Astrophotography
No light? No problem. The stars will guide you.
The Milky Way shines over Willow Springs Lake in Forest Lakes, Arizona. Two people sit at the shore, admiring the view and enjoying the quiet forest night. The way it came together accidentally is one of the best aspects of photography as an art.
Any time I’m asked what my favorite photo I’ve ever taken is, I pretty much instantly show off this one.
This photo is actually a composite of 25 light frames (the actual landscape and subject) and 25 dark frames (taken at the same settings with the lens cap on) and stacked in a software called Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac.
The Aurora Borealis was visible over some parts of Arizona in November 2025. I had called out of work with a fever earlier that day.
When I found out the Northern Lights were going to be visible from certain parts of Arizona, I drove two hours just for the chance to see it and it was well worth it - fever be damned. I hope to see it again someday, in more vibrant colors and from a different location.
This photo is a time lapse that took about an hour and a half, and came together using Adobe Lightroom and a free software called StarStaX.
The Milky Way is visible from the backyard of an AirBnB in northern Arizona. I rarely have a use for fisheye lenses, but this was an experiment that paid off in what I think is an interesting image that was able to capture the whole Milky Way stretching across the night sky.
This photo is also a composite of 25 light frames (the actual landscape and subject) and 25 dark frames (taken at the same settings with the lens cap on) and stacked in a software called Starry Landscape Stacker for Mac.
This image, aside from being another time lapse of the bridge at the Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, is possibly the clearest example of why people used to navigate by the North Star - while everything else spins and shifts throughout the night, Polaris remains a constant presence in the sky.
This photo took nearly three hours for the actual time lapse itself to come to fruition, and came together using Adobe Lightroom and a free software called StarStaX.
If I’m honest it’s one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken.