Inspirations – Kevin McElheran
Check out this awesome photo by Kevin McElheran of the recent eclipse. Kevin has been doing some amazing night photography and light-painting. Go check out his night photography and light-painting gallery and see why I absolutely love his unique style and vision–you’ll be blown away! This is one guy to watch–he is taking night photography to the next level. Kevin always does really well in the photo contests hosted here and over at Visual Wilderness (hurry, deadline to enter is Dec 31 at midnight eastern time). If you want to learn the basics of light-painting go here. Below the photo is Kevin’s description of how he made the photo.
©Kevin McElheran
The Painful Stuff: It was stupid cold and I didn’t have gloves with me(!!) which equaled frozen fingers @ 15 seconds holding the remote cable. My eyes watered up, then my eye lashes froze into little icicles, which fogged up my glasses leaving me unable to see and fingers too far gone to wipe my glasses clean. After getting this shot, it was all I could do to grab the tripod and run blindly for the car which had the heater running…(my next problem).
Entering that nice hot climate of the interior of my car sent pain so terrible into my fingers I would have preferred slaming them in the car door so I just sat there, all alone, crying and whinning trying to believe it was worth it!
The Other Technical Info: 5dMII, 24 – 70 2.8, ISO 3200, 15 seconds, remote cable, full lunar eclipse.
Darwin Wiggett 
December 29, 2010 at 11:03 AM
A-maz-ing! Kevin – your work is stunning.
December 29, 2010 at 11:47 AM
Just big sigh came out from my mouth. Really fabulous.
December 29, 2010 at 12:22 PM
Frozen eyelashes? Ohhhhh man! This looks amazing, totally worth it!! That sky is breathtaking…
December 29, 2010 at 1:40 PM
Great spotlight Darwin. Kevin deserves all the recognition he has received so far with much more to come I’m sure. Really great work.
December 29, 2010 at 7:28 PM
Great shot along with a funny paragraph……..I feel your pain.
December 29, 2010 at 8:18 PM
amazing photo just love star shots even if it is so cold u cant feel your self or the the extremes we have here mega hot days and nights. well done love to see more
markatmelb
December 30, 2010 at 8:04 PM
Thanks Darwin for the spotlight! Muchly appreciated my friend.
This place is a 2.5 hour drive from where I live and I could have picked some place closer but what made this spot important was the fact that the ghost town of Dorothy, Alberta is at the bottom of a steep valley in Alberta’s badlands and is very dark there with only a couple of farm lights that are fairly close by.
The subject of interest was of course the lunar eclipse but I wanted more than just 800mm blow-ups of the moon ….I wanted to photograph it with the milky way as I’ve never personally photographed the two together and I’ve never seen the two paired together in any photograph. I had one chance to get this right and the weather network said clear skies east and south of Calgary. So east to Dorothy it was and I’m glad I went.
Thanks for all the comments everyone and happy new year to you all!
February 19, 2011 at 5:11 AM
Wow, what a breathtaking photo. I think it is worth it.
July 13, 2012 at 9:33 PM
no clue why im drawn to the curtains but just an amazing photograph