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You can put one more big gun in your bag to make your night skies sing. I let out massive yawps of glee.įolks, a revolution has arrived. My whoops of pleasure resonated from the canyon walls.

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I was able to shoot a clear Milky Way sky with a full moon lighting the landscape. The polarization occurs only in that area (rather than the whole sky) because I am using a superwide lens and the effect covers a limited angle.Īnyway, back to the exciting part. I strategically placed the effect right along the axis of the Milky Way. That’s not from a local adjustment in post, but rather that’s where the circular polarizer’s effect happens. You may notice that the area of sky around the Milky Way is darkest. It’s one frame, with some Lightroom adjustments. Ignoring the fact that someone did light painting in the foreground for this shot, check out that Milky Way! This is not a composite.

We hustled to nail the Milky Way during that window, but I suspected I had an advantage with a circular polarizer and hoped I could make it appear even after moonrise.Īs soon as the moon rose, people started repositioning to re-frame to make the Milky Way less important. There was a 25-minute window of darkness between the end of twilight and moonrise.

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Now in New Mexico, we were shooting at Pueblo Bonito, the park’s showpiece ancient structure, which features over 600 rooms plus multiple kivas of fascinatingly intricate architecture. Can I extract a Milky Way from moonlit skies? It was an idea raised by Jason, a Rocky Mountain attendee who was on that hike with us the week before. This last test, if successful, would be the coup de grace, on my circular polarizer experiments. Well, what about the Milky Way? It’s a silly question, right? You can’t shoot the Milky Way on a moonlit night. And the sky in the background is darker-much darker-which is something we don’t generally see when shooting in moonlight. But it’s not the normal, cluttered sky we get without polarization and a much wider aperture. I think next time I’ll shoot such a photo at f/8 to see a touch more stars. So keep the moon (or sun, if you are so inclined), on your right or left shoulder. Tip: Polarizers work best when used perpendicular to the light source (90 degrees). The moon was at my left shoulder-ideal conditions to make a polarizer work. Our first shoot location, Emerald Lake, had a moon shadow slipping around to the right. On our final day of the workshop, we embarked on an add-on adventure with five attendees, during which we hiked with our gear almost 2 miles (one way) with 650 feet of elevation gain at over 8,000 feet of altitude. So I set out to test my hunch that it would work. I simply set it to minimum effect for the “before” images and maximum effect for the “after” images. Note: Since my polarizer was a screw-in 95mm, I did not go through the hassle of removing it during tests. Maybe, just maybe, I could make a polarizer do something useful-or even something amazing. That last one was really exciting to me, as we would have lots of moon at Rocky Mountain, as well as at our workshop immediately afterward at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Reduced highlights, which puts more of the exposure inside the dynamic range of my camera More vibrant colors and deeper saturation Minimized reflections, making water easier to see through Why? Well, I know polarizers have these positive traits: Your sensor will capture fewer stars-perhaps?ĭespite all those naysaying, braying voices in my head, I set about scraping out some moments during our Rocky Mountain National Park workshop to run some experiments. (Have you seen my backpack? I call it the “kitchen sink.”)

It’s going to be hard to see the effect through the lens.Ī polarizer is another thing to carry and/or take care of. You’ll lose up to 1.5 stops of light! My precious light … It basically said, “There are tons of reasons you should not even consider doing that.” It was this: What if I use a circular polarizer at night? I had another “What if?” moment, dear readers.