When Great Preparation Pays Off

My most rewarding photography experience to date was the direct result of putting into practice a lot of what I’ve already talked about on this blog. By planning carefully, scouting locations, getting up early, and knowing how to use my camera, I was able to get an amazingly unique shot:

This is far from a perfect photo. The tree in the middle is distracting, there’s a lot of noise in the image due to shooting on a very high ISO. The foreground holds no interest. BUT, this was the most excited I’d ever been while trying to capture a photograph. Why? Because even though the photo might not show it, it was almost completely pitch black outside. My human eyes couldn’t actually see the lenticular cloud in the image, and it was only through sheer luck as the result of careful planning that I even noticed it.

The photo was taken on my weekend photography trip to Southern Utah. This is about a 45 minute drive on a dirt road outside of St George, in a small road-side pull-off at the trailhead for Yant Flats.

Here’s why this photo is so important to me, as a confirmation that I was doing the right things:

I got up early.

These types of trips are all about maximizing your time in ideal conditions. I knew I wanted to be at a certain place (Yant Flats) before sunrise, so that I would have plenty of time to set up and get the shots I wanted as the sun rose that morning. I timed everything out: a 45 minute drive, followed by a 30 minute hike. I would be doing all of this in dark, so I gave myself extra time for both the drive and the hike, as both were completely unlit and very bumpy paths.

As a result, I arrived at the end of my 45 minute drive to the place that I parked the car at a little after 4 in the morning. It was still pitch black. Once I turned off the car lights and got out to get my gear from the trunk, I was immediately blown away by all the stars. I live on the East Coast. I had never experienced such a clear, star-filled night in my life. Every one of those white dots in the image above was visible to me, and I in awe.

This was not the location I was intending to photograph that morning. It was just supposed to be where I parked my car. But when I saw those stars I knew I had to capture them right then and there, because by the time I was done with my hike the pre-dawn light would be out and they weren’t going to be as visible.

I quickly went to work setting up my camera and thinking of how to best capture the stars.

Me setting up my tripod with my headlamp on, selfie taken on my phone

I knew I didn’t want to just point my camera straight up and take a photo of just the stars - I wanted context to show where I was when I saw this amazing sight. Luckily…

I had scouted the area in the daylight.

As I mention in my guide to planning and pulling off one of these weekend photography trips, using the middle of the day to scout locations is super important. When the lighting is perfect, you don’t want to be spending all your time finding interesting compositions. The more prep work you can do when the light is harsh or too overcast and not ideal for landscape photography, the more you can focus on tweaking the little things once the moment finally hits.

The day before I took this photo, I had already been out in the area. I was scouting for the Yant Flat hike, trying to find interesting compositions and using an app to find which path the sun would take the following morning for sunrise. I did all that, and had a great time, and even stayed a little longer than intended, because I decided to just stick around for sunset.

But I remember when I parked my car that I had noticed a small mountain. I didn’t take any photos of it that day; I saw it, I considered it, but I quickly concluded that there weren’t any compositions that would really work. It was too short, the trees in the area too tall, and not enough interest in either the foreground or the sky to really complete the image. So I left that day and didn’t think much of it.

But when I returned the following morning in the dark of night, and couldn’t see a thing except the stars, I knew that mountain was there. So when I was trying to think of a way of composing an image when I couldn’t see a single thing, I went back to that memory bank of where I remembered the mountain to be. So when I set up my tripod, I pointed my camera in roughly that direction.

The goal was just to capture the stars with the mountain as a bit of context. Just a way to say, “here are these stars I saw, and here’s this mountain to just ground the image and show where in the world I was.” But when I looked at what I had captured, I barely saw something that just looked…weird. My first images were super dark and I could barely make anything out:

I couldn’t see any of this with the naked eye, but my camera picked up on something that I had no idea was there. I saw a lenticular cloud sitting like a hat on Signal Peak, which is something I had only read about and seen on the internet before.

I knew how to operate my camera.

From there, I spent about 20 minutes fiddling with settings, testing out exposures and ISOs, trying to manually focus in the utter darkness. Knowing how to affect the image that my camera was capturing and not just relying on “Auto” allowed me to really take control and capture the best image I could under the circumstances. Is it perfect? Certainly not, and now knowing even more about my camera, there are some things I’d probably do a bit differently.

But I’m super happy that I was able to capture it at all. After getting the right exposure settings and touching it up in Lightroom when I got home, I have in my possession now an image of a moment that no one without a camera would have seen that day. That moment, by chance and by skill, was all for me.