Big Bend National Park – January, 2017 – Part 2

Big Bend National Park – January 2017 Photo Workshop, Part 2

One of my favorite experiences in the park is night photography. Thanks to the work of the park staff to change out all of the incandescent lighting to LED and to install shielded lighting, Big Bend National Park is one of only 13 parks in the world to receive a gold-tier certification from the International Dark Sky Association. It is the darkest park in the lower 48.

Even though the gaseous cloud of the Milky Way only makes a very short appearance in January, we still enjoy photographing what we can see of our amazing galaxy.

My favorite constellation is Orion. We got some wonderful views of the constellation.

Click on the center line and drag the “curtain” back and forth to see the annotated version of Orion, the hunter.

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Another fun nighttime photography activity is light painting. The Dorgan house is easy to get to and fun to paint. This time we had a special treat – that crazy Pixelstick.

In spite of some clouds moving through, we did have several opportunities for star trails. I took two of them. On the first night, I photographed the star trails through a crystal ball, something I have wanted to try for a while. It worked fairly well, but I do still need some work on this technique.

And no photography trip would be complete without the wild and crazy stuff. This time I worked on panning blurs. My first was a horizontal blur in the early morning at sunrise. The other two are vertical panning blurs of the tall, bare trees at Santa Elena Canyon. I usually take 10 or 20 of these to get one that I like.

The beginning of this trip is here.