Landscape photographers know that the best light for shooting is the sweet light that occurs just after sunrise and just before sunset. Depending on the time of year, this golden hour can be quite early in the morning and quite late at night. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for limited sleep. To limit our sleep further we added “star shooting” and “star light time lapse photography.” Our total sleep in the day was three hours – and we were lucky to get that!
On our first morning, per schedule, we got up before 5 am to shoot the sunrise over Dead Horse Point in Canyonlands National Park. The 7 cars of our Moab workshop, His Light Workshops with Bill Fortney, caravanned out of the parking lot at 5:30 am, arriving at Dead Horse Point by 6:30 am to set up and, hopefully, capturing the morning show. It is usually a confluence of time of day, luck and weather that makes a spectacular photo. Unfortunately, the sunrise at Dead Horse Point fell short on luck. But we still got a nice photo:
Sunrise over Dead Horse Point, Utah
Taking a shot like the one above requires certain attire. It can get pretty cold!
We continued with class and photo critiques during the day, a sunset shoot, catching a few hours sleep, and then waking for a night shoot (1:30 am). Our day ended at the hotel at 5:30 am. There was little time for sleep. Yawn!
Stay tuned for photos from our sunset and our star shoot. See if you can determine when the lack of sleep begins to have an impact.
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