Black Hole Sun: Get Ready to Shoot the 2024 Eclipse with Our New E-Book

It certainly seems like we are living in a golden age of eclipses.

When we started National Parks at Night in 2015, we were in the middle of a rare tetrad of blood red lunar eclipses. We experienced the 2017 total solar eclipse in a variety of ways, with Gabe and Matt leading hands-on experiences in Idaho and Oregon, respectively, and me sitting on a blanket with my daughter in South Carolina.

Then in 2023 we seized our first ring of fire eclipse with a group trip to Capitol Reef National Park, and with another group learning PhotoPills at the edge of the eclipse path in Joshua Tree National Park.

Then we prepared for the next big one: the Great North American Eclipse of 2024. It’s happening this coming Monday, April 8.

To help get you prepared, we’re excited to announce our brand new e-book, There Goes the Sun: A Guide to Photographing a Solar Eclipse.

What’s in the Book

The book comprises 66 pages and is chock full of everything you’d want to know about shooting an eclipse. Including:

• a history of eclipses

• a list and explanations of the gear required

• notes on eye and gear safety

• results on testing different solar filters and their affect on color

• detailed instructions on scouting, shooting and processing

• a gear guide for all sorts of products to help in the cause

• and more!

Sample Pages

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Sample Tips

Here are three tidbits on eclipse photography that you can find in the book:

1. “If you manually follow the eclipse with a long lens, it’s a good plan to allow room for the sun to travel across your frame for some time and then readjust your framing when it nears the edge. This does, however, require attention to your camera throughout all the phases you will be photographing.”

2. “The sun moves its own diameter every 2 minutes. Setting a shooting interval for every 2 minutes will make sure that you capture many phases of the eclipse without any overlap.”

3. “For everything except totality images, you can probably edit one to taste and then synchronize that image with the rest. But for your frames close to or during totality, which you shot at different exposures, you’ll need to edit them separately to get them to match.”

Get Your Copy Today

Whether you’re new to photographing eclipses and need to know where to start, or whether you’ve done this before and want to level up, we have you as covered as a black-hole sun!

Get your copy of There Goes the Sun for $9.99 today by clicking below:

Then, when you’re done shooting the eclipse, we’d love to see your images! Share in the comments below, or on our Facebook page, or on Instagram (tag us @nationalparksatnight #nationalparksatnight #seizethenight). Be sure to tell a story too—the technical aspects, the challenge overcome, or a tale of the experience.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2024). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Even More Words: Updates to the Night Photography Glossary

In January 2022 we released an e-book titled The Night Photography Glossary. It’s a reference guide to over 250 terms about night photography, along with over 80 images to illustrate. Our hope was that the glossary would be a fun educational tool that would also help unify and standardize many of the terms that all us night photographers use to describe the many crazy things we do.

We also intended the glossary to be a living document, adding to it as updates seemed appropriate, or as our niche developed new techniques and adopted new fascinations.

To that end, we recently added 25 terms, and updated others! You can read the newly added terms below.

You can also view the full list of terms on our Night Photography Glossary page, or download the e-book version.

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New Terms in the Glossary

auroral corona · rays of auroras converging to form a cone or crown shape, sometimes visible when the zenith of an aurora is directly overhead

black moon · the appearance of an “extra” new moon during a specific time period; most commonly the “black moon” label is applied to a second new moon within one calendar month, though originally the term indicated the third of four new moons in one season

cityscape · a photograph that depicts a city skyline, usually photographed from a distance with a normal or telephoto lens

corona · the outer layer of the sun, visible during total solar eclipses

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The sun’s corona, visible during a solar eclipse. © Gabriel Biderman.

