10/28/2026
Monument Valley at night, from Forest Gump point ✨
Cameras capture more light and colors than the unaided eye, however watching a desert sunset in Arizona fade off into the Fall night sky is quite colorful and spectacular in person especially the way the desert atmosphere scatters & spreads colors. Because the way the rods and cones are in your eye balls, the rods collect light and the cones collect color- so at night when it’s dark out your rods are working to trying to see so the Milky Way does NOT appear this colorful.
So the colors in the night sky are real, but we can’t actually perceive them! Cameras with long exposure allow us to capture more luminance and colors beyond the unaided eye. One of the techniques I use (and have been blasted for over the years, but now it’s a standard) is combining a twilight image of the landscape with a night image (on a star tracker). In a sense it’s like using an HDR technique but at night, and allows me to capture both details and colors in the landscape and the night sky.
Some call it fake, but to me I’m combining two different real moments together, so in a way it’s more real. And just because our naked eyes cannot perceive the colors in real time at night, it doesn’t necessarily make it fake- so we enter a grey area where debates have been raging among night photographers for the last decade.
I’ve receive mostly positive feedback on my art work, some negative, and it’s always the negativity that we’re naturally drawn towards unfortunately. At the end of the day, if one of my “fake” photos inspires someone to get out into nature seeking views of the cosmos, that’s the most tangible evidence I have of my work: inspiring a real life adventure that hopefully leads a person to the powerful physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits of adventure and being under the night sky.
Literally every single one of our ancestors looked up at the night sky, something that’s been accidentally eroded with advent of the near miraculous technology we have today- but it’s cool that same tech has given astrophotographers a chance to document, preserve, and hopefully protect the remaining dark sky views for future generations.
