Behold! The Perfect Stick!

Crater Lake (Giiwas in Klamath-Modoc,) is the deepest lake in the US.

People always ask what the hardest part of night photography is, and we all pretty much agree that it’s the getting-out-and-doing-it part. Setting off right as it’s getting cold, trekking through the dark, frozen fingers, night critters. It’s not a comfortable situation, and every fiber of your body begs you not to go.

I would say, though, that another really hard part is finding a beautiful shot, and then realizing it won’t work. WHen you find a foreground that’s beautiful or a subject that’s so visually appealing, but the stars (literally) just don’t align.

We set out in a group of five and clambered across the steep sides of Crater Lake to find our shots. I saw this dead tree (stick?) and wanted to photograph the Milky Way behind it. But after about 20 minutes of set up, myself and the camera perched precariously off the edge of a rock, my group mates talked me down. It would be two more hours before the Milky Way was in the sky, and by then it would be so dark that scaling down the mountain side would have been difficult at best and fatal at absolute worst. The other problem was my camera was visible in everyone else’s shots. Operating it in the dark with my headlamp would have interrupted everyone else’s shots.

I could cheat. I could edit this photo with a Milky Way shot above the mountains. But that would have been less satisfying than just taking this photo and admiring what is and what I can accomplish. I am okay with knowing this scene exists with a beautiful night sky behind it, even if I’m not the one to capture it.