Night Photography in the Utah Mountains or Bust
File this one under: you never know what's going to happen, so put it all out there!
So I was going to Salt Lake City for work to attend a conference and I posted this little Instagram:
And I got a reply from a local photographer, Paul Carter (website, Instagram), asking if I wanted to go shoot some night photography. Um, yes! So we connected and decided on going out someplace with no light pollution because there was a report of the POSSIBILITY of Aurora Borealis visibility in our area and much of northern USA.
Paul graciously picked me up and drove us hours into the mountains east of SLC. Utah is truly a beautiful state, and I got to see even more of it guided by a local. And Paul is a also great guy. We chatted about photo tech, techniques, tools, life and other stuff. And then we got up to umpteen thousand feet in the air... (( <---hyperbole!)
I was shooting a side project for the launch of Vü Filters, making example photos with and without filters of many subjects during sunset in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
10-stop ND Filter - where have you been all my life???
After that was done down near Mirror Lake, we headed back up to Bald Mountain Pass - where we bumped into a crew from Adobe with a RED camera mounted in the back of a minivan chase car filming a crazy decked-out BMW. Can't wait to see where that goes...
The last moments of sun... (This is not the Adobe crew.)
And then the sun was gone. We descended a little bit to Lilly Lake / Lost Lake. Perfect. The moon would not rise for at least 2 hours, so we focused on making photos of the Milky Way.
And since I was rocking the Pixelstick, I made a portrait of Paul:
Well, we made three, but this is my favorite :-)
And finally - it was cold. I didn't mention that. It was high 30's up there. Brrr. So we did a couple of long exposures for stair trails. (Perfect weather for it!) My batteries kept dying.
ADVICE: Put a fresh battery in if you are starting a long exposure in very cold weather!
