As time seems to accelerate with each passing year, we can look back at 2022 as when the world got its collective groove back. If 2020 is best remembered as the year we’d rather forget as the full force of Covid shut down the globe, and 2021 was a year of starts and stops as one variant after another reared its ugly head, then 2022 is the year we hit full stride and really got back up to speed.
Here at National Parks at Night, we ran a full schedule of workshops and tours, including a couple that had been twice rescheduled due to the pandemic. We ran 23 workshops and tours, six of which were international trips, including our first aboard a sailboat and our first to the Faroe Islands. We also welcomed some wonderful new people into the National Parks at Night community with our first Intro to Night Photography workshop in Death Valley.
It was a productive year for image-making too. Tim dug deeper into blue hour blends. Matt focused on rendering astro-landscapes through panoramas, vertoramas and little planets. Chris leaned into natural-looking foregrounds for night photos, whether blue hour blends, moonlit foregrounds, long exposures to fill in shadows, or employing Low-level Landscape Lighting (LLL) with a dim and cool light. Gabe leveled up his post-processing skills, getting more comfortable with blending, masking, stacking and compositing. I used new LLL tools to repurpose lighting skills I had developed a couple of decades ago.
It’s always a challenge to pick our favorite images of the year, but it’s also a great opportunity to look back at the images we made, to revisit the places we went, and especially to remember the people we traveled and worked with while making those images.
Below you see each of our top two picks from the night photographs we made in 2022.
Chris Nicholson
Moon Over Mount Baker
Nikon D5 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 10 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 800.
The Mount Baker Wilderness is one of my favorite places in the world. It’s part of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, in a stretch of Washington state’s North Cascades mountains, bordering the wilds of North Cascades National Park. Walking the trails is like walking at the edge of heaven.
Gabe and I brought a group to the area this summer. We stayed in a chalet in the mountains for a couple of nights, where we had access to some of the most beautiful alpine scenery in the U.S. On the second night we took a short hike, and I looked for an interesting way to photograph an area I’d shot twice before. The moon over Mount Baker was calling to me—the balance of moonlight between the sky and landscape was perfect—but I was struggling to find an intriguing foreground.
I walked a little further up the trail, turned a bend around some large glacial erratics, and came upon this expanse of ice and snow. Perfect! I had to climb one of those erratics to get the angle right. The boulder didn’t have enough room for both me and my tripod, so setting up was a little precarious—but worth the trouble.
I spent a lot of time this year working on natural-looking foregrounds to night photos, and using moonlight is one of the techniques I most enjoy. The serenity and dynamics that combine in this scene are a perfect example of why.
Star Trails Over Ocean Cliffs, Acadia National Park
Nikon D5 with a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 20 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 200.
From one corner of the mainland to the other, I moved from North Cascades in summer to Acadia in fall. On our last night in the latter, I brought Matt and a couple of our friends to one of my favorites spots in the park—one of my favorites for either photography or hiking or even just for enjoying the sound of waves swishing onto the cliff-bottom shores.
I made this photo while waiting to make another. I’d scouted a composition that required facing west, which is the last direction of sky to get dark at night. I wanted to stay productive while waiting, so I wandered around the rocks and eventually found this eastward view toward the entrance to Frenchman Bay.
Long exposures aren’t always easy to visualize, and that was the case with this setup. I wasn’t sure I’d like the image. But I had time, so I dilated it into this exposure. And when it was done, I was very glad I’d opened the shutter.
The scene was bathed in moonlight, so I didn’t need to do any blending or light painting to get detail in the foreground. There was so much moonlight, in fact, that the stars were getting a bit washed out—so I mounted a polarizing filter to make the moonlit sky pop a little better.
Once all that was done, executing the photograph was a matter of a simple 20-minute exposure and some easy tweaks in post.
Gabriel Biderman
Liberty Bell, Milky Way and Car Trail
Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 2 minutes, f/4, ISO 1600; sky: 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.
I was incredibly fortunate in 2022 to travel 70,000 miles, to 4 countries, to 15-plus national parks, adding almost 50,000 clicks to my cameras. Needless to say, I explored and taught a lot under the stars.
One of the most epic trips was my 3 weeks in the Pacific Northwest where I visited all three of the national parks in Washington, none of which I had previously been to. I was excited most about the least visited one, North Cascades National Park.
Known as “the American Alps,” North Cascades is challenging to explore, but once you peel back the layers it just gets better and better. The craggy mountains reminded me of the ancient peaks of Lofoten. And of those, Liberty Bell, to me, won the prize as the most distinguished of the peaks. It doesn’t hurt that—in this photo, anyway—the Milky Way rises above it and car trails act as a mirror below the peak.
We brought our workshop here and figured we’d stay for an hour or 2, but we all fell so in love with this location that we ended up staying the whole night.
There aren’t many times that I choose one spot to set up and happily stay all evening. But we had so much fun. We were all careful to compose with the Milky Way and add the road below. Some of us composed horizontally and some vertically. Most of us were shooting noise stacks because after we took our twilight base shot it got really dark and we were pushed to ISOs of 12,800 and beyond.
