Welcome to the Maru Landscapes Blog. Here, I will share with you my latest images, techniques, and thoughts on landscape photography. From the best places to go, to the best equipment and techniques to use, you will find it here. I hope you enjoy the blog and come to visit often. Feel free to contact me at maruphoto@shaw.ca if you have any questions at all about the content of this blog. Jeremy Jackson
Story: Night photography has begun to boom with the advent of modern digital cameras. Photographers are now able to make images of subjects that were trechnically very difficult if not impossible only 10 years ago. This image is made entirely with natural light coming from the moon and stars. Although the major light source is different in night photography (we use the moon rather than the sun), the objectve is still the same; to artfully represent the beauty of nature.
This image was made under the light of a full moon at around 4 am. It depicts a relatively rare phenomenon in which the moon creates a halo of light in low, soft clouds near the horizon. Above the moon, the sky was cloudless and so stars can be clearly seen sprinkled across the night sky. The hoodoos in the foreground are located in a place called "Devil's Playground" in southern Utah.
Images of dark subjects are often better viewed on dark backgrounds. The image is presented below on a white background but if you use your mouse to rollover the image it can be viewed on a black background. Please enjoy the image.
Technical Details: This is a composite of 2 images. One image was made for the moon and foreground hoodoos, and one was made for the stars. The image of the moon was made at ISO 400, 3 seconds and f8. The image of the stars was made at f3.5, 13 seconds and ISO 1250. Both images were combined manually in Photoshop. No significant changes were made to the original images except for an overall increase in contrast and some light dodging and burning. Overall, saturation in the sky was reduced to make it look more natural.
For all images I used a Nikon D800E and 24-70, f2.8 lens set at roughly 35mm.
One again, as unusual as this image looks, the image is true to life. This is a natural phenomenon that is seen only by people that have walked in to a pitch dark wildrrness under a full moon well before sunrise.
Night Photography