“Exploring the Night” is a short film capturing the beautiful dark skies of the California Coast in realtime. A realtime video of the night sky is going to be the upcoming trend with the camera technologies breaking ground in creating some stunning fast wide angle lenses, and reasonably priced mirrorless bodies capable of going up to 400k ISO with reasonable quality.

This is a compilation of realtime video of Milkyway captured to emphasize the beauty of the dark skies in the coastal California from a photographer’s life chasing the Milky Way and how it is important to get them back for our future generation to cherish and enjoy.

It also to showcases the technological advancements with the camera and lenses which has helped me put together this video.

The short film concentrates on audio visual which portrays the night is lively and equally beautiful to witness in realtime moving away from long exposure photography and time-lapse techniques to capture the videos of night sky. This has enabled me to capture some intricate details on the dynamic surfs and some subtle dances of the wildflowers and coastal plants with the breeze. I was lucky to capture a strange light moving across a frame which supposedly could be a lighting bug (fire fly).

This is my first step to much more and much better quality night sky videos with wildlife captured in the dynamic coast of California. This was shot with the combo of Sony’s A7s and the beautiful Sigma 20mm F1.4 lens with a metabones adapter and believe with the coming technological advancements its going to be even more intriguing.

International Dark Sky Week is an annual event which is celebrated to create awareness about conservation of dark skies around the world. With more artificial bright LED lights at night we are slowly starting to lose stars from our lives. As an avid Dark Sky Seeker who was born and brought up in a heavy light polluted city, I was stunned to see billions of stars so bright shining with our Galaxy Milky Way.

Darks skies not just is beautiful to watch with the naked eye but the benefits of it are a lot. With control of light pollution, we can achieve energy conservation, and also saves wild life which are detracted by bright night lights of the cities and towns.

Not just that, but with recent studies, it also shows it affects humans health and we are definitely at a loss but losing the stars from our life.

I would like to showcase thru this photo series some of the dark sky areas in the US which can provide you with a great solitude to enjoy the night with billions of stars and hundred of shooting stars. Hope you like this series and Happy Dark Sky Week. Wish you all clear skies to enjoy the stars and as well as some shooting stars of Lyrids meteor shower.

In my pursuit to visit natural wonderlands of United States of America, I have been fortunate enough to visit 25 National Parks and preserves in the past 10 years and amongst which some of them were multiple visits and some even touching double digits.

As I moved across different states, sometime for jobs I made it a point to visit nearby national parks. Sometimes, some of these parks me go so crazy, I use to fly, drive several hours to reach the location or once I even did a cross country drive from San Francisco to Maine covering multiple National Parks on the way from Yosemite in California to Acadia in Maine.

The night sky was one of the major attraction for me who was born and brought up in a City. I was fascinated by the number of stars that we could see with our naked eye. And as a photographer I got thrilled to capture them as well.

As we are celebrating National Park Services Centennial today on the 25th of August 2016, I wanted to relive my National Park Experience in this presentation of the below National Parks I had visited over the period of 8 years. Here is a collection of Photographs which I have carefully selected from my archives of all the 25 National Parks I have visited and which I feel portrays the National Parks feel to be there and enjoy and cherish it.

As a nature photographer, I take pride in capturing the beauty of varied landscapes in some magical lighting conditions. National Parks provide me the opportunity to enjoy and capture the moment at the same time. Running National Parks is not a simple thing and I believe the National Park Service which does a great job 24×7 365 days deserves an applause in what they do. Starting from providing a conducive environment to the public to visit and enjoy the place, they managing rescue operations day in and out providing safety to public. They conserve nature and wildlife and as well create awareness amongst the visitors on how to conserve and not pollute the preserved parks and its wildlife.

Keep Wildlife Wild and Nature a natural pristine untouched place for the generations to come. I am thanking NPS and hearty wishes to them for achieving this milestone. Happy 100th Birthday National Park Services.

Me and my wife planned a visit for night photography to Big Sur Pacific Coast region which is about a 6 hr drive from our place in Los Angeles. I don’t think we ever missed a chance to enjoy the night sky when we were given the opportunity to do so in our trips. We started driving at 10.30 am and reached Pfeiffer Beach by 4.00 pm. In between we had some astounding views of the pacific coast. The world famous CA1 highway goes along the coast. We stopped for some photographs with the elephant seals up close.

