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Make it a good week, friends. 🙂
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This is from a visit to the Banff area this past summer. Wildfires in the region limited the visibility for many of the iconic vistas, but for this sunrise the haze allowed for some nice diffuse light and color. I was a little scared to backpack alone into this fairly remote area with lots of bear activity; a park ranger at the Banff visitor center spent 30 minutes telling me his bear-encounter stories I think to talk me out of it. But I needed to get away from the tourists and find something more original to shoot than Moraine Lake, Lake Louise, etc. So I made lots of noise as I hiked and thankfully avoided any bear encounters. I’m really glad I made the effort (and faced some fears) to get out here; this was probably my favorite area of my 10-day trip, and I think my favorite image of the trip as well.
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One of the things I love about astrophotography is how the camera sensor can capture a perspective of reality that our naked eyes cannot see. The light is there–vibrant colors in the Milky Way, atmospheric “airglow” in reds, greens, and blues–but we need help to see it. Waxing philosophical, it brings to mind an important theme that cuts across many subdisciplines of psychological research: what we see is an incomplete and often distorted view of reality. In our physical and conceptual views of the world, what we think we know is an incomplete representation of reality, prone to distortions, biases, and conclusions interpolated from incomplete data. Truly, “we see through a glass darkly.” Understanding these limitations, biases, and distortions is important for many reasons, but hopefully if nothing else it creates in us a healthy sense of humility and openness to other perspectives. Think of all the conflict and unnecessary suffering in the world that stems from people unwilling to step outside of their narrow perspective. A fact of human experience is that what we currently see and can understand is limited and incomplete; knowing this can foster a greater sense of compassion and patience toward others as well as ourselves. And this is the drivel you get when you cross a photographer with a psychologist. 🙂
About the image: This is a near-180 degree panorama stitched from 12 images (6 for the stars, 6 for the terrain). It was from a visit to Zion back in April, and I had been putting off the processing because frankly the scene and my vision for the image were more than what my pp skills can pull off (gave it my best shot, and may revisit/refine in the future). I took some artistic license in moving the Milky Way slightly to the right relative to the terrain to allow a more balanced composition. The terrain images were taken about 45 minutes after sunset; I left the camera & tripod at the same position and came back a few hours later to capture the MW exposures (f/2.8, 25 seconds, ISO 3200). In contrast to an earlier post from this same location (“Celestial Zion”), I subdued the light pollution coming from the nearby town of Springdale but kept the green and red “airglow” visible in the original exposure. Thanks for looking!
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birdmanps 