Night Has Come

Behind the Camera

I want you to see this beautiful church in the far northwestern corner of Kansas. Stevens Chapel is in Rawlins County, and it is maintained by the Rawlins County Historical Society. The church was built with limestone quarried in the local area.

This is the perfect place to highlight faith’s influence as settlers made their homes across the plains and prairies of America’s Midwest. Stevens Chapel tells an amazing story of a rural church built in the poverty of the 1890s whose members made and sold cane sorghum syrup to raise money for building materials, and of the men who cut and laid the large stone blocks to build the church during hard economic times when crops were failing. Preserving Stevens Chapel honors these early settlers and teach current and future generations about the hard work and courage it took to settle and live in Northwest Kansas in the late 1800s. 

The broad plains and clear skies of western Kansas are perfect for landscape and night scape photographs. I am so grateful to the folks at the Rawlins County Museum who permitted me to stay through this cold night and attempt to capture a glimpse of the beauty of the starry skies that displayed Kansas’ motto “Ad Astera per Aspera.” Loosely translated to say, “To the Stars through Difficulty!”

My biggest challenge of this night was how to compose the photograph in a way as to capture its story in a single image. I didn’t think this it was possible, so I didn’t take one photo, but a series of photos that were stitched together to create the scene that I call, “Night Has Come.”

Ben King released a spiritual hymn in 1961 titled “Lord, Stand By Me.” More than 400 versions of the song have been recorded. The opening verse includes these words –

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No, I won't be afraid
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

Looking at the Milky Way’s galactic core, with its bright colored cosmic gases, I was struck with my own small size and frailty in comparison with the billions of stars of our universal home. The clouds eventually gave way to the brilliant heavens.

Geek Speak

I wrote earlier that the image in my mind was not possible in a single shot. The photograph highlighted this week is a composition of fifteen photographs! The forefront displaying Stevens Chapel, includes four photographs stitched together. Several different lighting techniques were used. I placed small lights in the windows on the backside of the chapel. Those lights illuminated the interior and gave the illusion that the lights were on for worship. I then painted with my headlamp across the front of the building and the grass.

My camera settings for each of these shots included a 10-second shutter speed and an aperture of f/8 to capture a sharpness of the entire depth of field. The lighting allowed me to lower the ISO to 800 for a cleaner image. I used manual focus on the chapel wall.

With the foreground completed, I raised the camera lens toward the stars. With my camera refocused onto the stars, I changed settings to an 8-second shutter speed (to keep the stars pinpoint sharp). Opening the aperture to f/1.2 on my Viltrox 27mm, f/1.2 PRO lens, I was able to capture a lot of light from the stars. Still, the ISO was raised to 3200 to maximize the sensor’s ability to collect as much light information as possible.

With those camera settings, I took a layer series of five photographs. Finally, I raised the camera, overlapping the stars by one third in the screen and took a layer series of six photos. In all, I had three layers from the ground to the sky made up of fifteen photographs.

The entire shoot took  1-½ hours to complete. I was cold, but exhilarated by the beautiful scene. After getting into the studio, I spent another four hours on the computer to grade each photograph and then stitch everything into a single panoramic image. When it was all completed, “Night Has Come” was born.

You can purchase a copy from my on-line prints store on this website (www.wanderingmonkhikes.com/store).