on planning extraordinary images, shooting with drones at night, using weather apps and exploring urban night photography, as well as (of course) techniques including image capture, different ways of working with moonlight and star trails, black and white at night, post-processing and more.

There are classes for all levels, including a series of five pre-recorded presentations that cover all the fundamentals of night photography.

There are intermediate and advanced level courses, as well as instructive, inspirational and informative sessions covering a wide range of topics. All in all, the programming totals over 45 hours of learning and virtual adventure.

Sponsors & Giveaways

We are thrilled to announce that several sponsors are already on board! B&H Photo, Nightscaper Photo Conference, Sigma, Spencer’s Camera, Calibrite, Novoflex, Acratech, Chimani and Focus on Stars are raring to go, soon to be joined by more!

Each and every sponsor is offering giveaways to be randomly awarded at the summit’s final party. More info on that to come!

How to Join Us

If you’re into night photography, or if you want to get into it, this is an event you absolutely do not want to miss.

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Tickets are $399, and include:

• 3 days, more than 35 instructors, over 45 hours of inspiration, instruction and fun

• a Fundamentals series of video classes for newbies or anyone who wants a refresher

• 1 year of access to re-watch all of the courses

• a live image review session

• exclusive glow-in-the-dark summit T-shirt

• personal access to product experts from manufacturers and developers sponsoring the event

• giveaways throughout the duration of the summit

• an unprecedented opportunity to connect with like-minded photographers passionate about the night

Moreover, if you purchase your ticket by January 13 at 2 p.m. EST, you’ll get your shirt and a swag bag before the summit!

(Note: shirts and swag bags will be mailed only to attendees with U.S. addresses, but we may be able to help those from other countries too. We’ll be in touch with more info after you register.)

Registration is available now, so sign up today and mark your calendars to join National Parks at Night for the world’s fourth online Night Photo Summit!

JOIN US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

As if all of that is not enough, we’ll be releasing plenty more information over the next few weeks. To stay tuned in to it all, we invite you to follow the summit social media accounts on:

• Instagram: @nightphotosummit

• Facebook: @nightphotosummit

• X: @nightsummit

We are very much looking forward to seeing you online next month. In the meantime, feel free to ask us any questions via the social media accounts above, in the comments below, or through the Night Photo Summit webpage.

Seize the night … online!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Night Grooves: Our Favorite Photos of 2023

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.

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Chris Nicholson

Voyageurs National Park

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Guiding the Light: Our Friend Improves Luxli LED Panels

Since the moment they were created and released, we have been quite partial to the Luxli Fiddle and Viola LED light panels, for both light painting and Low-Level Lighting. We feel that Luxli panels are the tools that offer the most precise control over added lighting for the type of night photography that we do.

However, until recently, that precision was mostly about the brightness and color temperature of the illumination. Photographers also need to be able to control light diffusion and spill. Originally Luxli provided a means for the former, in the form of diffusion screens that spread their already wide light sources even wider. Then last year Luxli introduced a grid attachment that narrowed the spread of the light from the Fiddle by about half and reduced the light intensity by about a third.

The Story

Fast forward to August 2023, and our 100th workshop celebration in New York City, which was attended by Josh Fischer from Luxli, as well as our good friend Jeff McCrum.

Josh is our primary contact at Luxli, and the person who goes to bat for us when we have feature requests or suggestions. It’s a tough job, as the kind of work we do with Luxli lights is quite different from what they were originally designed for, and the features that are important for us are not even on the radar of most people who buy them. (Not many videographers use the lights at 1 percent brightness, let alone .1 percent!)

Jeff is a New Jersey-based lighting designer for Fisher Dachs Associates, one of the world’s leading theater planning and design consultants. He’s also an avid night photographer. Most of us at National Parks at Night have known him for a long time––I first met Jeff the same day that I first met Matt at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery when I was leading a workshop there, years before the birth of NPAN.

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Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, Birmingham, Alabama. Lit with a flashlight raked across the rear wall from camera left, as well as by three Luxli Fiddle panels with grids. The one illuminating the wheel in the lower right corner has Jeff’s tighter grid. Nikon D780 with an Olympus Zuiko 24mm f/3.5 shift lens. 60 seconds, f/11, ISO 400.

