I thoroughly enjoy my trips to the desert, but I’d be hard-pressed to call them action packed. In fact, there are times when it can be downright boring; astrophotography involves a lot of waiting around in the dark. Regardless, I still REALLY enjoy it. Well, this trip had a bit of unexpected – perhaps even unwelcomed – excitement.
One of the days we were there turned out to be cloudy, and was forecasted to not improve until the next morning, so my friend Mark and I decided to just go scouting around to get ideas for future shots. He wanted to show me this one rock formation in particular, which he calls “the teeth”, plus a number of other cool things that are nearby. We ended up going out there, and then just wandered around goofing off, looking for things to shoot. The next evening we decided to go back and shoot “the teeth” and got back there just as it was becoming completely dark.
Now, it’s worth knowing a little bit about how this whole process works. To achieve the result above requires a lot of back and forth / trial and error with the lighting, because you can’t really see what you’re doing until you look at the back of the camera. Mark and I typically work together to make this easier – one of us will stay with the cameras and make sure everything is firing right, and also offer ideas on how to do things differently, since they’re seeing the result of the lighting real time. The other person will go “down range” and move the lights all around, or do the light painting, depending the approach being employed for the particular scene. In this case, we were using both stationary lights, and light painting, and as the designated lighting person for this scene, I was climbing and moving all around the rocks, while Mark was reporting back. The other thing that’s worth knowing is we were both shooting at around 35mm, so the rocks you see in the image are about 20 or so yards forward of the cameras, and they sit up on a shelf, which I had to scramble up and down on.
We had been at the spot for at least 30 minutes or so and were at the point in the creative process where we were both out of ideas, so I returned to the cameras so I could see what we’d done so far. As I got back to my camera, I just happened to look back at where I had just been with my headlamp on, and much to my surprise, saw a pair of eyes looking back at me. I continued to stare as the shadowy figure of a very large cat moves out onto the ledge just next to the one I had been standing on – maybe 30 or 40 yards from where we were now standing – and noted its tail, which seemed to me at the time to be about as long as my arm. That’s when it occurred to me that I was staring at a mountain lion, which was staring back at us! I let out more than a few choice words, I’m sure, which I think is when Mark finally looked up, as the cat continued to move away from us. I immediately started shouting and clapping my hands, hoping to scare the thing off, but it seemed none to interested in what I was doing, and continued on at its unhurried pace. Mark never saw it, but could tell from my reaction that I was not making this up, so needless to say we packed up and left the area.
Out of curiosity, I stopped by the park office the next morning to see how dangerous of a situation we’d just been in – because, you know, we have black bears and while, yes, they do sometimes kill people, most encounters with black bears are non-events here in the Smokies. Well, evidently that’s not the case with mountain lions! The park service believes there to be about 7 adult cats that call the park home, and they are so rare, in fact, that none of the park staff have ever seen one (the ranger wanted me to fill out a form describing the encounter, including the exact GPS coordinates of where we’d been)! Despite their rarity, they are considered a significant natural threat. The ranger did note, however, that the fact that the lion showed itself to us was probably a sign that it was just curious about us, and not trying to eat us, which I count as a positive, but we still didn’t return to that part of the park!
More next week!
–Dan Thompson