“There is nothing more musical than a sunset.” Claude Debussy
I just returned from five nights of photographing the night sky in Grand Marais, Minnesota. Why Grand Marais? It’s away from light pollution and the dark skies are filled with stars.
Control What You Can Control
Photographers pride themselves on controlling as many aspects of a photograph as possible. We carefully work the light, composition, and exposure in the field along with the processing afterwards in Photoshop to create an image. But some things are just out of our control.
Sky conditions are one of those things that are out of our control. I had hoped to capture a few sunsets along with the night skies. But the first three evenings in Grand Marais were “severely clear,” lacking any clouds. While that’s great for night photography, it makes for boring sunset images.
On the fourth evening, the winds started blowing in smoke from a massive forest fire in Saskatchewan, Canada. The sky became so hazy that you could barely see the sun and the clouds were invisible.
The Shot
My usual lens is a wide-angle that captures a wider field of view than our vision can. But that would have meant including a large expanse of boring, featureless sky. Instead, I pulled out my telephoto lens and concentrated on a small, distant part of the scene.
The smoke worked to my advantage turning a normally blinding sun into a soft pastel orb. And the telephoto lens allowed me to concentrate on an island with several visually interesting trees and reflections.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck