Discovering Night Photography

In the past, I've grown confident in wildlife photography and nature photography, but now I'm heading into a unknown region. Night Photography using film. No digital. For today's society, I can see the benefits of using digital photography, especially when photographing wildlife, who will never stay still for a moment as you get the right angle, focus, and shot. I am completely humbled and admire those who still use film photography to shoot rapidly moving birds, spooked deers, and slithering rattlesnakes. It takes a lot of patience, you have to take exposure and aperture into consideration to develop the scene in which you desire to catch.

As a child, I always loved practicing photography with my Mom's old Cannon AE-1, which I still use on and off today. There's something about the look you can achieve using old film cameras that's so raw and amazing that digital photography just can't offer.

Seeing I live in beautiful Sedona (AZ), with skies lighted by stars and galaxies, it's time for me to try to shoot this. I always wanted too when I lived in California, but light pollution always seemed to be in my way. So I am now currently discovering night photography through experimentation.

I headed out on full moon, with one page from the Cannon's manual on night photography to guide me. All I knew was to set it on manual, play with different apertures, and time your exposures. I don't have a cable release (a devise that connects to the shutter button, so you can exposure your photographs without knocking your camera and damaging your pictures), or the right kind of film for the experiment.

To be honest, I'm stocked I came back with something that's not all black fuzziness or white frames.

So that's what I ended up with out of a roll of film (24). I had about 6 or 7 others come out as well, but there were far more grainy, or blurred. I bought the cable release designed for my AE and invested in a variety of different kinds of film suggested by various established night photographers and I'm excited. 

I hope to document by errors and fortunes, as I learn lighting (moon phases), and what kinds of apertures and exposure times work best. Most of the photographs above were timed at 8-60 seconds. Some amazing photographers I found will expose their film up to 8 hours just to achieve the amazing scenes they capture. Only using their wit and dedication, they can capture sun rises, galaxies, star trails, comets, and much more!

I'm expecting to have my new cable release and films arrive late next week. I'm going to play with the film I got and the beautiful landscapes and starry skies to capture Sedona at night. I'll also be posting my errors and good come ups along the way, and share with you my findings. A good project, which takes a lot of patience, research, and a little bravery (seeing I'm out in the wilds by myself late at night).

This photograph was done by photographer Grant Kaye. Seeing something like this only inspires me to sit out in the dark all night and try to capture something that people hardly see these days :)