Campsite Moonlight

I almost didn’t get this picture. Twice. But like a lot of my good shots, and even some of my favorite shots, success is sometimes the result of more than a little bit of serendipity. A few weeks ago we went camping with some friends, and I almost didn’t bring my camera. Not just my Fuji X100F, which would be ideal for a situation like this (weather permitting, that is) but my GoPro, which doesn’t really have much of a place on a camping trip at all. And yet, as my wife and I packed the tent along with the usual supplies such as bug spray, sleeping bags, spare clothes, and the like, I decided to toss in the Fuji and GoPro anyway. I didn’t really know what I would plan to do with them–the former because it’s not weatherproof and not ideal when out in the elements, and the latter because we weren’t doing any kind of extreme activities at all. Just basic tent camping. Nothing more. And yet, I thought to myself, why not.

As we cooked over the campfire while the sunlight waned in the blanket of blue high above, I noticed that the wind was growing calm while the clouds cleared. I thought that I might be able to use this as an opportunity to take a long-exposure photo of the stars streaking across the nighttime sky, and quickly grabbed my GoPro and set about looking for a place to put it to get a good picture. I found a flat rock near the shore, just on the other side of the tents, that seemed ideal: it would get much of the lake in the foreground with a nice view of the sky along with the stars circling around Polaris as the earth turned. I placed the camera, set the timer to start the shot at 12:30am, and went back to the fire so I could focus on the people, not the pictures.

A while later as everyone was settling in for the night, I had a sudden flash of inspiration. It was the kind of light-bulb idea that hits out of nowhere, and ends up changing everything in a way that, in retrospect, seems so obvious. The one thing I consistently mention here on Weekly Fifty, the technique that informs my photography more than just about anything, is context. My original idea for a star-trails shot had none of it. It would have been a cool photograph, but with very little to connect the viewer on a psychological or emotional level, with the experience of actually being out at the lake on a clear starry night. A simple change would fix all that.

Just to the south of the little peninsula where we pitched our tents was a large dock that protruded about thirty yards into the lake. It was several feet off the water, and realized that if I attached the camera there and pointed it in the same direction as I had originally planned, it would capture not only the sky and stars but our tents as well. Bingo. Suddenly there would be something in the picture to ground the photo in a way that viewers could connect with, as opposed to a scene of water, horizon, and stars but devoid of any human life. The nearly full moon was a bonus, as it illuminated our tents along with natural elements like grass and rocks. Even the clouds cooperated, showing up as just a couple of light streaks without obscuring the stars at all.

The next morning I could hardly wait to check the GoPro to see what it got, and I’m enormously pleased with the result. I wish the horizon was a bit straighter but that’s the price you pay when you line up your shot in near total darkness after the sun has already set. It was an enormously satisfying photo to take, and gives me a few ideas about what I might do next time also.