dead sky · a sky devoid of any visual characteristics other than blackness, due to complete, dense cloud cover unlit by any nearby ambient light sources

deepscape · a photograph that depicts a landscape in front of a deep-space object in the sky

double processing · processing the same image file with two different results and then blending the two resulting images; for example, a noise blend

earthshine · the dim glow of the unlit portion of a crescent moon, caused by sunlight reflecting off Earth and onto the moon surface

light pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by either sunlight or moonlight radiating from below the horizon (i.e., before sunrise or moonrise, or after sunset or moonset) and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “sun pillar,” “solar pillar” or “moon pillar”

lunar corona · a faint disc or small rings of light around the moon created by moonlight refracting through thin clouds

moonlight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed under moonlight with a sky photographed in darkness at another time of the night (i.e., before the moon rose or after it set) to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; also known as a “twilight blend”

moon pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by moonlight radiating from below the horizon before moonrise or after moonset and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “lunar pillar”

moonscape · a nighttime photograph wherein the landscape is illuminated by moonlight; [see photo]

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A moonlight blend. The foreground was photographed as the moon rose from the horizon, and the sky was exposed earlier in total darkness. © Matt Hill.

noise blend · a processing technique for combining two (or more) parts of an image that are processed differently for noise reduction, such as a foreground landscape and a background sky that require different noise mitigation

noise stacking · a processing technique for reducing apparent high ISO noise by analyzing multiple exposures of the same scene in noise-reduction software

planisphere · a handheld star chart for identifying celestial objects in the field

solar maximum · the period of the highest solar activity during the 11-year solar cycle, resulting in an increased frequency of sunspots, solar flares, coronal mass ejection and auroras

starlight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed with a long exposure under only starlight with a sky photographed with a shorter, star-point exposure to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; [see photo]

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A starlight blend. The foreground was exposed for eight times longer than the sky, and the two frames were blended in Photoshop. © Chris Nicholson.

sun pillar · a vertical shaft of light extending from the horizon during twilight or nighttime, caused by sunlight radiating from below the horizon before sunrise or after sunset and reflecting off high-altitude ice crystals; also known as a “solar pillar”

twilight blend · a processing technique for combining a foreground photographed during twilight with a sky photographed in darkness to create a final image with foreground detail in front of a starry sky; also known as a “blue hour blend” [see photo]

vertorama · though the term in its basic form may indicate any photograph in a non-standard tall format, it’s most commonly used to describe a technique wherein the photographer exposes multiple frames while tilting the camera vertically through a scene, then “stitches” those frames together in post-production to create one high-resolution image that is taller and more detailed than could be created with a single frame in the same camera; i.e., the vertical equivalent of a panorama [see photo]

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There’s More Where That Came From

Remember to see the full list of terms on our Night Photography Glossary page. Bookmark the page so you can return to it whenever you see a night photography term you’re not familiar with. Or, better yet, download the e-book!

Chris Nicholson is a partner and director of content with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015) and Photographing Lighthouses (Sidelight Books, 2023). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

PhotoPills, National Parks at Night Partner for Two Masterclasses

As most of you know, we love the PhotoPills app. It is packed with tons of useful information for photographers. We use it to plan locations from home, scout the stars during the day, figure out exposures, calculate hyperfocal distances, visualize star trails and much, much more.

Earlier this year Chris Nicholson wrote a great article on “The Many Ways That PhotoPills Helps A Night Photographer,” which zeroes in on several key features that are essential to his workflow. Tim Cooper always says that PhotoPills is the best $10 investment he’s ever made in photography, and the rest of us definitely agree.

Yet PhotoPills is much more than an app. The team behind it also offers a lot of education to support their mantra of “Imagine. Plan. Shoot.” Why? Because their goal is to help people become better photographers.

National Parks at Night embraces that same philosophy, and we have partnered with PhotoPills often to collaborate. In 2018 we invited Rafael Pons, also known as The Bard of PhotoPills, to speak at our very first conference, the New York Night Photography Summit, and he also spoke at our Night Photo Summit online conference in 2021 and 2022. We’ve even run four PhotoPills Bootcamp workshops, with a fifth coming next year. 