We’d shout out whenever a car was coming up the valley, and you’d hear the triggers firing, as well as our giggling that we’d captured another successful image of several awesome elements coming together.
We could feel the world rotating and the Milky Way moving closer and closer to the peak. Should we stay to see how it looks coming out of the top? Will it look like a volcano erupting with space dust?
The answer is yes, but that is a picture for another time. This one was similar to many that our group shot, and I don’t care. It genuinely brings me back to Liberty Bell and the excitement we all shared when all the stars, cars and mountains aligned.
Auroras Over Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. 8 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of my favorite places in the park system. The sand dunes, picturesque farmsteads, historic buildings and pristine dark skies keep me coming back for more. The people who live in the small towns that dot this Lake Michigan region are so warm and welcoming that I feel right at home.
I created this image during a workshop I teach for the Glen Arbor Arts Center. We experienced auroras on two nights! Sleeping Bear is at the 45th parallel, the halfway mark between the equator and the North Pole. That’s pretty far north for Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and the area is definitely prone to green, red and purple auroras.
This night was magical. We were chasing spiking and Steve auroras, and we settled on composing the light show and stars in reflecting pools of water. We were having a blast, but the composition was missing … well, the human element, to express how excited both the atoms and we were. So I set up the intervalometer and walked to the other side of the pool, careful to place myself close to the water so the reflection would be from head to toe.
Lance Keimig
Thurmond Train Station, New River Gorge National Park
Nikon D780 with an Irix 30mm f/1.4 lens. Two blended exposures of 15 seconds and 2 minutes, f/3.5, ISO 800.
I had long been aware of the semi-ghost town of Thurmond, West Virginia, as it reminds me of the sort of location used by O. Winston Link, train night photographer extraordinaire and one of my heroes. I had expected it to be a highlight of my visit to New River Gorge National Park, and the little town did not disappoint.
On the afternoon of the night I visited, there had been a tremendous thunderstorm, and all but emergency power was out in the area. Luckily for me, this also caused the few trains that passed through the town that evening to stop at Thurmond station and wait for traffic down the line to clear. Their headlights provided ample illumination and just the right atmosphere when combined with the heavy wet summer air lingering in the gorge after the storm.
I didn’t think that the train would stay put long enough for me to make some good exposures, but after a minute or two staring at the scene and feeling as if I’d been transported back in time, I hustled down the track to a point halfway between the resting engine and the red signal lights that were holding the train in place.
I set up low to the ground and quickly determined that multiple exposures would be required to hold detail in both the highlights and shadows. I made a number of exposures, leaving myself options to either manually blend a couple of layers or to make an HDR composite if that turned out to be the better option. It did. I was excited that a car approached from across the river, lighting part of the bridge and filling in some shadows in an otherwise dark part of the frame.
I spent the whole night enraptured by the little town, thinking of Link, and feeling so pleased to finally get to create images in his footsteps.
Eidi, Faroe Islands
Nikon D780 with a Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens at 15mm. 3 minutes, f/4.5, ISO 800.
During our pre-workshop scouting in the Faroe Islands, Tim and I took a slight diversion to the outskirts of the little town of Eidi to check out a soccer pitch near the coast that we had seen as we came down the mountain above the town. I was much more interested in the town, but Tim saw the potential of this coastal view.
We didn’t shoot that day, but we did come back with the workshop one night after a wonderful Ethiopian meal prepared especially for our group at Rose’s Cafe a few miles away.
We didn’t get to do as much night photography as we had hoped, in part due to the weather, and in part due to sheer exhaustion from the long, full days we were experiencing. It was in fact raining off and on this night, but the group toughed it out and we photographed at the water’s edge for about an hour and a half. At one point the clouds opened up with the moon rising behind them, and that combined with waves crashing on the rocky shoreline and a long exposure made for one of my favorite images from our 18 days in Faroe, and of the whole year.
The Faroe Islands were a new destination both for me and for National Parks at Night in 2022, and in a year full of outstanding adventures with outstanding colleagues, it stands out as my favorite recent trip and the place I’m most excited to get back to.
Matt Hill
Half Dome Forest Fire Tracked Vertorama
Astro-modified Nikon Z 6 with a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and FTZ Adapter; foreground tracked with a Benro Polaris. 30 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 12,800.
When Lance and I were in the Eastern Sierra for a workshop this year, there were scattered forest fires that occasionally blew smoke in a direction that affected us. At Olmsted Point there is a spectacular view of Half Dome, and the Milky Way core was going to line up vertically over it. What an opportunity!
Alas, upwind of the iconic peak was a forest fire and the smoke was drifting right into the view. Some people might pout, stomp their feet, shake their fists at the heavens and shout, “I want clear skies!”
Not me. I saw that smoke and said, “Wow, now this isn’t something I’ve ever seen before! It’s something real that is happening now and tells a story of the drought and fire cycles. How can I make this work for an image?”
