TECHNICAL DETAILS
Snowshoeing home, Burntside Lake, Minnesota, 2017
Sony A7ii, Sony Zeiss 16-35mm f/4
10 second exposure at f/4, 16mm, ISO 3200 on a MeFoto Backpacker tripod.
WHY I LOVE THE BLUE HOUR
Up at the cabin this weekend, and I took the snowshoes and headed out on the lake a little before sunset today, intending to shoot some of the rosy glow. There hasn’t been a lot of snow here recently, and the windswept surface of the Burntside ice was hard and glassy in spots, making for quick progress. The sunset wasn’t particularly spectacular, and I was enjoying the exercise, so before long I found myself well across the lake, out past Blueberry Island, and nearly to the north shore. The last few days have been cold. It was -10° Fahrenheit this morning when I arose, and it stayed just around the high single digits most of the day. It makes for challenging shooting conditions, with fingers quick to numb, batteries sapped by the cold, and the mental inertia of saying that you’re going to stop and get everything out for a shot. But on this evening, perhaps as an oversight, I only brought with me one lens, my favorite go-to, the Sony Zeiss 16-35 f/4. The problem with shooting with a very wide angle lens when you’re far out in the middle of the lake is that all the shoreline recedes into a thin line, and unless there is an interesting sky, or an island or rock, there just isn’t much to make a good composition.
Content to take in the scenery, the sunset soon faded. A quarter moon was high in the southern sky, and Venus was just under it and a little to the west, astoundingly bright. The Blue Hour is characterized by the period of astronomical twilight, when the sun is well below the horizon, the stars begin to appear, and the warm glow of sunset is low or may even have faded to just shades of cool blues. It is one of my favorite times of day to shoot. Most people recognize the Golden Hour, right before and around the actual sunset, when the low angle of the illumination, and it’s very warm tones, makes for some of the most dramatic scenes. It’s easy to make great images during the Golden Hour. Shooting in the Blue Hour is hard. Challenges abound. First, a tripod is an absolute necessity; exposures are seconds long, sometimes as much as 30 seconds. You must know your equipment’s high-ISO performance, as frequently the lighting requires you to push the boundaries of your camera sensor’s capabilities. With the long exposures, wind and tripod vibrations are a constant threat. A simple bracketed sequence may take five minutes to shoot, given the lengthy exposures. It can be tough to focus, as there isn’t much light and viewfinder performance is impacted. And then there’s the post-processing. The high-ISO long exposures are, by definition, noisy. The sky and foreground may need extensive balancing. Too much noise reduction can wipe out star images; too little leaves the whole thing muddy. And yet for all these factors, the results can be captivating. A gentle, quiet light envelops all. Images seem to glow. So for the results as well as the challenge of achieving them, I love to shoot in the Blue Hour.
As the last of the sunset was fading, I was on my way back to the cabin. Not a snowmobile in sight. Few cabins anywhere on the eastern part of the lake with lights on that I could see. Not a breath of wind. The conditions were ideal. I made a few exposures of silhouettes as I passed Indian and Pattison Islands on the way back, and also a nice image of patterns on the icy lake surface. But now I was really only seeing by moonlight and I picked up my pace a bit thinking of dinner. Nearing the south shore, perhaps a hundred yards out from our lakefront, I stopped and turned around to check out how the stars were coming out and enjoy a last minute of quiet. The lake surface was unbroken around me, just the trail of my snowshoes heading back toward the northwest. The stars had come out in that way only the cold, clear winter air can present, and the Milky Way was faintly visible above the last of the sunset. Too good to pass up. Out came the tripod again. There went the fingers, and I had just gotten them warm! The snowshoe tracks were crisply highlighted in the moonlight, and I knew that with the right exposure, I could bring out the Milky Way and the last few warm hues of sunset, even though I could barely see them with my naked eye. It probably took me ten minutes of bracketing and tweaking settings, but I thought I had a useable exposure as I packed up one last time, took off the snowshoes at the edge of the lake, and climbed the hill up to the cabin, dinner, and an evening of processing the images.
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