Colorado Summits: Twin Sisters (11,428′), and Planning and Timing Your Photography

Moonset Beside Longs Peak. From Twin Sisters Peak, Colorado, July 4, 2012

Lately, one of my favorite things to do is to rise in the wee hours of the morning, carry my camera gear a few hours up a Rocky Mountain trail in the darkness, then be in position at dawn to catch what I am always hoping will be a scene illuminated with spectacular light. I don’t do this all the time–just when I think the circumstances will be just right for something special. Sometimes it works and I come away with a good image; other times, the light and cloud cover don’t cooperate and I come away with nothing. You can’t win unless you enter the race, though, so I keep at it.

Last July 4th was one of those days that seemed like it might be a good one for some landscape photography near Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. The weather forecast called for partly cloudy skies (clear skies are boring!) and, even more interesting, the moon and sunrise tables called for a full moon to be setting just after sunrise. Given the moon’s location, it seemed to me that if I were sitting atop Twin Sisters (11,428′) to the east of Longs Peak (14,259′) at sunrise I would get some great sunrise images as well as–just perhaps–a nice image of the full moon setting behind Longs Peak and the famous Diamond.

Arising just after midnight, I drove up from Boulder to the trailhead, hiked uphill for several hours by the light of a full moon, and found myself arriving at the Twin Sisters summit just as the first light of the eastern dawn started to bleed blue around the brilliant, glowing eyes of the Pleiades, Jupiter, Venus and Aldebaran. Beautiful! The cloud cover was a bit heavier than I had expected, so the sunrise wasn’t the “10” I always hope for–but the moonset to the west turned out to be worth the trip. At first the moon was obscured by the clouds as it dropped toward the saddle between Mt. Meeker and Longs Peak, and I groaned with frustration…but at the last minute it emerged and I was able to make the image you see above.

The lesson? It takes effort to put yourself somewhere special where you can capture an image that is different from the millions of other images of the same well-known landmark. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but it is a good feeling when it does.

Tip: If you want a superb website/download that will help you figure out the location of the sun and moon at any given place on Earth at any given hour, try this excellent resource: The Photographer’s Ephemeris .

Good luck!

P.S. (January, 2015) It is fun to go back and reprocess old images to see if you can improve on your earlier attempts. Although this moonset photograph was taken with a 12mp camera on a very hazy early morning, it was still possible to bring out a little more detail from the original raw file. To illustrate, here is the original raw, converted to JPEG for the web, with no post-processing:

Out-of-camera version, unprocessed file. From Twin Sisters Peak, Colorado, July 4, 2012.

Now, here is the same image after working it over yet again on January 2, 2015. The difference between the untouched out-of-camera file and this one is quite obvious (Nik/Google Silver Efex Pro was quite a help.)

There is also a fairly large difference between this version and the one at the top of this page. The challenge was in trying to extract detail, then to create at least a semblance of depth despite the very flat lighting:

Moonset on the Loft, Meeker and Longs. From Twin Sisters Peak, Colorado, July 4, 2012.