By now, if you have been following Weekly Fifty for any length of time at all, you have probably heard me wax at length about the idea of context and how important it is, for me anyway, when taking pictures. I like to give viewers, whether myself or someone else, a sense of the broader time, place, mood, or even weather conditions that led to the creation of any given image. The clearest, or perhaps simply the most recent, example of this phenomenon is my picture of star trails while we were camping at a nearby lake with some friends. Instead of just water, earth, and sky, I made the deliberate choice to include our tents in the shot which made a huge difference in the meaning, message, and mood of the final image.
This concept of context, and that star-trails-with-tents image, was certainly on my mind when I took this week’s image during my family’s annual trip to Milford Lake, Kansas–the same location where I took my first GoPro star trails shot a year ago. As things were winding down for the evening and I got to thinking about where to position my camera to take a long-exposure shot of the night sky, I realized I could enhance the composition and tell a bit of a story by including our cabin in the frame instead of just the lake. All the other star trails shots I have taken at the lake were set up with the camera near the shore, but this one would be different: I found a picnic table across the gravel turnaround near the cabin, and used a jaws-style clamp to secure the GoPro to one of the bench seats. I was pretty sure no one would be coming around at night and, even if they did, I was similarly confident they would not notice a small black camera attached to the picnic table with black securement. There was still just enough light to compose the shot with the cabin on the horizon and the expanse of sky above, though there was one small hitch in the plan. I wasn’t sure exactly where Polaris would be and, as such, I wasn’t sure how to orient the camera so the stars would rotate around it.
The next morning when I checked the camera, everything had worked out more or less how I expected but with a bit of a twist. The rotational center was also in almost the exact center of the shot! I did not plan that at all and was actually hoping it would be closer to one of the edges, but as my sister would say, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Everything else worked out great though! The cabin lit up by the dim glow of the porch light, some green streaks from fireflies slicing vertically through the foreground, and a brilliant sky full of stars showing our relatively small place in the heavens. In the end I’m very pleased with how this picture turned out, and I actually appreciate that it didn’t go quite how I expected. Sometimes it’s fun to have things pan out just how you want them, and sometimes it’s fun to just be surprised :)
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