Star Trails over Bear Lake

My photographic philosophy has always emphasized authenticity. My motto is, “What you see in my prints is what I saw through the lens.” But when I began photographing at night, I realized that my philosophy required updating. In daylight, my eyes are better than my camera; at night, the opposite is true. Our visual system cannot integrate incoming light over a two-hour period to reveal the graceful circles the stars make as they rotate around Polaris, the North Star. My camera can. My camera can also record color at night in a way that my eyes cannot, no matter how dark-adapted I become. Photographs of star trails obviously cannot be a literal record of what I saw; instead, they are an illustration of the power of the camera to show us the world in a unique and surprising way.

To make this image, I set up my camera atop a rock jutting from the surface of Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Using a 24mm lens set to f/2.8, I composed to include Longs Peak, Pagoda, Chiefshead, and Thatchtop. The night was incredibly calm. With my Canon 5D Mark III set to an ISO of 1600, I made 243 30-second exposures back-to-back, with only a one-second delay in between frames, then merged all the frames in Photoshop to reveal the complete star trails. I then used a procedure developed by nature photographer Floris Van Breugel to eliminate the tiny gaps that would otherwise have appeared in between the trails recorded in each 30-second exposure.