A Three Day Shower

It was that time of August where the meteor showers were about to be in view. The previous year I didn’t have much luck seeing any so I was skeptical of shower this year. With my new camera I knew I could take landscape photos at night and they would turn out in a decent manner as long as it was calibrated to the right settings. Key phrase there is “calibrated to the right settings.” A week before the shower Sam and I went over by the Liberty Cap in the front of the Mammoth Hot Springs and started to take some photos of the clear sky. Unfortunately to take photos at night you should have a tripod and a remote clicker for your camera since one key part of night photography is long exposures. Any movement while the shutter is open will be caught in the image and will end up blurry.

                Sam and I were not equipped with any of these items at the moment and that meant we need a steady hand and patience for the next hour or so. There are a lot of different settings that we had to adjust and at one point we were taking photos that looked the same but when we compared the settings, they completely different. I won’t go into details about the settings, (I’m still not familiar with the settings for night time photos but have an idea), but we knew we had a lot to learn about it. After an hour in the cold night, we walked back to the dorm to look at the photos. Most of them were very blurry but we had one or two that was good enough to look at the settings and adjust it from there. A downside of the photography is the wait. When you take “X” seconds to expose a photo, you have to wait “X” seconds for that photo to develop. It is possible to take a 15 second night photo and have a good picture, but you can also take an hour long photo and have a great picture. That is the one aspect that I still need to research up on but it should be worth it in the end.

                The day of the shower I drove to Bozeman and went into the camera store and started to browse. After 20 seconds the clerk there helped me and I found a used tripod and remote for $50. I rushed back to the park and waited for the night to fall. I spent an hour or so in the pub drinking soda, talking to Missy and waiting for people to get off of work. After waiting so long I decided to just drive up to Swan Lake Flats and try to capture some night photography. After the first two exposures I found what I needed to do. I spent a total of an hour by myself taking photos and watching the sky. I drove back down the hill to pick up some people.

                I was very proud of the photos I had just taken and wen tto the pub where my Canadian friend David was at. He was a huge fan of night photography and knew a little about cameras since his dad was a professional photographer. He gave me a couple pointers with the compliments about my photos and I was off to repeat the journey. On the way to the car I picked up Michael, Shane and Connor. I kept my distance from Shane and Connor for most of the season but I felt like everyone and their mother should see what I had witnessed firsthand. I waited another five minutes or so and we ventured to the Flats.

                I had setup my camera and slowly clicked away while the other three were talking enjoying the view. Connor was an odd guy who looked for people to “WOW” at him. He had outrageous stories that were hard for me to believe but despite the odds of the stories being true, I didn’t hesitate to talk about his experiences. One story he had, that I can’t recall all of, was about his Grandma who was 60 and still in the prostitution business. Like I said before, I don’t recall much of it because I tried not to pay attention to it. With only him talking and the crickets in the background, it wasn’t hard to hear, but it was hard to listen to. For all I know, the story is true but I’d like to think differently.

                We stayed up for an hour before driving back down the hill. Michael stayed with me and we tried to recruit Mimzy, his girlfriend, and Seth. Mimzy was a Room Coordinator and wasn’t off until two so we had to wait. During the wait we asked her boss Jason if she could go early. Jason stated that it was his Friday and he should be the one to leave early. I didn’t hesitate to say what I thought because I had known Jason for over a year and have been able to joke around with him. So after he was done talking I responded with, “Jason, you don’t have any friends waiting for you to get off work, let Mimzy enjoy her friendships.” After that point I apologized as all of us laughed and we waited ten more minutes before Mimzy was ready to go.

                This was my third drive up to the Flats and I had finally come up with a great plan. My remote has a manual switch to where I move a small lever and it would hold the button down until I released it causing to take very long exposures or I could put the camera on a set time and it would continue to take pictures until I turned the remote off. I put the camera down on the tripod and set the exposure for 30 seconds and hopped back into the warm car where the four of us would stare into the night and watch for shooting stars. I would move the camera every 10 minutes or so and after each time I moved the camera, a shooting star of massive proportions would pass through the line of vision that the camera was once in. On one of the moves, I had the camera pointed straight up and as soon as I moved the camera, two large shooting stars created an “X” in the sky and it continued to light the sky up before it faded ten seconds later. It was funny looking back on it but a big disappointment at the time.

                I looked at the shooting stars three nights in a row each day with more anticipation than the other. I managed to snap okay pictures for the first night photography that I had done and shared the experience with others who I appreciated being there and others that needed to witness the beauty that the park had to offer than just sitting in your room playing videogames.