Toadstool Rock, Richterveld, South Africa

Most of you know by now that my photography is mainly concentrated on landscape photography.

The first photo I showed here on Steemit in my Introducemyself blog entry, was a landscape photo taken in 1977.

Over the years my photography evolved and I explored many other genres of photography, but the thread through all these photography years is landscape photography.

And for me, the personal challenge through all these years are- and still remains to get that unique landscape photo that nobody else has photographed - and I go to great lengths to try and get that unique photo.

To illustrate this, I want to tell you about a photo I called "The Toadstool Rock". In 2004 a group of photographers and I went camping in the Richtersveld National Park in the northwestern corner of South Africa for four days. I read and saw a picture of a very interesting rock formation in the vicinity of our planned campsite, but could not find any clear directions on the internet to locate it. Arriving at our campsite I spent the first day and a half searching for it and eventually on the morning of the second day found it. It was about 800 meters from our campsite but not in direct sight of our campsite.

Toadstool Rock, Richtersveld, Nothern Cape, South Africa

After founding the toadstool rock, and photographed it, I started to think what will make a unique photo of this special rock formation. The reason I wanted to photograph it was because I saw a picture of it in a local travel magazine. This means that somebody else, before me, already photographed it, and the photo you see above is not unique at all.

I decided to use it as a foreground feature in a star trail photograph.

That evening around the campfire, I told my fellow photographers about my plan to photograph the rock formation in a star trail photograph. And not any star trail photo, I want to expose the photo for at least 5 hours. I bought my first digital camera only a couple of months before this trip, so I did not do the full switch-over to digital yet as I did not feel totally comfortable with the digital camera yet. A 5-hour star trail photo on film is no issue as the light gathering capabilities of normal unenhanced film suffers from reciprocity failure which, in the case of an extra long star trail photo, works in your favour. (I will tell you about my long exposure digital star trial photography in another blog post.)

The people around the campfire thought I was a bit mad to tackle such a photograph is such a remote location for two reasons namely that fact that we are in the wild and there are night creatures in this national park and secondly being about 800 meters away from our campsite could mean that one can get lost in the dark night( I forgot to mention that it was a moonless night).

I had no volunteers to go with me, so after dinner, while the other people were still relaxing around the campfire, I took off with my camera and tripod to take my photo.

It took me about 30 minutes to find it in the dark. I took both the digital and film camera as well as a camera flash with me and first set up the digital camera to experiment with the flash to lit up my foreground. Once I was happy I swapped the digital camera with the film camera and start the exposure.

Those days, my recipe for a star trail photo, was something like this:

• I normally photographed star trials with an F5.6 F-stop.
• I set up the camera on the tripod and focus on the foreground feature.
• I start the exposure and do the light painting, either with a hand torch or, like in this case, with an off-camera flash.
• Once the light painting was done, I place the lens cap on the lens and change the focus to infinity to ensure the star streaks are not too thick and overwhelming.
• I then remove the lens cap for the star trail to continue.

I used a Pentax K1000 for my star trail photos as it is a fully manual camera with only a small watch battery for the light meter.

After going through all the steps as described above, I decided to go back to the campsite (about 20 minutes walk) and come back later to fetch the camera. I arrived back at the campsite just in time to share a late night hot chocolate drink before everybody retire to their tents.

But then one of my fellow photographers asked me if I remembered to focus on infinity - and I could not remember performing that step! After trying to remember without any luck, I decided to walk back to go check my focus. This time it took me about 20 minutes to get there, and after placing the lens cap on the camera, I used a torch to check my focus point, just to see that I did in fact remembered to change it to infinity - I just forgot as this was already second nature for me to do. So I switched off the torch, remove the lens cap and walk back to the campsite (another 20 minutes) to also get some rest while my photo was getting exposed.

I knew moonrise is going to be at 04:30 so I decided to set an alarm to make sure I get back at the camera at about 4 am to ensure the moonlight does not have an influence on the photo. I woke up at 3:30, walked back to the camera and release the shutter. The total exposure time was 7 hours.

This was my longest star trail photograph yet.

Toadstool Rock. 7 hour exposure. Pentax K1000, F5.6

At home, after scanning the negative, I noticed that there is an anomaly in the star streaks, similar to a bump of the camera. Based on the length before this bump I decided this equates to about 45 minutes of exposure, I realised that I must have bumped the camera when I fiddled with the lens cap to check whether I set the focus at infinity. So the photo is not perfect, but for me personally, this bump makes it an even more unique photo.

This is my entry in the weekly #longexposurephotography challenge created by @juliank