This past May, Chris and I were instructors at PhotoPills Camp, a much-sought-after international gathering of PhotoPillers hosted on the Mediterranean island of Menorca, Spain. It was an amazing experience, and we finally met the entire PhotoPills family on their home turf!

Shortly thereafter, Rafael invited Chris and I to present as part of their Masterclass series on YouTube. Both of those masterclasses were livestreamed in the past two weeks.

I spoke about star trails and Chris taught about how to photograph lighthouses at night. We are very passionate about these subjects and have been honing classes about them for years. But given the chance to speak on the PhotoPills Masterclass platform, we knew we had to share every bit of information we knew, and then some. So we hit the books, pushed the stars and lighthouses beyond anything we had tested before, and voila!

Both classes are now posted on the PhotoPills YouTube channel for you to watch at your leisure.

It was a great thrill to see so many friends and workshop alums among the livestream visitors (thank you!), and we’ve been enjoying reading the positive comments in the chat.

Please leave any questions you might have in the comments for each video. Chris and I will be monitoring them for the next few weeks and want to make sure you are ready to Seize the Star Trails and Lighthouses in the near future.

What other night topics are you interested in learning more about? Drop them in our comments below and #staytunedformore.

Gabriel Biderman is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night. He is a Brooklyn-based fine art and travel photographer, and author of Night Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots (Peachpit, 2014). During the daytime hours you'll often find Gabe at one of many photo events around the world working for B&H Photo’s road marketing team. See his portfolio and workshop lineup at www.ruinism.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Words, Words and More Words: Announcing the Night Photography Glossary

Jargon. Lingo. Parlance. Vernacular. At the bottom line, they’re all just words. But words are important. Words help us understand each other, they help us understand concepts, they help us learn new ideas. And the words that have nuanced definitions for a particular field are critical to understanding that field well.

Auto mechanics have their own vocabulary. For example, to them “dipstick” means something entirely different. Software engineers have their own terminology. For example, “incremental development.” Sailors have theirs. “Argh!”

And night photographers? Heck yeah, we have our own language too. Heaven help the stranger who walks into a night shoot and tries to make sense of, “Hey, I set the LENR when using my intervalometer, and now I have gaps in my star-stacked Silky Way, not to mention moire. And don’t even get me started on my lighting ratio and ambient exposure. Hot pixels! Bortle!!!”

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Yeah, we have a lot of words.

At National Parks at Night, as photography instructors we spend a fair amount of time talking about those words and terms—words and terms from A to Z, such as “azimuth” and “zodiacal light.”

Now we’ve put those words together into a glossary. Over 250 terms about night photography, along with over 80 images to illustrate. The vocabulary of this fun and wonderful thing we do.

We’re making The Night Photography Glossary available to all, to read over your morning coffee. You can do so two ways:

1. We have added a Night Photography Glossary page to this website.

2. We have published a Night Photography Glossary e-book, with a fun, illustrative layout. For this we are charging—well, whatever you’d like to pay us. You may enter $0 and download for free, or you may send us some funds in exchange for our educational offering. Whatever it feels worth to you, is fine with us.

Either way, these are living documents. We will make updates to the Night Photography Glossary over time, adding terms and updating definitions. The webpage will always be kept current, and occasional updated versions of the e-book will be available as well (if you download, you’ll receive an email whenever we post a new version).

OK, enough words from us—in this announcement, at least. Move on over to all the words in our glossary. Soon you’ll be able to tell all your friends about how you bulb-ramped that time-lapse and then used your colorimeter to ensure accurate K and dark-frame-subtracted the hot pixels. Bortle!

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

Live, in Front of an Online Audience: National Parks at Night!

In early March, Gabriel Biderman and I jetted over the Atlantic to run our first international trip of the year, to the Lofoten Islands of Norway. Two weeks later we returned to a very different life.

