On our recent roadtrip I wanted to get some photos of some of the rock formations and arches without the massive amounts of people that were visiting these same places during the daytime and I found that at night… they disappeared! Well, went to their hotels, homes, RVs or where ever, but they were gone. On the two nights I shot, I only encountered perhaps two other people out shooting.

In my opinion night photography, at least for me, has gotten much easier with the improvement of today’s digital cameras. Of course not all of them are created equal as some do a much better job of handling the noise (grain) that comes with low light and long exposures. My Nikon D700 is one of these cameras that really handles the higher ISO’s usually associated with night landscape photography.

Now, don’t misunderstand, most cameras that can be mounted on a tripod and controlled manually will give fairly good results, provided you can control the ISO of your camera and it will allow you to control the exposure (how long the shutter stays open).

This post will just go into what I did to capture the images you can view in my Arches National Park at Night Gallery here on this website.

I didn’t take my remote timer so I was limited to an exposure time of 30 seconds in manual mode on my D700, which for me was fine as I wanted to have pinpoint stars in the pictures and not star trails, as you begin to get with longer exposures.

I set my ISO for the most part at 4000, shutter speed was 30 sec and the f/stop would vary depending on how much ambient light there was, ie, moon out or cloudy skies with light from nearby Moab, Ut. Most of the photos were shot with my 18mm or my 24-70 lens, usually at about 24mm.

Everything was shot in RAW format and then post processed using the Adobe Raw Plug-in using Adobe Photoshop CS5. Other than that, no other filters were applied to the photos.

I plan to produce a calendar from 12 of these images in time for the Christmas Holidays, so check back here on our blog for a link where you can purchase a copy when it’s done. Hope you enjoy the photos and get out and try some of your own night shooting! – JP