Saving Astrophotography in National Parks

Brent Bergherm sits at the roundtable with Jeff hosting an episode where the two discuss the story of some passionate photographers saving the right to do astrophotography in two National Parks in the Unites States.  They also talk about about the progress of rebranding the Improve Photography Podcast Network.
Topic 1: IP Network Rebranding Progress

https://masterphotographypodcast.com/faq
The Photo Taco feed has been split out and the episode this past Monday, April 30 2018 the episode about the update to the Profiles functionality released with Lightroom Classic CC 7.3 in early April 2018 is out there.
If you haven’t re-subscribed to the individual feeds you will want to do that.  We will continue to put all of the shows into the Improve Photography feed through the end of June just to give listeners a chance to hear the changes.  After that point we intend to only put episodes from the other shows into the IP feed occasionally.

If you as a listener would prefer to have the IP feed continue to have all of the shows then let us know in the Facebook groups or email [email protected]
Brent teases about fabulous prizes that will be part of subscribing to Latitude when the separate feed gets going again.


We will be re-branding the Improve Photography Podcast to the Master Photography Podcast sometime between now and June.  So don’t worry when the album art and the name changes. Same show, same format, same everything. Just being rebranded.

 
Topic 2: Saving Astrophotograpy in National Parks

In 2017 three national parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Grand Teton) banned light painting and were talking about banning all night photography.  It was a very disturbing trend as astrophotography was something people from all over the world came specifically to those parks to do with the unique landscapes and the dark skies.
Arches in particular.

Bortle scale is a 1-9 scale developed by John Bortle.  Not going to dive into the detail of that scale here, that is something for Photo Taco that I may do someday, but the higher the number the more light pollution you have to deal with in your night photography and the fewer stars you are going to see.
Closest city producing light pollution is Moab and at the center of that city you only get to a Bortles scale of 4 out of 9 (https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=10&lat=4664983&lon=-12201649&layers=B0FFFFTFFFF)
Unfortunate thing is that Moab is south of Arches, so if you are going there to take Milky Way photos you are going to have to deal with that light pollution.
The southern ⅓ of the Arches has a Bortle rating of 3 and the ⅔ is all the way down to a Bortles of 2.


Combine the low amount of light pollution with the very unique landscapes and Arches is a destination for photographers world-wide to get photos of that combination.  

In fact, the landscape is so unique there that there is a story you can’t possibly visit Zion National Park without hearing about Frederick S. Dellenbaugh who painted scenes at Zion National Park and took his paintings to the 1904 World Fair in St. Louis.  Nobody believed him that the scenes depicted in his paintings were real.


One of the techniques you can use to get a good astro shot is light painting.  Involves using a high lumen flashlight and sweeping over the landscape to try and illuminate it while your shutter is open for tens of seconds to capture the stars.

You can imagine that if you were camping in a tent in this area...