Location: McWay Falls, Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, planet Earth
Created: 08/13/15 8:37:40 pm & 9:40:35 pm
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark iii
Lens: EF16-35mm f/4L IS USM
Aperture Sky: f/4.0; @16mm; 20 sec.; ISO 8000
Aperture Land: f/4.5; @16mm; 13 sec.; ISO 500
When asked to pick a location to capture the Milky Way, this is it. A good friend and I prepared for this night, many months before, using The Photographer's Ephemeris, a map-centric calculator, to reveal how light and stellar features will fall on the land, be it day or night, for almost anywhere, at a precise moment on earth. The alignment is unique for every day of a year.
The shot day began with a hike up the McWay Creek in the early afternoon, then back to set up our shot across from the Falls around 6 pm. After about 7 hours of shooting the stars, we returned back to our truck, parked in a locked and gated parking lot, posted as “absolutely no-overnight parking”, another common photographers quirk.
It’s intriguing to see the Milky Way shot as a long exposure photo. The Milky Way has the whitish halo, since we are here, centered well within our galaxy, looking thru a thick disc of millions of stars, and clouds of gas, and dust. Light is obscured by all but the closest regions of the galaxy from view. We can really only see a mere 1,000 to 2,000 light-years in any direction — when in fact the Milky Way is over 100,000 light-years across. The unobserved colors of the stars rarely are white. In fact, what stars we see, are the blue, red, and yellow authentic color, as seen in this photograph. The notion of time and place are a key detail of the origins of galaxies, shedding light on our history of our universe and it’s formation.
If there is a single most popular image of Big Sur, it is probably here, as the 80 foot falls seen from this trail, of the McWay Creek as it cascades onto the sandy shore of the bay. We appeared alone in the dark, while, if you peer to the right, just behind the waterfall, there was the feint magical glow of a hidden camper’s bonfire, on the fringe of the cliff in the woods. A subtle symbolic metaphor that all moments are connected in time and space, and shared within us all.
