r/wyoming • u/shatteredankle • 21d ago
I took a 4 hour exposure of myself climbing Devil's Tower.
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u/cowbell_solo 21d ago
I thought I read that it was closed to climbing after dark, did I hallucinate that? Either way this is awesome.
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u/shatteredankle 21d ago
You can't camp on the summit, but there's nothing saying you can't climb it at night.
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u/Zuke77 20d ago
You really shouldn’t climb devils tower. Its a sacred landmark to the Lakota tribe and climbing it removes stone. They have been fighting to ban climbing it for decades because its been damaging it.
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u/shatteredankle 20d ago
Climbing neither removes stone nor damages the tower. It's a very popular climbing destination that people come from all over the world to experience.
There is a voluntary closure during the month of June to respect the tribe's ceremonies.
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u/easyreader68 20d ago
Awesome photo! My husband is wondering what route you were on?
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u/shatteredankle 21d ago
Here's some more details about the set up for those who may be interested.
I scouted out a position to dial in my composition before it got dark. Then I came back during "blue hour" (the time after the sun sets and the stars are starting to come out, but it's not quite dark dark yet). I set up my camera on a tripod and took a properly exposed shot of the tower and the hill below it (30sec, f1.4, ISO 500). Then, I waited till it got properly dark, changed the settings to expose for my LEDs (30sec, f8, ISO 320), connected my phone to my camera, set into burst mode and used my phone as an external shutter to lock the shutter down.
Then, I simply hiked up, put on my sweater and pants that have the LEDs and climbed up the 500 foot tall 5 pitch route. I changed the colors at the top of each pitch.
After topping out, and getting back to the camera at almost 5 in the morning, the batteries were completely dead and I just had to hope that they died after we finished the climb.
It turns out that they did and the very last image my camera took was me topping out the route.
Then, it took many hours of tweaking everything in photoshop to get the final image. I had a series of 30 second exposures from 9:30 to 1:30. I had to edit them, then pick out just the ones of me climbing with the LEDs (not the ones of my partner with his headlamp), add all those together into a single image in photoshop. Then I took the "blue hour" image and overlayed the lights onto that, so that the rock had some more detail. And then, I took all the images from that night and added them all together to get the full star trails. Then I had to cut out the stars from the climbing/blue hour image and replace them with the star trails image.