Overnight at Epinette
Manitoba parks had recently announced that they completed a controlled burn around the Epinette Creek Trailhead as part of their wildfire prevention program. When I saw the area the week before this shoot on my way home from hiking in the Spirit Sands, I knew I wanted to use it for a Milky Way foreground.
I’ve been hiking in Spruce Woods for more than 20 years. I was 13 the first time I was on the Epinette Creek Trail when I went with my Scout group. In all that time, I have never seen the area in this condition. Covering the rolling hills from Highway 5 all the way to the trailhead are charred roots and grasses with orange bunches of junipers spread throughout. It provided for a very unique take on a familiar landscape that just happened to line up with an early season new moon. I knew I had to jump at this opportunity. I arrived early while I still had lots of daylight left to scout for compositions.
While wandering the fields looking for my favourite vantage, I found a couple of jaw bones and an antler. Placing them in a nice looking patch of burned roots, I found a nice composition that wasn’t on my shot list.
Before heading out, I had checked a few critical times, mainly the Milky Way core visibility and the moonrise. The Milky Way core would rise around 1:30 am in the south. The moon wouldn’t rise until after 5 am, well into morning twilight. The Milky Way core can feel really busy in the night sky, but I had a few hours of darkness before it would rise and I wanted to try to get some star trails in that time. I found a perfect gnarly looking tree to use as a foreground element. I could easily get a north facing composition with it so that I could frame Polaris, the North Star, above it and get those nice concentric trails. Everything was going great – until my camera battery died after 40 minutes of continuous shooting. The trails weren’t as long as I’d have liked, but I haven’t done many star trails before and was still happy with the result.
The final item on my shot list for the evening was to try and shoot some of Manitoba’s provincial flower, the prairie crocus, under a starlit sky. I’ve done a couple night shots with crocuses in the foreground over the last few years, missing only the Milky Way. It just so happened that the new moon in April lined up very well with the crocuses in their peak. Even more fortuitous was the large field of crocuses directly next to the parking lot. I barely had to wander 50 feet to find the perfect clump for my foreground. Even better, they were on the opposite side of a small hill blocking the view of cars parked at the trailhead.
With a bit of downtime between sunset and night, I decided to set up my camera to take a short time lapse of the bunch of flowers I intended to use. Watching it back later, I enjoyed seeing the flower petals close up with the fleeting light. Around 2 am, I set up to shoot a focus stacked image of the crocuses to use as my foreground. I did take a tracked exposure of the sky that I blended in, but I did take a photo of the sky before moving my camera so that I could align the sky as it was.
Below is a short (10 second clip) time lapse composition of a bunch of crocuses with their flowers closing up as the sun sets and the sky gets gradually darker into night.