At our celebration in New York, I was chatting with Jeff when Josh came over to say hello. We talked about the Fiddle, and how much we (NPAN) appreciated the new grid, but that we had some ideas about how to improve it. I explained that we often used Cinefoil or Blackwrap to try to further tighten the beam of light, but that it wasn’t easy to achieve the desired effect.

I asked Josh if Luxli would consider making a tighter grid that narrowed the light beam even more. Josh seemed receptive to the idea, and said he would share our suggestion with the engineers. Encouraged, I mentioned another issue we’ve experienced with the fiddle: the power switch being inadvertently activated in the camera bag, which not only leads to unexpected dead batteries but is also a potential safety issue due to heat buildup.

I didn’t give the conversation much further thought until I received a mysterious package in the mail from Jeff about 5 or 6 weeks later.

Upon opening the package, I was stunned to find a redesigned Luxli Fiddle grid that addressed exactly the issue I had spoken with Josh about! It was thicker, with a deeper honeycomb grid, meaning the light beam from the Fiddle would be narrower and dimmer, both of which would be useful to night photographers. Moreover, the back side of Jeff’s grid extended to cover the edges of the light, which is a culprit of light leakage in the original grid. In short, Jeff had reverse-engineered the Luxli grid, and changed it in such a way that it was now tailored specifically for us night shooters.

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Figure 1.

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Figure 2.

The above examples show the light intensity and beam size with (from left to right) the Fiddle alone, the Luxli grid and the Lanceli grid. Figure 1 shows the light pointed up, and Figure 2 shows the light directed straight ahead. (Settings were the same for all images to show the light reduction as well as light distribution.)

According to Jeff, the Fiddle by itself has a 102-degree light spread. The Luxli grid reduces the light output by 23 percent and limits the light spread to 58 degrees. His version, which I’m both embarrassed and humbled to say is named the Lanceli, reduces the light output by 39 percent and brings the beam down to 36 degrees.

The loss of light is not a problem—because we work in dark conditions, we often use these LED panels at 1 percent power or less. The net effect is that with Jeff’s custom-built solution, we now have much more precise control over where the light falls, making it easier to isolate added light to a localized area or a small object in the scene. It’s another tool in the toolbox, and I’m glad to have the option to use either or both of these grids as different needs arise. As both grids are pure black, they have no impact on the color of the light.

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The Lanceli grid for the Luxli Fiddle.

The Lanceli grid was not the only thing in the package! I also found a small, strangely shaped piece of plastic that solves the problem of the Fiddle switch being inadvertently turned on in transit––the Luxli Switch Protector! This cleverly designed little gadget attaches securely and unobtrusively over the switch to ensure that it doesn’t get accidentally activated. Not only that, but it is made of glow-in-the-dark material, making it easy to find at the end of the night when you are packing up to go home.

If that wasn’t enough, Jeff also designed a grid system for the Luxli Viola, called the Hex Stack. Luxli does not make a grid for the Viola, so this is an entirely new product. As the name implies, the Hex Stack can be combined in multiples to further reduce the light spill by about 20 degrees per piece.

As with the Fiddle grid, the Hex Stack fully hides the edges of the light source by overlapping the outside of the fixture. Each piece added to the stack also decreases the intensity from the original output by about one stop. The Hex Stack is held solidly in place by sliding into a slot in the panel itself from either side.

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Lit with three Luxli Fiddle panels with grids. The one illuminating the round tank end in the lower center has Jeff’s tighter grid. Nikon D780 with an Olympus Zuiko 24mm f/3.5 shift lens. 60 seconds, f/11, ISO 400.

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Lit with two Luxli Fiddle panels. The one illuminating the wheel has Jeff’s tighter grid, and the one lighting the ground is unmodified. Nikon D780 with an Olympus Zuiko 24mm f/3.5 shift lens. 30 seconds, f/11, ISO 400.

Jeff was pretty nonchalant about the effort that he must have put into creating these tools, but they are incredibly well designed, durable and super-functional. Grids have been used to modify the light on studio strobes for decades, but creating one for an LED light unit that has over 100 individual emitters is a couple of orders of magnitude more complex. Each cell in the grid has to align precisely over an emitter in order to maximize both the effect and the output. All of these tools are made with a 3D printer using non-toxic PLA plastic.

Despite the name of the grid, Jeff didn’t make these tools for just my benefit. He’s sharing them with the night photography world! You can purchase the Lanceli (comes with a Fiddle Switch Protector) or the Hex Stack from Jeff’s website.