For the past two and a half months we haven’t been traveling for workshops—neither Gabe nor I, nor our business partners Matt Hill, Tim Cooper and Lance Keimig. We miss being in the outdoors at night, so much that we made a video about it. We also immediately missed interacting directly with the community of night photographers, both inside and outside the ranks of our workshop alums.

In an effort to reach out, and as part of the global collective effort to give us all something to do in the confines of our homes, we launched a series of weekly livestreams, as well as an online post-production course. Since March 23, we’ve been online at least three times per week, either on YouTube or Instagram, chatting with workshop alums and other night photographers, engaging in public Q&A’s with industry experts, teaching Lightroom and helping folks with their images, and more.

We’ve shared notices of these endeavors on our Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts, but have yet to mention anything in our blog. Today, that changes. Below you can see a rundown of all the online programs we’ve been offering this spring, along with our plans for the immediate future.

#BlogChat

Our #BlogChat livestream on YouTube is something that had been in the works for a while. Every week for more than five years we’ve published a post in this blog. But there is always so much more to say than can be fit into a thousand or two thousand words. So now we chat about it online, too, and we field questions from the live comments. Yay for more words!

On Tuesday nights, Matt sits down in his studio in Catskill, New York, and leads a conversation with whoever wrote that week’s blog post. We started with a week of five straight #BlogChats centered on posts from our archive, and since then have conducted a weekly online discussion of that week’s topic. We intend for this is be a consistent program, even when we’re back on the road.

Some topics we’ve covered so far:

• Make Printing Part of Your Process

• Returning to Nature, Returning to the World: Where We're Ready to Go

• Six Steps to Shaking Up Your Night Photography

You can see all our #BlogChat videos here:

To receive a notification from YouTube whenever we go live, be sure to subscribe to our channel!

(Yes, I am, right this minute, writing a blog post about a video program about our blog posts. It does not escape me that this is very meta. Is it possible that this week’s #BlogChat will be a video about our blog post about videos about our blog posts? We’ll see!)

Ask NPAN Anything / Conversations

Instagram is the social media service designed for photographers, so of course we have always dedicated a lot of time to our profile and image grid there. What we hadn’t done was engage via the platform’s live capability. Two months ago, that changed.

At the beginning of April we launched Ask NPAN Anything, a weekly Wednesday-night exchange between Gabe and one other instructor, and whoever was watching on Instagram could chime in with questions about … well, about anything. We’re always open books, happy to discuss all topics related to night photography, national parks and dark skies. We’ve been doing that for half a decade in our “Five Questions” blog series, and Instagram is the perfect alternative format for doing that live.

Each week featured a theme. One time Gabe chatted with me about national parks, another time he chatted with Matt about night portraits, another time he chatted with Tim about post-processing—and all of these were open to questions from anyone watching.

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Then Gabe had an idea: What if we invite one of our friends to join us for a conversation? He reached out to JC Carey of Nikon, who was happy to come online and talk about Nikon cameras and lenses, his amazing work with strobes and his adventures photographing at night.

The next guest was Art Suwansang of BenQ, and everyone was able to ask great questions about monitors, calibration, etc. Then photographer Susan Magnano joined us to chat about being “stuck” living in an RV in the wilderness of Moab for two months during the COVID19 lockdown. This past week Ralph Lee Hopkins, a National Geographic photographer and the director of photography expeditions for Lindblad Expeditions, joined for a groupwide conversation about his amazing travels.

Because format and “the feel” of this livestream has changed a bit, we are announcing a new name for it: NPAN Conversations. Gabe will still host this every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET, and other NPAN instructors will still often be guests. Here’s a peek at what we’re planning for the next few weeks:

• June 3: Rafael Pons of PhotoPills

• June 10: To be announced, talking about tripods

• June 17: Lance Keimig, talking about night photography books

• June 24: Sandra Ramos, aka National Park Patch Lady, talking about getting to know the smaller units of the National Park Service

We also have long-term plans for guests that include a national park ranger, an astronomer and a street photographer, as well as industry experts in the fields of lighting, printing, lenses and more.

