Mountain Glass Reflections and the Milky Way

How I Captured this Photo

Last summer, I invited one of my good friends Connor on a road trip across Colorado. One of my strongest passions is adventure filmmaking, and so we set out for a 4 day trip in July, with the plan to depart from Boulder, CO, across the state, down to Carson, CO, then over to Durango, and up to Silverton, and back North from there.. We had a lot of miles to cover in a short window. You’d think we’d have a solid plan of attack with some activities planned out and campsites lined up. But we didn’t. And this created some unusual challenges and very late nights for us, but it also allowed us more latitude to change our plans last minute, and that's what allowed this photo to happen.

On the second day of our trip, Connor and I went from Alamosa, to Durango, up to Silverton. We were headed for the Ice Lakes. To get to the trailhead, there's a dirt road that stretches a few miles from the highway to the trailhead. We drove all the way to the trailhead hoping for a scenic spot to set up camp, but the entire road was filled with campers and other people’s vehicles. After some deliberation, we drove back out of the dirt road looking for an spot we could pull off to the side, and we lucked out to snag a wedge of the dirt road right by a small pond and a riverside. It really couldn’t get much better, we had a view of the mountains, and the pond was incredibly still. It looked like a glass reflection. There were mountains on both sides of the composition, and the lake valley caught in the middle. There were flowers in the foreground, and a humble mountain in the background. I got out the tripod with the intent to shoot an overnight time lapse, and set it up on the grass right above the pond, on a precarious wedge of land. On the front of the camera, was a lake it could fall into with one push. Behind it was about two feet of walking room between the campers. We’d have to be very cautious around the setup, but it created the best composition so it was worth it. The landscape we saw is the landscape in this photo. After three more long days, totaling 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of driving, and hiking for the rest of it, we got home and I sat down to edit the content.

The Editing Process

I was thrilled with the content we had shot on our trip, and as I came across the timelapse of the lake, I got the idea to combine a night shot and a daytime shot into one photo. I found an optimal still from 6pm, and another one from 11pm that showed a bit of the milky way. These were my selections:

Photoshop

I fired up photoshop and got cracking. My first order of business was overlaying the photos on time of one another, and finding an optimal angle to match them. I settled on slicing them diagonally, to showcase the sun bathed landscape with its glass like reflections in the bottom half, while revealing the mirage of stars and the milky way in the top half. To do this, I selected the triangle portion I wanted to delete on the night image, feathered it out, and cut it.

Enabling the layer below it, the two images were now merged into one. I then added some slight curves to increase the contrast, and took the image into Lightroom to do some color cleaning.

Lightroom

I use lightroom because it is the best tool I have to naturally edit a photo and draw the eye to the points of interest. This is the image I started with:

Looking at this photo, I noticed the tree reflections on the right weren’t very easy to see. I also noticed the trees on the left looking a little too punchy, and the mountain in the background looking a little dark. The milky way was also a tad washed out for my taste. I use lightroom because it is the best tool I have for targeting certain parts of an image and adjusting them in a natural, pleasing way. It gives you the option to add circular filters, which I used to fix all of the above issues.

I brought more vividness into the tree reflections on the right, reduced the contrast of the trees on the left by raising the shadows and decreasing the luminance of the yellow-greens. I added a circle filter over the mountain and increased its highlights to make it pop. I added another one over the stars on the right to reduce some strange reddish artifacts near the trees, likely due to issues with my sensor or white balance. I also added a larger circle filter over the entire night sky to shift its white balance to more of a blue tone.

This is the resulting before and after:

Photoshop (Again)

I went back into photoshop one more time to fix some hot pixels that had become evident in the color editing process. If you look closely, they can be seen it the blackness of the trees on the right.

I used the ‘dust and scratches’ filter and it took them right out.

And after all of that, I had an end result and a fun story to tell alongside it.

This is one of my favorite stills, not only because of the image, but because of the memories attached to it. I’m so grateful Connor and I made it through our adventures that week. It was trying and painful and sleep deprived and uncertain many times, but on the flip side, it was exhilarating, beautiful, revitalizing, and we did what I enjoy most: filming and photographing in the beauty this world has to offer. We didn’t have to go across the country, we just had to ask the internet some questions and be resourceful. And we found what we were looking for, right in our backyard. I encourage you to look a little deeper into your own backyard. Even if you don’t live somewhere exciting, there is something unique and beautiful about every location that others would enjoy looking at. Be adventurous, try to plan your adventure a little better than we did, but don’t let that step on your spontaneity-- after all, that is how we walked away with the memories we did.