Jim Richardson

Patterns - Of Our Living

Chaos seems to rule our daily lives. The blizzard of problems, events, meetings, small triumphs, frustrations, chance encounters, dreaded confrontations, long-for moments of loving and bliss –– all of it overwhelms us and we are often left wondering what it all means. But from one step removed, just a few thousand feet in the air, the patterns are revealed. Somehow, in each little step of life, we make something larger, something more permanent that we intended, and something more orderly that we knew.

It is worth considering and it may even be comforting, if only for a few moments.

Chicago as the clouds drifted in from the lake.

Stromness in Orkney, Scotland, a very old whaling village in the North Sea.

 

The abandoned village on Hirta, St. Kilda, Scotland.

Central Park in New York City.

 

 

Hill fort and farms in the Aran Islands, Ireland.

 

A lone church on Egilsay, Orkney, Scotland.

All images ©Jim Richardson

 

 

 

Vigil at the Stones: Frame 9,068

©National Geographic Society

Frame 9,068 came at around 2:30 a.m.

There by myself amongst the timeless standing stones of Callanish, I kind of lost track of time. The night's calm was as powerful as the stones. Around midnight, as the last of midsummer's light in these northern latitudes faded into a deep blue in the north, I thought:  I don't need to be rushing around. I can stay here all night.

In the nearby village I could hear the occasional barking dog and an unexplained sound that I eventually attributed to the earth adjusting itself to the passage of time.

It was peaceful. I was peaceful.

With that peace came the inner time to work on this picture -- to really stretch my seeing and try to bring something to a photograph of a place that has been photographed countless times before (including by me).

After all, it's not like I was seeing something new that nobody had ever seen before.  These stones were put up by the local folk sometime around 2900 BC.  That's before Stonehenge!  Without doubt there were spiritual structures here before the stones.  Before that, this place had been sacred for a very long time.

My Guide to the Milky Way

OK, this is cool. Sky Voyager on the iPhone!  Let me tell you why.

Anybody who has seen my photography in the last couple of years will have noticed that I'm fascinated with shooting the Milky Way.  And everybody should know by now that to take pictures of the night sky you need a really, really high ISO camera (like my Nikon D3.

But there's another tool that will make life a lot easier.  You see, you really need to know when and where the Milky Way is going to make itself available.  It rises and sets just like the sun and the moon. Knowing when that's going to happen from a given location can save you a lot of fruitless, sleepless nights.  

That's where SkyVoyager comes in. It's a really nice, easy to use astronomy program from Carina Software.  I've used it for several years. It'll tell you sunrise and sunset info as well as moonrise and moonset, and where these objects will be any time of the day or night, today or in the past or in the future.  So when I knew that I was going to be on Easter Island with the cool statues in January on just one day I could see that the Milky Way would be visible AND that the moon would set by midnight, giving me a shot at a picture.

Now comes the good part.  They just ported it over to iPhone!  It's not cheap, as iPhone apps go, costing $14.99. But, hey, if I've only got one shot at a great picture in a remote location, that's nothing.

The laptop version is easier to use, I think, but I'm glad to have both of them available.  SkyVoager and a $5000 Nikon D3 and you're ready!

St. Louis Arch: Compliments of a Low Ceiling

I had one simple strategy while I was shooting the light pollution story for National Geogaphic:  I would drive during the day and shoot at night.  If I ended up in a city I shot pictures of the urban lighting obliterating the night sky.  If I ended up in the dark stretches of the western United State I shot pictures of the glorious night sky.  Either way I had something to shoot every night for the month that I work on the story.

The St. Louis Arch image is a good example.  I had intended to drive to Chicago that day where I hoped to shoot the city from from the air.  But a quick check of weather enroute confirmed that the rain I was driving through blanketed much of the midwest, Chicago included.  So I elected to divert to St. Louis where I might have a shot at the Arch. 

The resulting image turned out to be one of my favorites, something I never expected to get.  And it’s gotten attention from other quarters, too.  National Geographic’s director of photography, David Griffin, wrote about it in his blog, as a stepping off place to discuss the ramifications of digital for the professional photojournalist.  Read David’s thoughts here.  

Secrets of the Milky Way

It was a grand sight to see, the Milky Way stretching across the sky behind Owachomo Bridge.  It was a natural subject for the opening spread of National Geographic’s story Our Vanishing Night in the November issue.

First, let’s get this out of the way. This is a straight shot.  

That’s right.  No layers in PhotoShop.  No multi-image, bracketed-exposure HDR computer magic. No telescope-mounted clock-driven hours-long exposure. At National Geographic we really can’t use all those wonder weapons of the digital era.  Readers expect reality and we try to deliver.

This picture just involved a camera on a tripod in front of the right scene.  Well, almost.  Photographing the Milky Way and not ending up with a big blur requires several elements, one of which has only been available in the past couple of years. Here’s what you need to know.

The Milky Way is out there every night.  But you need a really, truly dark sky like what they have at Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah.  You probably can’t do this picture east of the Mississippi. I scouted this location during the day, looking for the right bridge that faced the right direction and that I could get to in the middle of the night.  Oh, and if you want a dark sky you can’t have any moon.  That’s part of the next step.

Seeing Fireflies in the Dark

We live in a new Golden Age of photography.  The new digital cameras have an uncanny knack for seeing in the dark. How else could I have gotten this picture of the fireflies for our story on the Flint Hills of Kansas?

The bare facts are these:  76 second exposure at f2.8, ISO 1600.  Problem is, the bare facts don’t usually tell you what you need to know.  

So let me go a bit deeper into what brought this picture about.  There are several key factors if you are going to photography fireflies.  The first is the fireflies (naturally.) If you are an entomologist you won’t be surprised if I tell you there are a whole lot of firefly species.  You’ll probably say, well, no duh!  And there are a corresponding range of mating behavior and flashing patterns.  If you are a firefly bent on mating tonight you kind of need to find one of your own species. And you want to avoid the various cannibalistic species that will home in on your flashing tailpipe and have you for dinner. (I’m not kidding.)