Much Ado About Lighting

Why is this a big deal, you might ask? Back in the day, when most light painting was done with a handheld flashlight––often one with a narrow, focused beam–– it was relatively easy to direct the light exactly where it was needed, even onto a small area in the scene. The challenge with flashlights is getting consistent, repeatable results, and not being able to see the cumulative effect of your lighting in real time. With Low-Level Lighting, using LED panels in fixed positions, both of those problems are solved, but the wider spread of the light beam makes it more difficult to get the light exactly where it’s needed, and nowhere else.

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This image takes advantage of two Luxli grids to control the warm light in the background and the cool light in the middle ground, and the tighter focus of the Lanceli grids on the left and right sides of the gear and framework that make up the focal point of the image. Nikon D780 with a Nikon 24-120mm f/4G lens at 50mm. 2 minutes, f/7.1, ISO 800.

Honeycomb grids, snoots and barn doors are all light modifiers designed for that purpose. We are fortunate to have the Luxli-designed grid that narrows the light beam by about 50 percent, and now the Lanceli grid that reduces the beam width to about one-third of the original width. The Hex Stack for the Viola is the only grid available for that light, and the ability to stack multiple units makes it super versatile. I should note that it’s useful to have both versions of the Luxli grid, as well as at least two of the stackable Viola grids to meet the needs of the situation at hand.

It’s been exciting to observe and participate in the birth of a new style of lighting over the last few years, and truly exciting that Luxli and other companies have stepped up with groundbreaking products we can use, even if they were not designed specifically for night photographers. On top of that, we have thoughtful and creative people like Jeff working to make these tools even better.

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Ready for Inspiration, Education and Fun? — Announcing the 3rd Annual Night Photo Summit

We are thrilled to announce the return of the Night Photo Summit!

Now in its third iteration, the Night Photo Summit is a 3-day virtual conference that celebrates everything night photography. Each year we aim to make it a little bigger, a little better, and to bring you even more opportunities to learn, to be entertained and (of course) to Seize The Night!

We know that there are many night photography enthusiasts out there who are looking to connect and learn, so we created the summit to exalt in the joys of our shared passion. Perhaps you’re hunkered down for the long cold winter, not able or ready to travel, but still keen to expand your knowledge and be better prepared for the coming Milky Way season. Maybe you’d like to learn a new technique to broaden your horizons, or simply long for that kick in the pants that a healthy dose of inspiration can provide.

The Night Photo Summit has all that covered––and then some.

Join us from February 3-5, 2023, to experience 3 days of dynamic presentations from 35-plus world-class photographers, authors, artists, astronomers, and national park and dark-sky activists.

Sessions and Speakers

This year’s summit features sessions on creativity, auroras, publishing photography books and lighthouses, as well as (of course) night photo techniques, including image capture, different ways of combining exposures, lighting, mobile night photography, post-processing and more.

There are classes for all levels, including a series of five recorded presentations that cover all the fundamentals of night photography. You’ll have access to those before the summit begins if you’d like a refresher, or to get you up to speed if you are just getting started in night photography.

There are intermediate and advanced level courses, as well as instructive, inspirational and informative sessions covering a wide range of topics. All in all, the programming totals over 45 hours of learning and virtual adventure.

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Our incredible lineup of speakers and talks includes:

• Albert Dros: “Cities Come to Life After Sunset”

• Alyn Wallace: “Night Sky Wonders”

• Chris Nicholson: “Photographing Moonlight”

• David Zapatka: “USA Stars and Lights: A Lighthouse Project”

• Dirk Ercken: “Light Painting from Within the Scene”

• Elia Locardi: TBA

• Forest Chaput: “Choosing a Telescope (and Other Equipment) for Deep Sky Astrophotography”

• Gabriel Biderman: “9 Parks at Night”

• Harold Ross: “Light Painting the Still Life”

• John Paul Caponigro: “Naked Eye, Camera Eye, Mind’s Eye”

• Joseph DePasquale: “Unveiling the Infrared Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope”

• Katrina Brown: “Designing the Night with Light”

• Ken Lee: “Behind the Book: My Path to Publishing a Monograph”

• Kevin Adams: “365 Nights: A Year of Inspiration”

• Lance Keimig: “Know Your Options: Decisions That Lead to Your Best Images”

• Matt Hill: “Color Management for Night Photographers”

