A Spectacular Failure
Failure is not an option. Unless you can pick up the pieces of wreckage and mash them together to make something snazzy.
In 2016 I went on a lone wander through the French and Swiss Alps, camera in hand, in the hope that I could collect myself a few stand-out shots of the mountains. I came home with a couple of images that I was pretty darned happy with, and I’ll probably talk about those in another post. This is the story of how I fell asleep and accidentally made this shot...
A Blanket of Cloud
The Journey
After a long and tiresome trudge to the alpine skier’s paradise of Zermatt, I stumbled into my overpriced lodge and disappointingly looked South West, where I was led to believe that the Matterhorn supposedly stood. It was cold, damp and the opaque grey clouds filled the valley, smothering the mountains and any hopes I had of capturing a worthwhile photo.
I skulked around the town for a while, found somewhere to have a meal and a drink to temper my dissatisfaction with the weather gods. Once it had gone dark, I got bored and decided to have an early night, I’d been on the road since 5am that morning to reach the town in good time. Heading to the hotel, I saw a light in the sky, it was a cable car station on one of the mountains shining through the clouds. Somewhat optimistically I propped up my camera on a fence post and fired off a long exposure shot into the darkness to see what was up there.
Spot the Matterhorn...
The Failure
To my surprise the visibility was rapidly improving, and...is that the Matterhorn behind that cloud?? I ran back to my hotel for my tripod, looked out from my balcony and there it was! I started trying to find a composition with the longest lens I own, the somewhat paltry Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.... and became increasingly frustrated with my own inability to find a shot with the gear I had at hand. I settled with a portrait-oriented shot, but wasn’t particularly happy with it.
I decided to cut my losses and just take a timelapse of the stars passing over the mountain instead. I hadn’t taken a passable star timelapse before, so I spent my limited brainpower on remembering how to take them, entirely forgetting to recompose into landscape for a video. I passed out on the bed for half an hour, waking up to a cloudy sky and a camera that had filled its SD Card with a mass of photos with a portrait orientation. Bugger.
The Salvation
When I got home and looked at the 140 or so virtually identical shots of stars processing over the mountain, I realised that I’d inadvertently mimicked the method for stacking star trails (of a fashion). With the help of ‘StarStax 0.71’, (a fantastic piece of freeware by Markus Enzweiler) which, essentially overlays a series of images, prioritising the starry highlights and fills in any gaps. The practical upshot is that the stars become unbroken lines along their path, whilst the stationary objects in the image, in this case, the Matterhorn, is untouched.
Star trails always look spectacular, but I’d never thought to create one before. And I think it turned out alright. Even if it was a stupid mistake.