Last night my boyfriend and I decided to make a last minute trip up north to see what can be seen of the Lyrid meteor shower that was reaching its peak that evening. We arrived there at full dark and explored the Woods Canyon Lake area to see if we could find a good view of the night sky.

We found a meadow that allowed a decent view and setup to start taking some pictures. We also explored light painting and learned so much this evening! First, I found out that I love light painting. It opens up so many more options with night photography. 

Here is one of the shots we took after playing around with it for a while.

Forest Road

Here it what it would look like without lightpainting:

Forest Road - Without Light PaintingThis is the same photo without light painting

See how I was able to bring color and definition to the trees and road instead of just leaving them as silhouettes.

While this was very successful, the whole point to the evening was the Lyrids and they were almost a complete no-show. My boyfriend saw a bright one that lit up the sky, however I did not get to capture it on the camera (I wasn't even looking in that direction so I didn't see it at all). Other than than we saw maybe half a dozen shooting stars.

We moved from this location back to Woods Canyon Lake to see if we could capture the moon rising over the lake before we left to head home. Since it was so late and almost no one was out here with us, we saw a large number of wildlife as we drove. We saw a lot of elk, 2 porcupines, and a very scared looking rabbit. We also saw a small pond on the side of the road that I wanted to stop and see how it would turn out. Again this is with light painting, otherwise you would only see the outline of the trees. 

Stars over Pond

Again this is how it would look without light painting:

Stars over Pond - No Light PaintingThis is the same picture done without light painting

This was by far my favorite shot of the night, and definitely the highlight for me. However, after snapping this shot, we turned around and saw a herd of elk in front of the car on the road. This made us decide last minute to try and snap a shot of it.. not our best idea. So between getting my camera ready, switching settings, and the fact that I still had my remote timer plugged in I managed to knock my camera over and it unfortunately hit just wrong and smashed my small LCD screen on top that displays all my settings on the camera. This... really sucks. I tried taking pictures when we made it to the lake, however something is definitely not working right. I will have to do some more testing, but it looks like I will have a visit to the camera repair store in my very near future. So while I had a great time, definitely a night of highs and lows.