ABSTRACT
The moonrise is minutes away in Arches National Park. Quite possibly the most critical step in the entire planning process is the initial stage of creative pre-visualization. Core compositions for all nightscape photographers generally involve an interesting and beautiful night sky subject with a well-positioned foreground subject. In contrast, a sky-priority image contains a very specific night-sky subject, again, often viewed from a very specific angle. Earlier and the Milky Way does not rise high enough over the eastern horizon before dawn arrives; later in the summer and autumn, the Milky Way arches too high overhead to make into a pleasing panoramic image. Composite nightscape images can be especially challenging to plan since the final images lie beyond human perception. They only exist after the merging together of the constituent images; it’s totally impractical to create a “test shot,” for example.