• Michael Frye: “Reducing Noise with Star-Stacking”

• Noel Thomas: “Astro Time-Lapse Techniques”

• Pete Mauney: “Plane Trails at Night: Visualizing Human Networks”

• Phill Monson: “How to Put Nature First as Creators”

• Rachel Jones Ross: “A Field Guide to Photographing the Northern Lights”

• Rafael Pons: “Moon Photography Planning (from Beginner to Pro)”

• Royce Bair: “Starlight Blends”

• Russell Preston Brown: “New Developments in Mobile Night Photography”

• Sandra Ramos: “How to Keep Your Instagram Account from Being Hacked”

• Sherry Pincus: “Things That Go Bump in the Night: Staying Safe in the Wilderness”

• Susan Magnano: “Spark your Creativity with Luminescent Portraits”

• Tim Cooper: “5 Photoshop Techniques for Night Photography”

• … and more to be announced!

Sponsors & Giveaways

Every attendee will be automatically entered into drawings for a large number of giveaways from our generous sponsors, as well as amazing session-specific giveaways from speakers. More info on that to come!

How to Join Us

If you’re into night photography, or if you want to get into it, this is an event you absolutely do not want to miss.

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Tickets are $399, and include:

• 3 days, more than 35 instructors, over 45 hours of inspiration, instruction and fun

• a Fundamentals series of video classes available on-demand before the summit weekend

• 1 year of access to re-watch all of the courses

• a live image review session

• exclusive glow-in-the-dark summit T-shirt (mailed to attendees with U.S. addresses, and we may be able to help those from other countries too!)

• personal access to product experts from manufacturers and developers sponsoring the event

• giveaways throughout the duration of the summit

• an unprecedented opportunity to connect with like-minded photographers passionate about the night

Moreover, if you purchase your ticket by January 13 at 2 p.m. EST, you’ll get your shirt and a swag bag (USA only) before the summit!

Registration is available now, so sign up today and mark your calendars to join National Parks at Night for the world’s third online Night Photo Summit!

JOIN US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

As if that isn’t all enough, we’ll be releasing plenty more information over the next few weeks. To stay tuned in to it all, we invite you to follow the summit social media accounts on:

• Instagram: @nightphotosummit

• Facebook: @nightphotosummit

• Twitter: @nightsummit

We are very much looking forward to seeing you online next month. In the meantime, feel free to ask us any questions via the social media accounts above, in the comments below, or through the Night Photo Summit webpage.

Seize the night … online!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Hanging Ten: Our Favorite Photos of 2022

As time seems to accelerate with each passing year, we can look back at 2022 as when the world got its collective groove back. If 2020 is best remembered as the year we’d rather forget as the full force of Covid shut down the globe, and 2021 was a year of starts and stops as one variant after another reared its ugly head, then 2022 is the year we hit full stride and really got back up to speed.

Here at National Parks at Night, we ran a full schedule of workshops and tours, including a couple that had been twice rescheduled due to the pandemic. We ran 23 workshops and tours, six of which were international trips, including our first aboard a sailboat and our first to the Faroe Islands. We also welcomed some wonderful new people into the National Parks at Night community with our first Intro to Night Photography workshop in Death Valley.

It was a productive year for image-making too. Tim dug deeper into blue hour blends. Matt focused on rendering astro-landscapes through panoramas, vertoramas and little planets. Chris leaned into natural-looking foregrounds for night photos, whether blue hour blends, moonlit foregrounds, long exposures to fill in shadows, or employing Low-level Landscape Lighting (LLL) with a dim and cool light. Gabe leveled up his post-processing skills, getting more comfortable with blending, masking, stacking and compositing. I used new LLL tools to repurpose lighting skills I had developed a couple of decades ago.

It’s always a challenge to pick our favorite images of the year, but it’s also a great opportunity to look back at the images we made, to revisit the places we went, and especially to remember the people we traveled and worked with while making those images.

Below you see each of our top two picks from the night photographs we made in 2022.

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Chris Nicholson

Moon Over Mount Baker

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Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 800.

The Mount Baker Wilderness is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s part of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, in a stretch of Washington state’s North Cascades mountains, bordering the wilds of North Cascades National Park. Walking the trails is like walking at the edge of heaven.

Gabe and I brought a group to the area this summer. We stayed in a chalet in the mountains for a couple of nights, where we had access to some of the most beautiful alpine scenery in the U.S. On the second night we took a short hike, and I looked for an interesting way to photograph an area I’d shot twice before. The moon over Mount Baker was calling to me—the balance of moonlight between the sky and landscape was perfect—but I was struggling to find an intriguing foreground.

I walked a little further up the trail, turned a bend around some large glacial erratics, and came upon this expanse of ice and snow. Perfect! I had to climb one of those erratics to get the angle right. The boulder didn’t have enough room for both me and my tripod, so setting up was a little precarious—but worth the trouble.

I spent a lot of time this year working on natural-looking foregrounds to night photos, and using moonlight is one of the techniques I most enjoy. The serenity and dynamics that combine in this scene are a perfect example of why.

Star Trails Over Ocean Cliffs, Acadia National Park

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Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 20 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 200.

From one corner of the mainland to the other, I moved from North Cascades in summer to Acadia in fall. On our last night in the latter, I brought Matt and a couple of our friends to one of my favorites spots in the park—one of my favorites for either photography or hiking or even just for enjoying the sound of waves swishing onto the cliff-bottom shores.

I made this photo while waiting to make another. I’d scouted a composition that required facing west, which is the last direction of sky to get dark at night. I wanted to stay productive while waiting, so I wandered around the rocks and eventually found this eastward view toward the entrance to Frenchman Bay.

Long exposures aren’t always easy to visualize, and that was the case with this setup. I wasn’t sure I’d like the image. But I had time, so I dilated it into this exposure. And when it was done, I was very glad I’d opened the shutter.

The scene was bathed in moonlight, so I didn’t need to do any blending or light painting to get detail in the foreground. There was so much moonlight, in fact, that the stars were getting a bit washed out—so I mounted a polarizing filter to make the moonlit sky pop a little better.

Once all that was done, executing the photograph was a matter of a simple 20-minute exposure and some easy tweaks in post.

Gabriel Biderman

Liberty Bell, Milky Way and Car Trail

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Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 2 minutes, f/4, ISO 1600; sky: 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

I was incredibly fortunate in 2022 to travel 70,000 miles, to 4 countries, to 15-plus national parks, adding almost 50,000 clicks to my cameras. Needless to say, I explored and taught a lot under the stars.

One of the most epic trips was my 3 weeks in the Pacific Northwest where I visited all three of the national parks in Washington, none of which I had previously been to. I was excited most about the least visited one, North Cascades National Park.

Known as “the American Alps,” North Cascades is challenging to explore, but once you peel back the layers it just gets better and better. The craggy mountains reminded me of the ancient peaks of Lofoten. And of those, Liberty Bell, to me, won the prize as the most distinguished of the peaks. It doesn’t hurt that—in this photo, anyway—the Milky Way rises above it and car trails act as a mirror below the peak.

We brought our workshop here and figured we’d stay for an hour or 2, but we all fell so in love with this location that we ended up staying the whole night.

There aren’t many times that I choose one spot to set up and happily stay all evening. But we had so much fun. We were all careful to compose with the Milky Way and add the road below. Some of us composed horizontally and some vertically. Most of us were shooting noise stacks because after we took our twilight base shot it got really dark and we were pushed to ISOs of 12,800 and beyond.

We’d shout out whenever a car was coming up the valley, and you’d hear the triggers firing, as well as our giggling that we’d captured another successful image of several awesome elements coming together.

We could feel the world rotating and the Milky Way moving closer and closer to the peak. Should we stay to see how it looks coming out of the top? Will it look like a volcano erupting with space dust?

The answer is yes, but that is a picture for another time. This one was similar to many that our group shot, and I don’t care. It genuinely brings me back to Liberty Bell and the excitement we all shared when all the stars, cars and mountains aligned.

Auroras Over Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

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Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of my favorite places in the park system. The sand dunes, picturesque farmsteads, historic buildings and pristine dark skies keep me coming back for more. The people who live in the small towns that dot this Lake Michigan region are so warm and welcoming that I feel right at home.

I created this image during a workshop I teach for the Glen Arbor Arts Center. We experienced auroras on two nights! Sleeping Bear is at the 45th parallel, the halfway mark between the equator and the North Pole. That’s pretty far north for Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and the area is definitely prone to green, red and purple auroras.

This night was magical. We were chasing spiking and Steve auroras, and we settled on composing the light show and stars in reflecting pools of water. We were having a blast, but the composition was missing … well, the human element, to express how excited both the atoms and we were. So I set up the intervalometer and walked to the other side of the pool, careful to place myself close to the water so the reflection would be from head to toe.

Lance Keimig

Thurmond Train Station, New River Gorge National Park

Nikon D780 with an Irix 30mm f/1.4 lens. Two blended exposures of 15 seconds and 2 minutes, f/3.5, ISO 800.

I had long been aware of the semi-ghost town of Thurmond, West Virginia, as it reminds me of the sort of location used by O. Winston Link, train night photographer extraordinaire and one of my heroes. I had expected it to be a highlight of my visit to New River Gorge National Park, and the little town did not disappoint.

On the afternoon of the night I visited, there had been a tremendous thunderstorm, and all but emergency power was out in the area. Luckily for me, this also caused the few trains that passed through the town that evening to stop at Thurmond station and wait for traffic down the line to clear. Their headlights provided ample illumination and just the right atmosphere when combined with the heavy wet summer air lingering in the gorge after the storm.

I didn’t think that the train would stay put long enough for me to make some good exposures, but after a minute or two staring at the scene and feeling as if I’d been transported back in time, I hustled down the track to a point halfway between the resting engine and the red signal lights that were holding the train in place.

I set up low to the ground and quickly determined that multiple exposures would be required to hold detail in both the highlights and shadows. I made a number of exposures, leaving myself options to either manually blend a couple of layers or to make an HDR composite if that turned out to be the better option. It did. I was excited that a car approached from across the river, lighting part of the bridge and filling in some shadows in an otherwise dark part of the frame.

I spent the whole night enraptured by the little town, thinking of Link, and feeling so pleased to finally get to create images in his footsteps.

Eidi, Faroe Islands

Nikon D780 with a Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens at 15mm. 3 minutes, f/4.5, ISO 800.

During our pre-workshop scouting in the Faroe Islands, Tim and I took a slight diversion to the outskirts of the little town of Eidi to check out a soccer pitch near the coast that we had seen as we came down the mountain above the town. I was much more interested in the town, but Tim saw the potential of this coastal view.

We didn’t shoot that day, but we did come back with the workshop one night after a wonderful Ethiopian meal prepared especially for our group at Rose’s Cafe a few miles away.

We didn’t get to do as much night photography as we had hoped, in part due to the weather, and in part due to sheer exhaustion from the long, full days we were experiencing. It was in fact raining off and on this night, but the group toughed it out and we photographed at the water’s edge for about an hour and a half. At one point the clouds opened up with the moon rising behind them, and that combined with waves crashing on the rocky shoreline and a long exposure made for one of my favorite images from our 18 days in Faroe, and of the whole year.

The Faroe Islands were a new destination both for me and for National Parks at Night in 2022, and in a year full of outstanding adventures with outstanding colleagues, it stands out as my favorite recent trip and the place I’m most excited to get back to.

Matt Hill

Half Dome Forest Fire Tracked Vertorama

Astro-modified Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and FTZ Adapter; foreground tracked with a Benro Polaris. 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.

When Lance and I were in the Eastern Sierra for a workshop this year, there were scattered forest fires that occasionally blew smoke in a direction that affected us. At Olmsted Point there is a spectacular view of Half Dome, and the Milky Way core was going to line up vertically over it. What an opportunity!

Alas, upwind of the iconic peak was a forest fire and the smoke was drifting right into the view. Some people might pout, stomp their feet, shake their fists at the heavens and shout, “I want clear skies!”

Not me. I saw that smoke and said, “Wow, now this isn’t something I’ve ever seen before! It’s something real that is happening now and tells a story of the drought and fire cycles. How can I make this work for an image?”

It was after twilight, but the fire and starlight provided enough illumination for exposures at ISO 12,800. And I wanted Half Dome, which is quite diminutive from that vantage, to really stand out. So I put on a 70mm lens and composed for a vertorama where the landscape and sky were exposed at the same settings to blend well.

I shot with my astro-modified Nikon Z 6 to pull out more of the reds and magentas. I exposed the sky first to see how well the stars poked through the low smoke layer. Using the Benro Polaris to track that image for 30 seconds was a breeze.

Liking the results, I recomposed the landscape frame to include the granite valley walls leading up to Half Dome, and then completed the two-panel vertorama.

