School’s Out!

Hi y’all, Dan here! Thanks for joining me. If you watch my YouTube videos, this is my usual greeting. As I begin this blog journey, it just seems like the right way to start.

Each blog will center around a photograph. (After all, this is a photography website.)

I began nature and wildlife photography a few years back as a way of slowing down to enjoy the beauties of creation. So, I will share nature or wildlife photographs taken from one of my adventures. I hope you enjoy the picture, but I really want to encourage you to go outside and look around at nature. It’s amazing!

I plan to do a couple of things with these blogs.

First, I will be sharing the story behind the picture. Second, I want to provide the technical side of the photograph for other photographers. I get loads of questions for both the story, as well as my camera settings. This way, I can answer both. If you aren’t interested in both sections of the blog, simply focus on your area of interest and skip the rest.

I try to capture a larger story in my photographs. Something more than just a snapshot. Something that places the subject in its world, and tells what it may be doing there. Some subjects are wildlife; birds, fish, or animals. Both large and small. Some subjects are the landscape itself; trees, plants, mountains, and prairies. Some include buildings; schools, churches, or homes. Other photos are night skies; stars, moon, or other celestial sites. My very favorites are photographs that combine all the above.

The Story of the Image

One of my favorite images is this one with the Milky Way coming over the top of an old schoolhouse. Looking at the photo, I can almost hear the children of early settlers playing on the school grounds, or reciting the pledge of allegiance before beginning their studies of the day, or slamming their books closed as they prepare to rush home. Also, I look at the stars and realize these are the same stars that the children saw when they were chasing fireflies at night and looked heavenward as they prayed before going to sleep.

Yes, these photos are much more than just pictures. They capture stories and open room for the imagination to explore. This photograph was taken at the beginning of Milky Way season in 2025. The Milky Way is visible in the northern hemisphere from March until late October. After that, it rises above the horizon after sunrise. Through fall and winter, we don’t see the beautiful galactic core until early spring when the orbit of our little celestial home shifts to let us look at the great neighborhood of our galaxy.

To see the vibrant gaseous colors of the Milky Way, I have to travel to dark sky areas. I’ve seen the dark skies over Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. However, I am truly blessed to live in southeastern Kansas. It’s a short drive to escape the light polluted areas and see the night sky like I remember witnessing as a young boy in the sticks of Alabama.

This subject of the photograph in this post is the Lower Fox Creek Schoolhouse near Strong City, Kansas. The limestone school was built in 1882 and served area students, children of settlers in the local Flint Hills area, until 1930.

If you zoom in on the windows of the school, you may see the picture of George Washington hanging inside the classroom. School’s Out! photograph offers a sense of place in its story. I hope you agree.

This National Historic Landmark is truly an iconic site of life on the prairie. You can visit the school which sits in the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve managed by the great men and women of the National Parks Service.

Geek Speak

I took this photo around 1am in May. It was an exceptionally clear sky. It seems we have had a stormy spring, with few clear, starry nights. I’m really not complaining. This is Kansas and we will pray for rain in August. So, I appreciate all we can get now. It does make nights like the one in this photo especially fun.

I am always learning in photography. That is one of my favorite parts of this craft. Each genre of photography requires different skills and considerations. Night photography is particularly challenging to me. I think it requires a foreground to offer a sense of place, as well as the stars to give room for the imagination. Sharp clear foregrounds and sharp clear skies require very different camera settings. It’s not easy.

I tried a couple of special tricks for this image. For the schoolhouse, I place small lights on the outside of the back windows to illuminate inside the room. I wanted to make the school come alive, as if the children were inside making the sounds of learning and laughter. I also used a technique called “light painting” on the outside of the building to have the schoolhouse stand out from the rest of the picture.

To light paint the subject, I set my camera to a high numbered aperture (like f/8) to get a greater depth of field and keep more of the details in sharp focus. I also decrease the ISO to 800 to reduce the noise of the image. Then I set the shutter speed to 10 or 15 seconds. My go-to white balance setting for night photography is 3800K. That offers the cooler tone that I personally like for night shots. I set the focus to manual and then focus the camera on the building itself.

In this photograph, I took two shots of the foreground. In one, I set a 10 second timer for my shutter release. I pressed the shutter button, quickly walked to the left edge of the frame and lit the schoolhouse and grass by waving my headlamp on its lowest setter to “painting” the area. I took a second shot by doing the same thing, but quickly walking to the right edge of the frame and painting from that direction. Never paint the image from directly behind the camera. I always try to cross light the subject this way. I then merge the two images in post-editing software like Photo Shop (I use Affinity Photo).

Next, I turn may attention to the sky. Night scape photography is very camera specific. I use a Sony a6700 camera. My favorite lens is a Viltrox 27mm, f/1.2. You will need to play with your gear for what works best. For taking star photography with my kit, I set my shutter speed to 8 seconds. Any faster and I lose detail of the sky, any slower and the image captures star trails (stars look like little streaks because of the earth’s rotation). With the aperture at f/2.5, I then manually focus on a bright star by adjusting the focus ring until the star looks like a little point of light rather than a blurry blob. My ISO is set to 3200, but I may increase it to 6400 if I don’t like the look of the test image. Again, white balance is 3800 kelvin for a cooler sky look.

This photograph is actually a panorama made with two images wide, and two images tall. I stitched them together in Affinity Photo (you may prefer Photo Shop). That’s it.

This is one of my favorite Milky Way photographs that I’ve taken. I hope you enjoy it.

If you would like a copy of this, or any of my select photographs, you can visit the store page of this website (www.wanderingmonkhikes.com/store) and order the size and paper that you desire. These orders are completed by and shipped from White Wall Labs, a premium photo printing company. White Wall has been voted eight times by TIPA (Technical Image Press Association) as the world’s best photo lab. They use excellent quality paper (I offer a matte, glossy, and crystal pearl paper for all of my photographs). Their customer service is superior too. If you have and damage to your order, they will replace it hassle free. Select the size and paper of you choice, prices vary according to size. Add it to your cart and checkout from their secure site. Thank you for supporting my work and enabling me to share more images.

Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and stay on the path! God bless you.

Dan “Wandering Monk”