Preparing for Summer Night Photography
There is always a point in the year where planning starts turning into possibility.
Longer roads.
Warmer nights.
The return of places that are unreachable in winter.
This summer we are hoping to spend more time under dark skies, working on night landscapes, storms, star fields, and long-exposure images across Wyoming and surrounding areas.
Part of that preparation has been adding a few new tools to the kit.
Recently we added a MIOPS Smart Trigger trigger system and a Move Shoot Move NOMAD star tracker.
The MIOPS trigger opens up possibilities for lightning photography, motion triggering, and other timing-sensitive work that is difficult or impossible to capture by hand. Wyoming storms have a habit of arriving fast and unpredictably, so having tools that can react faster than a person matters.
The NOMAD star tracker is something we are especially looking forward to experimenting with this summer. One of the ongoing challenges in night photography is balancing exposure time against the movement of the earth itself. A tracker allows the camera to follow the motion of the sky, making longer exposures and cleaner star-field images possible without the stars turning into trails.
Like most creative tools, there is always a learning curve between owning the equipment and truly understanding how to use it well. Some of the coming months will involve experimentation, failure, adjustment, and hopefully a few images that make all the effort worthwhile.
We are especially interested in:
Milky Way landscapes
Remote prairie night scenes
Weather and lightning photography
Old structures under night skies
Long-exposure landscape work
Combining travel with image-making in more isolated places
Part of this blog will be sharing not only finished photographs, but also the process behind them — what worked, what failed, what we learned, and what we are still trying to figure out.
Summer never feels long enough in Wyoming, and dark skies are becoming harder to find in many places. We intend to make the most of them while we can.
— Jason & Lynn
Jason’s Light Works