For all of these sessions, the floor will be open for questions, so be sure to join us on Wednesday nights on Instagram (@nationalparksatnight) or npan.co/instagram.

The Night Crew Image Review

One of the most important activities on many of our workshops is the Image Review. We gather during daytime to go over the photographs we’ve been making at night. It gives the group a chance to celebrate its successes and to learn from its challenges.

Now we have brought that experience online with The Night Crew Image Review. Each week we’ve put out a call for images, and then we’ve met with participants on Zoom to go over their submissions. We’ve seen some great work, and we’ve offered suggestions on everything from initial capture to cropping to post-production.

Moreover, we have simulcast the meetings live on our YouTube channel so that other photographers can hopefully learn from the experience and join in the chat discussion. You can see all the Night Crew Image Review sessions we’ve done here:

As of June, we’re changing the schedule for this program to once per month, on dates to be announced. You can still submit images at any time by visiting npan.co/imagereview. We’ll reach out when it’s your turn for the livestream group review so that you can join us on Zoom, and we’ll announce the simulcast on our social media channels.

If you need more immediate feedback, that’s actually a service we offer! We run one-on-one sessions with photographers on a regular basis, on topics as varied as:

• Catalog Clutter and Image Organization

• Gear Consultation, Camera Settings

• Image Review

• Lightroom and Photoshop

• Mentoring and Artistic Development

• Monitor Calibration

• Night Photography Techniques

• Pre-Workshop Education

• Travel Prep

This is a service we offer online as well as in-person when possible. For more information, visit our Tutoring page.

Lightroom Live

This is another idea we’d contemplated for a while, and this was the perfect time to launch it: an online course designed to teach Lightroom, the most important piece of software for photographers, focused on the two most important modules, Library and Develop.

You can see more about our Lightroom Live online course in this video:

We’ve run two sessions of Lightroom Live already, each with a full cohort of 12 participants who attended four two-hour classes. (We’re keeping these classes small to maximize the time that participants get with the instructors.) We recently announced two more sessions, each in June, each on weekends, each with seats available:

• Session 3: June 5, 6, 12, 13

• Session 4: June 20, 21, 27, 28

The course also comes with bonuses! When you register you’ll receive a download of our new video Lightroom: Correcting Your Catalog Chaos (which will be on sale to the public soon—stay tuned!), and at the end of the course you’ll receive an hour of one-on-one time with the instructor of your choice.

See our Lightroom Live online course page for more information and to register today.

Other Endeavors

During all this non-travel time, we’ve been busy with other projects as well. Of course, we’ve still been writing blog posts, on topics ranging from the new Nikon D780 to a new intervalometer to ideas for long exposures at home and more.

We also recognized that five years of blog posts, over 200 in total, are a little unwieldy to look through when they’re organized only by date. So we created a brand new page on our website where you can see all our posts organized by topic. That’s about 300,000 words of free night photography education. We hope you enjoy!

We’ve also been busy on the publishing front. In April we released an e-book titled Great Balls of Fire: A Guide to Photographing Meteor Showers. It covers everything you’d want to know about the subject:

• which meteor events to target

• dream locations to photograph meteor showers

• how to scout, shoot and edit a meteor shower

• a gear guide for being perfectly equipped in the field

You can get more info and download the e-book here.

(Psst, psst! Want to know a secret? We’re also in the final stages of publishing our second e-book of the spring. Want a sneak peek?)

Wrapping Up

Of course, we have some more plans too. We’ll let you know as soon as they’re ready.

In the meantime, we’re excited to see you online! For more information and to stay updated about all of our livestream programs, visit npan.co/live.

Chris Nicholson is a partner and workshop leader with National Parks at Night, and author of Photographing National Parks (Sidelight Books, 2015). Learn more about national parks as photography destinations, subscribe to Chris' free e-newsletter, and more at www.PhotographingNationalParks.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT