On the early morning of Wednesday January 3, 2018 I took over 50 time exposure photos of my house and garden under a magical moonlit sky filled with cirrocumulus clouds between 3:00 and 4:30 AM. I had been in Lake Havasu City to work the day before and as usual I went to see a late movie while I was there. Driving home after midnight, I noticed the beauty of the night sky with a just-past-full moon brightly illuminating the thin clouds of an approaching Pacific front and the landscape below, and it occurred to me to perhaps get out the camera and make some photos. Below is one of the first photos I took, showing the constellation of Orion dipping low over the western horizon near the saguaro cactus, and the brilliant star Sirius breaking through the thin cirrus clouds to the center left over the roofline of the house.
Initially I resisted this photo session idea a bit since it was nearing 3 AM and I was tempted to “just do it another night”. But the fact that there was a nice “mackerel sky” going on made me reconsider, since this doesn’t happen all that often. Named for the resemblance of the rippled clouds to the scales covering the body of a fish, mackerel skies usually occur 6 to 12 hours before the approach of a frontal system and often portend rain, although here in the desert that is less true perhaps than it is in other climates. Since this particular cloud type is somewhat less common than average, and also visually very interesting, I decided to set aside my procrastination tendency and just get out and do it. I told myself, “Good photos are always worth staying up late for if necessary. You won’t regret it. ” It was, and I don’t. 
Having gotten out of the house and into the garden with the camera and tripod, it was time to start experimenting with exposures. When doing nocturnal photos, it is necessary to play around with different aperture settings and times and ISO speeds, trying to get varying elements to work together in harmony. My goal was to have it look clearly like nighttime, but to avoid total darkness and shadow in what is actually a very interesting foreground. Some darkness is obviously required, but not too much.
Meanwhile, the opposite problem of overexposure can also happen, even at night, thanks to the brilliance of a full moon, which over a long time exposure can result in a washed out appearance that looks a lot like a poor quality daytime photo. It’s worth remembering that moonlight is merely faint, reflected daylight, and that the full spectrum of colors is present, just in concentrations too low for our human eyes to see. So if you turn up the sensitivity of the ISO settings and leave the shutter open for too long, too much moonlight can enter and bleach out the landscape, just as if it were done during the daytime, if a bit more slowly. Again, the goal is to have it look like night, not a flat sunny day at high noon.
People often ask me how I get this type of lighting into a nocturnal photo. The answer is first of all, I do not generally use a flash for time exposures like these. Because the shutter is open for a relatively long time, the effect of light entering the camera lens is cumulative, not instantaneous. The way a camera “sees” light in an aggregated fashion over time is radically different from the way our eyes and brains interpret light in a very non-cumulative manner, moment-to-moment.
In this example, the sky and attendant clouds are entirely lit by the luminous moon, while the foreground is partly lit by the lights inside the house and partly by me shining a LED headlamp onto the scene for about 2 to 3 seconds. The use of a handheld light directed selectively at aspects of a given scene is often referred to as “light painting”. It is different from using an in-camera flash because you add light in a time exposure over several seconds (sometimes longer) utilizing a handheld light source rather than the instant but momentary flash built into the camera. Using hand-held lights of whatever type can be a little bit tricky, however. Too much light painting and things look washed out, but too little and they appear dark and with less detail than is desirable.
One of the more challenging aspects of lighting this scene with a headlamp was getting the exposure of the Agave palmeri leaves in the foreground correct. Since I was standing within only a few feet of the agave rosette, and the camera’s open lens was less than 18 inches away from it, it was easy to overexpose by making the LED light I was holding too bright. Several photos I took made the softly colored grayish-green leaves into burned-out white icicles jabbing skywards into the picture frame. I deleted those photos. Other times, the rosette was a bit too dark since I didn’t flash the LED onto the rosette long enough. The latter effect is not always unappealing however, as the image below shows, since the silhouettes provided by darker leaves against a brighter backdrop can easily have aesthetic merit of their own.
More distant objects can have the LED shining on them for longer without risking as much overexposure since light intensity drops quickly with distance. And obviously, there’s no hard rule stating that any extra LED light painting needs to occur whatsoever. Sometimes on a brightly moonlit night, allowing la luna to do the work for you is also acceptable. The photo below illustrates this concept. There are some lights on inside the house to provide a warm domestic glow, but the exterior landscape is entirely lit by the moon alone. I personally strongly prefer having light painting effects added to my plants because they are so interesting in their own rights, but I usually also take some photos of the scene by ambient moonlight alone just to have a point of comparison. Both types of photos are valuable, and beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder….
The final photo of the night is one I took mostly looking away from the house with its lit windows and over the front garden to the northwest. I wanted to catch the Aloe aculeata in the foreground with its rapidly developing flower spikes and winter-ruddy leaf colors along with some of the other cacti and succulents in my landscape. As with the brief process tutorial explained above, it took me about 8 or 10 tries to get the particular combination of features I wanted into one image. I wanted the aloe to be well-lit but not overexposed, the more distant tree aloe “Hercules” and the saguaro cactus to also be well lit but not too dim, and the dark sky to have some deep blue colors and stars without exposing it to look like a bad daytime photo. All of my previous attempts came up just a little short on one or more of these fronts. But as I narrowed in on the proper combo of ISO, aperture, depth of field, length of time exposure, and handheld light painting, I finally got it. This was the last image of the night.
Satisfied with my creative output for the early morning session, I took down the camera, folded up the tripod, downloaded the photos onto the computer, and ultimately went to bed before the long winter night ended. And now it’s time to share the beauty with the wider world. Enjoy!