Animus Forks Little Planet

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Nikon Z 6II with a Laowa 12mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 18 blended frames shot at 1/4, 1 and 4 seconds, f/11, ISO 800; sky: 10 stacked images shot at 15 seconds, f/4, ISO 12,800.

When we arrived at the abandoned mine town in Colorado at 11,000-plus feet, I was awestruck. I wanted to try to get everything I saw and felt into one photo. Reasonable, right? Of course. A spherical panorama would solve that! And PhotoPills showed me that the Milky Way arch from mountain peak to mountain peak would make for a strong “Little Planet” edit.

So I set up a tripod along the river’s edge and embarked on the most ambitious panorama I’ve ever attempted. (Watch your inbox for a blog post dedicated to the process from tip to tail.) The short story is that I made an HDR multi-row panorama of the landscape, left my setup in place and walked away for a few hours. I came back when the Milky Way hit the right position, then made sets of pano images of the sky to noise-stack in post.

I stitched the landscape and sky images separately in PTGUI Pro, then blended them in Photoshop. I did this process twice to find just the right shape for the little planet projections.

It was a risky idea, but I am super proud of how it turned out. And it’s inspired me to attempt even more blue hour spherical panorama blends in the future.

Tim Cooper

Northern Lights Near Fredvang, Lofoten Islands, Norway

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Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, lit with a Luxli Fiddle panel light and a Coast HP7R flashlight. 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.

Sought after by photographers and night sky enthusiasts, the northern lights are a bucket list item for many folks. On our March trip to Norway, I was lucky enough to witness these amazing lights over one of the world’s great landscapes: the Lofoten Islands. While there are many places to view the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere, not all supply the dynamic mix of mountains and beaches that Lofoten provides.

Three days after the group arrived we were treated to our first aurora opportunity. Keeping an eye on several aurora tracking apps, we headed out with high hopes. As we were photographing at a local beach, they finally appeared. The mix of waves, mountains and clouds with auroras was beautiful, but it soon petered out. We decided to try another location in the hopes they would reappear.

I’ll never forget the excitement in the van as we recounted the beauty we had just witnessed along with the fun of chasing some more. Once we arrived at our new location, we quickly scrambled out of the van and got to work.

I remember snapping a couple of quick frames before I headed along a trail that led to an inlet. Turning around I saw the trail leading directly back to the glow of green. Beautiful!

To be sure I captured something, I snapped a few quick shots. Then I set up a Luxli Fiddle to illuminate the foreground. This panel light coupled with a handheld Coast HP7R flashlight brought out the texture of the grasses and helped define the trail. I was in heaven.

It felt like I shot a thousand images while watching the auroras dance and change shapes. Everyone had plenty of time to capture the magic. The northern lights are truly phenomenal and experiencing them with like-minded folks was a true gift.

Star and Car Trails Near Checkerboard Mesa

Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 30 stacked frames shot at 30 seconds, f/4.0, ISO 800.

I love lines in my photographs. Both real and implied lines generate impressions that influence the feel of the photo. Converging lines suggest speed, vertical lines suggest stability and horizontal lines give a feeling of calm. My favorite lines, however, are curved ones. These lines are elegant. They are in no rush to get you through the composition, and they make you slow down and take in more detail.

Car trails and star trails are two very common types of lines we encounter in night photography. The National Parks at Night team will tell you that my love of car trails borders on an obsession. It was no surprise to Chris, then, when I found this scene while we were scouting locations for a spring workshop in Zion National Park.

Climbing up from the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway near Checkerboard Mesa, we were searching for dramatic red rock formations to use as foregrounds. The eastern side of the park is noted for its swirling sandstone and solitary trees, so these subjects were in my mind’s eye as we climbed the ridge.

Not finding my imagined scene, I switched from looking for a particular subject to seeing what the area offered. That type of “searching for a specific thing” has often made me miss great opportunities, so I am glad I was able to switch mental gears that night.

After walking around with an open mind I saw the road bisecting the peaks and leading straight to the sky. I was thrilled. In typical (for me) fashion, I made plenty of images to capture the best car trails and many more to capture the night sky. To round it off, I had to make several frames using different focus points to ensure that the foreground was sharp front-to-back at my wide-open aperture setting.

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Your Turn

What was your favorite night photograph of 2022? 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 … have a Happy New Year!

Lance Keimig is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He has been photographing at night for 35 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images at www.thenightskye.com.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT