The last time I slept in a tent in a real camping situation, some wicked strong wind was blowing down our tent in the middle of the night causing my wife and I to scramble three kids from the tent to the car with buckets of rain falling from the sky and bolts of lightning making a flashlight obsolete. Maybe that’s why it’s been nearly four years since we took on the great outdoors in a tent. But this time, I had some ideas for a few photographs that I was hoping to capture while camping a single night at Jordanelle State Park near Heber, Utah.
My hope was to capture some star trail photos or even a shot of the Milky Way. The night sky was supposed to be cloud free, but a little thing known as the full moon, or in this case the Super Moon, put a damper on that idea, because before the light from the sun was fully extinguished, the moon was peaking over the mountains in the east. But once I got my kids to bed in our 3-4 person dome tent, I turned on a light for them and then set up the photo below.
Canon 60D | 18-135mm lens | 30″ | f/7.1 | ISO 400 | RAW
One of the hardest parts of the photo was to get the tent to glow, without over-exposing it, while capturing some of the stars in the night sky. I think if the moon wouldn’t have been lighting up the great outdoors, it would have been easier to capture the two elements I had in mind. But I still like the way the overall photo turned out. I did capture this photo in a horizontal and vertical layout, and I’m excited to try and do a few different things with this photo – maybe a iPhone 4/4s cover? Hmmmm.
~signed, Carltonaut
