MonikaC
Well-Known Member
My dog & I returned to the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range of WY last week to try for another shot of the aforementioned waterfall with Milky Way behind it. It's an 8 hour drive and I'm ready to stretch my legs after that, so we walked in 5 1/2 or 6 miles to Big Sandy Lake for our first night. It rained pretty hard for an hour the next morning and was completely overcast & cloudy all that day, which is great for hiking (especially uphill with a big pack), but not so auspicious for night photography. Talking with someone who was hiking out, I learned that it had rained hard for 3 hours there the previous evening, which pretty much emptied the Cirque of climbers. I did see 1 fellow, got whiffs of a campfire and heard voices just before I headed out to shoot, but pretty much had the place to myself. When I got to the waterfall, it was barely a dribble (when I went in late June, it was raging, but I couldn't get across the creek to get the angle I wanted, thus the return trip), but after several hours, it picked up. The forecast had been vacillating between clear & dry to thunderstorms and cloudy at night, so I brought extra food in case I needed to camp out there for an extra night or 2. Fortunately, the sky started clearing up around 7pm. The willows had leafed out, obscuring the view of the waterfall from downstream and all but 2 places close to the base of the waterfall. After dithering around for long enough to allow the MW to align with the waterfall, I got my shots & went back to camp to try to get some sleep before walking out the next day.
This is 2 shots, one for the bottom 2/3 and the other for the top of the Galactic Center since I couldn't shoot from further downstream to get it all in 1 frame. I did some light painting on the waterfall & ledge with my headlamp on its lowest setting, then toned it down in post.