                                                                             Elephant seals resting in the beach

When we reached Pfeiffer Beach, it was one of the windiest beaches I have ever been with monstrous waves crashing on the rocks it intimidates a new person visiting the beach for the first time. We enjoyed watching an amazing sunset at the beach and took some photos standing against  a cold wind blowing from the Pacific Ocean.

Crashing Waves at Pfeiffer beach

                                                                                        Pfeiffer beach Portal

We planned to come back to the beach that night again to admire Pfeiffer’s beauty in moon light. To experience dark sky and also to capture good night photographs of the star with the landscape one should look for the 1/3rd moon phase. This was one such night when we would be able to watch the stars along with the moon illuminated beach and its massive rock formation. We went to the lodge and got ourselves ready and was excited to venture into the beach around 9.40pm to capture the moonlit Pfeiffer. Stunned by its beauty in moonlight, I kept watching the crashing waves creating white surf with the Moon and Venus bright in the western sky.

The light pollution may not look as a big problem from the outside but it has been proved that the excessive light thrown out creates health issues to human beings. Scientific evidence suggests that artificial light at night has negative and deadly effects on many creatures including amphibians, birds, mammals, insects and plants which depend on natural day light and star light for their activities. Here are 5 photographs with 5 different level of light pollution plotted against Milky Way.

Gaining Cosmic Energy –  This is a perspective of gaining the cosmic energy from such a beautiful location Mono Lake with literally no light pollution from surrounding towns and the sky turns up with all the details possible of our Universe!! It was taken with a 50mm lens on a full frame with 15s exposure with ISO 3200 without tracking.

Mono Milky Way – This is again from Mono Lake taken on the same night but after an hour when Milky Way moved south from South East, and this time it is over the lake with lights from the small town of Lee Vining which acts as a distraction along with some very little light coming from far off place which might’ve been created from the wild fire which started on the same night over Yosemite National Park last summer.

Double Arch – Galactic Milky way arched nicely over the Earthly Arch Rock in Joshua Tree National Park during an eventful night when my wife standing inside the Arch saw several meteors striking the earths atmosphere. We listened to Coyotes singing and supposedly Mountain Lion Purrs and Meows!! This panorama shot stitched together with 7 single exposure vertical photographs. The small light domes seen here are an indication that there are some lights far from the place which creates these domes. Larger the dome larger is the light pollution from near by cities.

Blue Ridge Parkway – This was my first milky way shot of the 2015 season!! It was a sad story to start when nothing went right when I wanted to time-lapse  the moon set and milky way rise over the blue ridge Looking Glass Rock, eventually it turned out the roads were closed. Clueless what next, went to looking glass falls to catch the milky way but it turned up it was very hard to control shadows of waterfalls to the light polluted bright sky. Then I had the urge to at least see the milky way with my eyes for all the effort I had taken and wanted to give it a try once again at 5AM and hence drove back all the way again to blue ridge parkway.  There were lights from many small resorts and towers all across the mountain valley on the way up and hence I drove to the top of that intersection where the road was closed, and to my surprise Milky Way was visible against so much of light pollution from near by cities.

Monument Night Sky – Here is an example of how the light pollution and clouds can make the night sky viewing even more worse. Clouds tend to stick on to the light thrown at it from the lights of towns and it worsens the impact of light pollution on the viewers. When the clouds are not seen while star gazing, it means its an unpolluted place, and where it can be seen with such colors it means its a light polluted place.

Also, excessive usage of light in the night just increases the usage of energy there by increases the demand/shortage for power. And as per International Dark Sky Association (IDA) : “We do need some light at night, but much of it is wasted by lights that are overly bright or left on when not needed. Unshielded fixtures waste the most energy. Their lights shine upward instead of down on the ground where it’s needed. In fact, IDA estimates that that up to 50 percent of all outdoor light is wasted. That adds up to $3.3 billion and the release of 21 million tons of CO2 per year! To offset all that CO2, we’d have to plan 875 million trees annually”. Hence I ventured out to capture the beauty of the night sky to spread the word to the masses to show what the city dwellers like myself have been missing.  Hence this small comparison of the Light Pollution.