I thought I’d begin this Behind the Photo series with one of my more popular images. There is a story behind it that is both a little adventurous and a little technical, so I figure it’s a good place to start.
My original vision was to shoot the Milky Way rising, or arcing, over Fort Rock. Fort Rock is a geological phenomenon in Central Oregon about an hour and half from my home in Bend. The rock is a “tuft ring” rising above the plains. Basically it’s the tip of a volcanic crater with one side collapsed, almost like a miniature Mt St. Helens. I guess it kind of looks like a rock fort. I thought I would position myself in the plains and shoot South East and have the Milky Way soaring above the formation.
I left home at 10:30PM and drove on out through the night, arriving at the rock at midnight. I then walked into the field behind Fort Rock looking for the correct position to compose the shot. It was very spooky out there. Coyotes were yipping and yapping in the distance while bats dive bombed my headlight and sundry critters scurried through the undergrowth sagebrush and rabbitbrush. There wasn’t a soul around and any lights in the distant farmhouses were turned off. It was dark and cold.
I snapped a few compositions. I was shooting 5 or 6 shot panoramas, shooting vertically to get in as much sky in as possible (for the Milky Way) and sweeping left to right to accommodate the whole wall of the rock. It was tricky, as all night photography is, to see anything since it’s so dark. The whole scene is generally dark and in the camera viewfinder it's completely black. It wasn’t until I had shot a 15 second exposure that I could review it and see that things were composed correctly, but even then, seeing as I was going to have to stitch the images together later on my computer as a panorama, I could only hope I was getting the shots to make the vision work.
But even with just a single frame of a panorama, I could tell this wasn’t working. Fort Rock appeared as just a big, dark cliff against the night sky. It didn’t look good. It was not a pleasant subject, even with the Milky Way. I guess if I had a massive spotlight to light up the cliff, it may have helped, or even if I had taken two exposures, one for the night sky and another for the cliff, it may have been better. However, there was no getting away from the fact that a rock cliff is not that interesting of a subject. It’s just a dark, dull wall. Dejected and tired, I headed back to my truck.
On my way home, a mile or so down the road from Fort Rock, I passed a historical site called Fort Rock Village. It looked neat and I deemed it worthwhile to stop since it appeared that my original vision had been a waste of time and sleep. I pulled over and grabbed my camera. As I walked around, hunting for a composition, I had to be careful not to get too close to the fence and trip the alarm. I was already feeling vulnerable wandering around there at one in the morning and I certainly didn’t want to draw any attention to myself.
As I paced the perimeter of the old village, I could feel there was a shot, but this annoying orange streetlight at the parking lot was casting its glow on everything. It didn’t look too bad to the naked eye, however with a long exposure, the orange just soaked into any image I took.
Eventually I found a composition with the old church. Since I was shooting South East, I knew I could maybe get some of the Milky Way in the shot. I still had my super wide angle lens on my camera from earlier. I took a few test shots and didn’t love what I saw - too much grassy foreground and the church too small in the frame. I popped off the wide angle lens and threw on the trusty 24-70mm and zoomed in a bit. This solved the issue of removing the grass and junk in the foreground and made the church larger in the frame. The problem is that this ended up cropping out most of the sky. I resolved this issue by deciding to shoot a two shot vertical panorama, and bingo!
Back home on my computer, the two shot pano stitched together seamlessly but the orange cast from the street light still bothered me. While I worked on the night sky to bring out the Milky Way, I noticed how the teal color in the sky worked really nicely with the orange cast on the church. In the end, the resulting image redeemed my original vision failure and made the sleep deprivation totally worthwhile.
Celestial Fort Rock Village
Fort Rock, Oregon
June 6, 2024 1:14AM
Sony A1
24-70mm GM @ 37mm f2.8
ISO 3200
15 seconds
2 shot vertical panorama