The historic Benbow Inn keeps quiet watch along the South Fork Eel River, a century-old host lit in gold while the stars swing silently across the sky each night. In summer, the Milky Way takes its turn, marking time as it sweeps by like a clock hand through the night. I traveled down there the other night to catch them all together: the inn, the Milky Way, the bridge and the river.
I had scouted the scene a couple weeks previously while staying at the inn with family. The timing was off with the night sky, though, as the moon was sitting on the Milky Way, completely blotting it out. But I knew that in two weeks it would come up later, leaving the sky dark enough for the Milky Way’s display.
I noticed a small wooden door tucked into the base of the bridge across from the inn and assumed it concealed some kind of bridge troll. I knew then I’d want it in my shot.
An app told me where the Milky Way would be in a couple weeks after dark and when the moon would rise. The inn isn’t actually visible; its golden glow is what illuminates the foreground, even highlighting the texture of the stone Benbow Bridge.
On Aug. 13, my brother and I headed down to try making the photo (it’s never a sure thing). Without him, I probably wouldn’t have gone down that night, so thank you, bro!
The scene had a much wider dynamic range (the range of values from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows) than my camera could capture in a single frame. A single photograph would yield either a well-lit foreground with an underexposed sky or a good sky with a completely overexposed foreground.
The solution was to take a series of photographs. I first photographed for the brightest lights so that they looked normally bright, not overexposed. The next exposure was a little brighter to start gathering shadow detail. I took six or seven photos, each one successively brighter until in the final one.
Then, I used a process called HDR editing (high dynamic range), which gathers the image information from each of the photographs in the series and creates a single image that had everything exposed well from the highlights to the shadows.
For this, I could not move the camera once I settled on a composition, I had to leave the camera in place. Everything has to line up exactly the same in each shot or else combining the images won’t work.
And thus, my brother and I sat with the camera from dusk until 11 p.m., munching cookies while I made many separate series of images. (As I tell my students, one has to shoot a lot to get the best shot possible.) The last series of photos I took were darker for better stars, well focused and caught the Milky Way in better position with good focus.
The photo forces, or gods, call them what you will, were good to me that night. Capturing the historic Benbow Inn beneath the Milky Way has been in my thoughts for a long time. Finally last week, the little voice that says, “If you don’t go out, you won’t bring anything back,” got its message through, and we took the trek.
It took perseverance and shooting that sequence of photos many times to finally get the one I wanted, but the wait, the trek and the work paid off: the inn’s glow, the Milky Way, the bridge — even a mysterious door — are all there in one frame at last.
Keep abreast of David Wilson’s (he/him) photography at mindscapefx.com or on Instagram at @david_wilson_mindscapefx.com. He teaches Art 35 Digital Photography at College of the Redwoods.
This article appears in ‘No Signs of Recovery’.