It was after twilight, but the fire and starlight provided enough illumination for exposures at ISO 12,800. And I wanted Half Dome, which is quite diminutive from that vantage, to really stand out. So I put on a 70mm lens and composed for a vertorama where the landscape and sky were exposed at the same settings to blend well.
I shot with my astro-modified Nikon Z 6 to pull out more of the reds and magentas. I exposed the sky first to see how well the stars poked through the low smoke layer. Using the Benro Polaris to track that image for 30 seconds was a breeze.
Liking the results, I recomposed the landscape frame to include the granite valley walls leading up to Half Dome, and then completed the two-panel vertorama.
Animus Forks Little Planet
Nikon Z 6II with a Laowa 12mm f/2.8 lens. Foreground: 18 blended frames shot at 1/4, 1 and 4 seconds, f/11, ISO 800; sky: 10 stacked images shot at 15 seconds, f/4, ISO 12,800.
When we arrived at the abandoned mine town in Colorado at 11,000-plus feet, I was awestruck. I wanted to try to get everything I saw and felt into one photo. Reasonable, right? Of course. A spherical panorama would solve that! And PhotoPills showed me that the Milky Way arch from mountain peak to mountain peak would make for a strong “Little Planet” edit.
So I set up a tripod along the river’s edge and embarked on the most ambitious panorama I’ve ever attempted. (Watch your inbox for a blog post dedicated to the process from tip to tail.) The short story is that I made an HDR multi-row panorama of the landscape, left my setup in place and walked away for a few hours. I came back when the Milky Way hit the right position, then made sets of pano images of the sky to noise-stack in post.
I stitched the landscape and sky images separately in PTGUI Pro, then blended them in Photoshop. I did this process twice to find just the right shape for the little planet projections.
It was a risky idea, but I am super proud of how it turned out. And it’s inspired me to attempt even more blue hour spherical panorama blends in the future.
Tim Cooper
Northern Lights Near Fredvang, Lofoten Islands, Norway
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens, lit with a Luxli Fiddle panel light and a Coast HP7R flashlight. 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200.
Sought after by photographers and night sky enthusiasts, the northern lights are a bucket list item for many folks. On our March trip to Norway, I was lucky enough to witness these amazing lights over one of the world’s great landscapes: the Lofoten Islands. While there are many places to view the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere, not all supply the dynamic mix of mountains and beaches that Lofoten provides.
Three days after the group arrived we were treated to our first aurora opportunity. Keeping an eye on several aurora tracking apps, we headed out with high hopes. As we were photographing at a local beach, they finally appeared. The mix of waves, mountains and clouds with auroras was beautiful, but it soon petered out. We decided to try another location in the hopes they would reappear.
I’ll never forget the excitement in the van as we recounted the beauty we had just witnessed along with the fun of chasing some more. Once we arrived at our new location, we quickly scrambled out of the van and got to work.
I remember snapping a couple of quick frames before I headed along a trail that led to an inlet. Turning around I saw the trail leading directly back to the glow of green. Beautiful!
To be sure I captured something, I snapped a few quick shots. Then I set up a Luxli Fiddle to illuminate the foreground. This panel light coupled with a handheld Coast HP7R flashlight brought out the texture of the grasses and helped define the trail. I was in heaven.
It felt like I shot a thousand images while watching the auroras dance and change shapes. Everyone had plenty of time to capture the magic. The northern lights are truly phenomenal and experiencing them with like-minded folks was a true gift.
Star and Car Trails Near Checkerboard Mesa
Nikon Z 6II with a Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. 30 stacked frames shot at 30 seconds, f/4.0, ISO 800.
I love lines in my photographs. Both real and implied lines generate impressions that influence the feel of the photo. Converging lines suggest speed, vertical lines suggest stability and horizontal lines give a feeling of calm. My favorite lines, however, are curved ones. These lines are elegant. They are in no rush to get you through the composition, and they make you slow down and take in more detail.
Car trails and star trails are two very common types of lines we encounter in night photography. The National Parks at Night team will tell you that my love of car trails borders on an obsession. It was no surprise to Chris, then, when I found this scene while we were scouting locations for a spring workshop in Zion National Park.
Climbing up from the Zion-Mount Carmel Highway near Checkerboard Mesa, we were searching for dramatic red rock formations to use as foregrounds. The eastern side of the park is noted for its swirling sandstone and solitary trees, so these subjects were in my mind’s eye as we climbed the ridge.
Not finding my imagined scene, I switched from looking for a particular subject to seeing what the area offered. That type of “searching for a specific thing” has often made me miss great opportunities, so I am glad I was able to switch mental gears that night.
After walking around with an open mind I saw the road bisecting the peaks and leading straight to the sky. I was thrilled. In typical (for me) fashion, I made plenty of images to capture the best car trails and many more to capture the night sky. To round it off, I had to make several frames using different focus points to ensure that the foreground was sharp front-to-back at my wide-open aperture setting.
Your Turn
What was your favorite night photograph of 2022? We’d love to see it! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.
Then … have a Happy New Year!
