For those who have never been to Bryce Canyon, it's really not a canyon, but more of an amphitheater, a series of small canyons parallel to each other all draining down into a valley below. You can see the bowl-like shape it has in the first shot.
Upon arriving, we quickly set up camp, then headed to Sunset Point, which is the trailhead spot for several popular trails. We intended on hiking down Wall Street, a series of switchbacks that would take us down this narrow canyon and down to the floor, then hike around the end and hike back up via the Navajo Loop trail a trek of a little over a mile in length. It's strenuous, but nothing we couldn't handle.
The next evening, we waited until after 9 PM or so, then headed over to Sunset Point again to hike down. Thor's Hammer is very close to the rim, so we didn't have to hike too far, but the trail is a little creepy at night, even with good flashlights. I set up my equipment and took several longer exposures of 30 seconds or less. Taking less than 30 seconds, you get pretty close to pinpoint stars. Anything longer than that and your stars start to become trails. These shots, I wanted individual stars in my photos.
On the LCD screen on the back of my camera, the shots looked to be a little bit of a disappointment, but they turned out much better once I got them on to my computer screen at home. I need to remember than the next time I'm out shooting stars. You can't see all of the stars on that little bitty screen. Here's what I think is one of the best ones I shot that evening. Thor's Hammer was illuminated by my son using his flashlight.
About the only thing that I wish Sharon and I had done on our trip a month before yours was make it to Bryce, but there's only so much time, and we got a lot of traveling in, as you know.
ReplyDeleteOne of the very first, maybe even *the* very first, jigsaw puzzle that I ever bought with my own allowance/chore money was a 1,000-piece shot of Bryce, pretty-much the same shot that you post here, although cropped down about 30% along the bottom and left-hand sides. It was a winter shot, so a lot of the features had snow on them. I still have that puzzle, somewhere.
As for your comment on your star shots, I understand completely. When I was taking shots of the annular solar eclipse, and then of the transit of Venus, what I was seeing in the viewfinder was not promising, but the shots came out a lot better than I could have hoped for :-) The great thing about digital photography is that each shot is basically free, so you can do a ton of bracketing, which I did, and it only costs the time to look at each one and then cull the worst.