Top 16 New Night Photography Images of 2020

A lot of photographers post their Top10 or Best 9 images of the past year, and I’ve posted a few of my favorite 2020 images overall and out of curiosity, mobile phone images as well. But as an enthusiastic night photographer, how was the year for night photography?

On one hand the global Covid pandemic put restrictions on travel, on the other hand, going to remote, outdoor places represented one of the few safe options for travel and recreation. So provided that you can get to your desired location and stay there without too much exposure to potentially contaminated indoor air, dispersed remote camping, stargazing and night photography could be safer than staying home and going into a grocery store.

In mid to late February we had a previously scheduled workshop in Death Valley. The group decided to rent a Jeep to visit more remote locations, and we started before dawn to catch the Milky Way rise.

On the way back from Death Valley, taking a night off at Walker Lake enabled capturing the Milk Way arch leading to the lights of Hawthorne, Nevada.

Mid-March found us in Death Valley landscapes, then on the way home Central Nevada, enjoying historic locations at night:

The pandemic and lockdowns arrived, and with uncertainty on how fasta nd wide the pandemic might spread, photography became a strictly in-neighborhood affair. We went down to our lakeshore and captured some Milky Way shots.

Then lockdown restrictions started to ease, and taking recommended precautions, a trip to rural Central Nevada seemed a safe and appropriate option.

Rural Nevada remained much less affected by the pandemic than more populous states, so a couple more forays revisiting sites and exploring more of the state were sanity-protecting moves in crazy times.

Then Bodie State Historic Park reopened for outdoor, safely-distanced, small group events, so we were able to bring a few photographers there with us.

In July we ran a combined Bodie-Nevada ghost town itinerary with a small group, with the added feature of Comet NEOWISE in the sky. We were also early enough in the summer to practice capturing Milky Way arch panoramas.

We’ve been testing that combined Bodie-then-Nevada itinerary for years, first with a single couple, then a couple more years with small groups. As we get better at smoothly handling the logistical challenges of securing meals and lodging for groups while arriving at the right time for best light in the stunning wide open spaces in Nevada, we’re offering this great Wild West adventure again in 2021, this time in June.

In August we went back out with a few photographers to our favorite local night photography spot, Bodie State Historic Park. Are you beginning to see a trend here? Fortunately for us Bodie is a local destination that we’ve arranged over 60 private sessions to access, and knowing the services such as restaurants and revisiting them during and throughout the pandemic, we could navigate the logistics of

August also offers the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Late August also saw a tremendous wildfire that threatened our home, so I went a few miles down the road to see whether we should be packing and evacuating.

In September we had to postpone to October our planned night photography workshop in Bodie, but we had secured a hiking permit to the Wave a few months earlier, so we scouted other remote spots in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado to see where else we might run workshops in late summer if extreme and unsafe wildfire smoke becomes a new normal in California.

Returning to Bodie was like seeing an old friend, a vestige of normalcy of in a strange year. We have practice nights in our night photography workshops before we arrive for our precious time in Bodie, and we try to include excellent subject and composition opportunities for those nights as well.

The end of the month saw our annual Yosemite Fall Colors workshop, and while not the main focus, we always try to include a little night photography in our landscape photography workshops.

Temperatures are coming down by October in Death Valley National Park, so after installing a set of durable All Terrain rated tires on my Subaru, a quick return visit to The Racetrack was a nice diversion.

November started with the end of our fall workshop in Yosemite, but later in the month looked like another good time to stay home. That didn’t stop a horrible fire to start in high winds and race towards us. We had to monitor the fire’s progress to endure that the wind direction remained a few degrees off from coming right at us. But dozens of homes burnt to the ground and one life was tragically lost.

We had to postpone our Death Valley Winter Light workshop in early December. The annual Geminid Meteor shower provided a consolation prize from a suitably remote locations.

The Saturn – Jupiter conjunction provided another astronomical show that we enjoyed, as so many other times in the year, from a vantage point in our neighborhood.

So the year had a number of themes for us… local, local, local… rural, rural, rural… Bodie, Bodie, Bodie and Nevada, Nevada, Nevada (Bodie and much of Nevada being local and rural for us), and an occasional visit, when allowed, to Death Valley, Yosemite and remote, undeveloped, public lands. For the foreseeable future it looks like 2021 will be much of the same. We moved to the Eastern Sierra because being surrounded by remote landscapes and historic sites was where we wanted to be, and we’ve been very fortunate that the peaceful outdoor pursuits we came here to enjoy have proven to be among the safest ways to remain sane in the current global health situation.

Form a business perspective, the year was exhausting and let’s just say not financially rewarding. If you plan Bodie workshops for 10-12 participants but end up running them at 6, you keep your expenses but lose most of the potential profits. Covid restrictions added to the administrative time required and burden. Add in frequent pandemic-related or smoke-forced reschedules, and your communications required go up 3X-4X. Financials are hit by refunds and reschedules cut into future workshops’ profitability, while loans like EIDL give you a debt burden you for 30 years, just to get by for one year. No doubt this will seriously affect many operators’ ability to continue, and it may impoverish some that don’t have deep pockets.

There’s a saying in the wine business: “the way to make a little money in the wine business is to start with lots of money.” Increasingly as the global pandemic dragging on puts a strain on many operators’ finances, that may be true for the photography workshop community and other small travel tour operators as well.