Canon RF 24mm f/1.4L VCM for Night Photography

December Night Sky Captured with the Canon RF 24mm f/1.4L VCM

As should be obvious for anyone that follows my photography, I enjoy creating images at night. As I’ve developed my skills, I have progressed from just being excited that I was able to take a decent shot at night, to trying to render the Milky Way well over a landscape, to striving to create nightscape compositions that would be compelling even if they weren’t taken at night. One aspect of this is researching locations, moon phases, star charts, and sometimes tides to get the lighting and elements that I want for my photo. Another aspect is gear.

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2024 Favorites

Looking back at my favorite photos from this past year, it is clear that I spent quite a bit of time standing around in the dark. Six of my ten favorites were taken at night and four of those included at least some amount of aurora. The photographic highlight of my year was my trip to the Lofoten Islands in Norway in February. This year’s collection also includes images from my usual haunts in Yosemite, Glacier and the Mendocino coast. Here are my favorite photos from 2024, presented in the order they were captured.

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Sierra Autumn 2024

I spent the last weekend of October in Yosemite and nearby parts of the Eastern Sierra in search of fall color. My usual goal at this time of year is to photograph autumn in the valley, but I was a week or two too early for that this year. Fortunately there are still plenty of photographic opportunities including reflections in the calm Merced River, night skies, and colorful aspens just east of the park.

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Lofoten Islands Part Two: Leknes and Svolvær

This post covers the second half of my February trip to the Lofoten Islands in Norway. My previous post (here) featured photos from the first part of the trip, when I was based in the western end of Lofoten and many of the photographic subjects were the small islands and fishing cottages common in that area. From there I moved east, staying in Leknes and then Svolvær, which provide closer access to some of Lofoten’s beautiful beaches. I also had some better luck with the northern lights…

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2023 Favorites

I look forward to this retrospective each year – both as a chance to look back at how I spent the year and as a chance to review some of my favorite images, often leading me to reprocess them or select different favorites from the same shoot. I won’t make any claims that these are the best images I created in 2023. I don’t believe that there is an objective “best” photograph. Selecting favorites allows me to tie them to my memories in a way that is more personal. This was a tough year for this exercise, as I have alternates for many of these photos that I like just as much. On another day I could easily have selected several different favorites. I’ll refer to some of those in my comments below.

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Dark Skies in the Eastern Sierra

I made a trip to the Eastern Sierra in late October (Halloween to be exact) with the primary goal of capturing the Milky Way over the Mobius Arch and Mount Whitney. This is a popular spot for sunrise photos, as the rising sun creates a glow on the mountains and I have been there to see this at sunrise several times. I wanted to get a similar effect at moonrise: I wanted a glow on the mountains while having the sky dark enough to clearly see the stars. Few people do Milky Way photography with a nearly full moon, but I guess I am one of the few. I used an app called PhotoPills to find the best date where the stars would be behind the arch at moonrise, with the sky already fully dark after sunset. October 31 was that day.

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