Behind the Image: Wooden Spiders Under the Stars

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I’m enamored with the Milky Way core. I’m enamored with stumps on lake shores. Naturally when I camp at a lake in a dark sky location, and that lake has stumps all around it, I’m going to see if I can put the two together. These three very large stumps were within sight of our camp site at Trinity Lake when we were there for several nights in June 2022. I felt absolutely compelled to light paint them under the stars! This image is the result of several shots of the sky shot in rapid succession and stacked to reduce digital noise caused by the needed camera settings to capture the stars before they trail due to the Earths rotation. These were then merged with several more frames with different camera settings where I light painted the stumps by walking around with an LED flashlight. In this way I can create a very clean image with much more detail than can likely be achieved in a single frame.

Nightscape photograph titled “Wooden Spiders Under the Stars,” featuring three massive tree stumps illuminated by light painting beneath the Milky Way core at Trinity Lake in Trinity County, California. Captured in June 2022 during multiple long exposures, the image blends stacked sky frames for reduced digital noise with carefully lit foreground exposures created using an LED flashlight. The twisted, root-like forms of the stumps stretch across the dry lakebed, their organic shapes resembling giant wooden creatures under the vast galactic canopy. Above, the Milky Way glows in purples and golds against a dark, crystal-clear sky, creating a vivid composition that merges celestial beauty with the rugged textures of nature reclaimed by time.

Prints available here.

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