The Pro Interview
This photographic duo has created spectacular night sky images which highlight the dangers of light pollution. ‘We’re hiding the medicine in the candy,’ they tell David Clark
We bring you not one, but two pro photographers! American duo Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan talk night sky images and light pollution
Abeautifully clear, star-filled night sky is one of the most amazing sights to see on Earth, but it’s becoming increasingly rare. As cities expand and the number of artificial lights increase, night skies are becoming brighter and gradually wiping out all trace of the stars. This doesn’t just prevent us from seeing starscapes, it has negative consequences for human health, for ecosystems – and wastes a huge amount of energy.
Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan wanted to make this phenomenon more widely known. They realized they could do this through their astrophotography and time-lapse videos. To achieve their goal of releasing a book and Blu-ray, Gavin and Harun decided to crowdfund their project. It became the fourth most successful Kickstarter photobook campaign ever.
However, that was just the beginning of a project that has caught the public’s attention around the world. Here they talk about how the Skyglow project started, how they made the images and videos, and what they hope to achieve. How did you two meet? Harun: I had studied screenwriting and theatre as an undergraduate and I met
Gavin when we were both studying directing at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.
Gavin: Our core background was largely to do with storytelling and we were focused on fiction films. But after film school we also did a lot of experimental and personal projects, largely as a way to blow off steam and do something that didn’t involve any of the politics and slow-moving gears of Hollywood films.
What kind of things did you work on together?
Gavin: We started doing these little trips to get out of the city. We would go to National Parks and do photography and shoot time-lapses. That was what eventually brought us to the whole
Skyglow thing.
Harun: I had always taken some form of landscape photographs just for fun. I would meet up with friends and instead of going out for a coffee, we would just pick a spot and take some shots. After university, when I was travelling, I consciously set aside the time to do it and these shoots grew into something bigger. I’ve now done three books of portraits which ended up landing me in places that ultimately helped with Skyglow. I also started doing some astrophotography. One thing led to another and it all came together in this project.
How did your joint work develop?
Gavin: We started doing time lapse videos by taking long exposure photographs, around 25 seconds per picture, which really let all the light flood in. These long exposure still photographs allowed us to see the Milky Way and the galaxies with so much more clarity than we could with our own eyes. Then essentially we would take those single still frames and animate them together to produce the fluidity of movement you usually only expect to see when shooting a video.
Can you tell us more about how and when did you get the idea for the project?
Skyglow
Gavin: In order to get to locations to shoot these time-lapses, we would have to get away from the city. The 25-second exposure, while it would allow you to see more in the sky, also magnified the light pollution from cities hundreds of miles away. That’s what brought the issue of light pollution into our eyes. We started asking and wondering more about it. We’d had the good fortune of making a few time-lapse videos that had received good press and lots of attention, so we said to ourselves, what if we took this attention and focused it on the issue of light pollution? That way, we could learn
In order to get to places to do these timelapses, we would have to get away from the city and light pollution
more about it and teach people about the hazards of light pollution in the process.
What is Skyglow all about?
Gavin: At its core it’s the fact that plants, animals and humans evolved over millions of years with day and night. When you start taking the night away with excessive artificial light, it upsets ecosystems and migrations. Trees are budding earlier so the insects are mating earlier. It has all kinds of dire consequences for human health and it costs a lot of money in wasted energy. There’s an endless cycle of impact but few people are aware of these effects. Only about 10% of the people we talked to had heard of the term ‘light pollution’.
Why did you choose to crowdfund the project?
Gavin: We went via Kickstarter because Harun had done a couple of photobooks that had been funded that way. The campaign went incredibly well and ended in May 2015. After that, we figured we could use the funding to visit incredible locations that are hard to get to. We wanted to show what a wonderful resource the night sky is and how much danger it’s in. We also wanted to be two of the people working to save it.
How did you decide upon the shooting locations you used?
Harun: We wanted to capture some of the most polluted and some of the least light polluted locations, with a range of those in between. We looked at Bortle Scale maps, which show how much light pollution is found in particular locations, so we were able to identify the best places to see the stars and those areas that have long since lost their night skies. We tried to cover as much of the country as we could, given our resources. We ended up doing about 150,000 miles worth of travel. We focused on North America, which is still, on average, the biggest light polluter in the world.
Gavin: We also wanted the book to be like a time machine, so through the chapters it travels through the history of light and light pollution, from early settlers to the most futuristic modern cities you see now. Throughout the project, we tried to keep a storytelling essence at the heart of it. Even though we’re trying to educate, we’re also really telling the story of lighting and how it became this way through the ages and trying to keep it interesting in that sense.
Which cameras did you use?
Harun: When Gavin and I started doing this some years ago we were both shooting with the Canon 5D Mk II. Then we both bought Canon 6D cameras as an upgrade. The 6D cameras were initially used to shoot still frame, time-lapse photographs. Then we started using the 5D Mk III, then the 5DS R and eventually the 5D Mk IV. So we ran through about
We focused on North America, which is the biggest light polluter in the world
three generations of cameras. When it comes to low light shooting, we have both found that the cameras have grown exponentially better. For example, the difference between a 5D Mk II and a 5D Mk IV for daylight shooting isn’t that noticeable. But if you compare night images, the most you could do with a 5D Mark II was get up to about ISO1600 before noise in the image started getting really bad. Now on a 5D Mk IV we can go all the way up to ISO12,800 and still produce a highly usable image.
What effect has high ISO performance had on astrophotography?
Gavin: The big jump I noticed was between the 5D Mk II and the 6D – that was the first time we noticed you could really push it hard in night photography. It’s just kept getting better from there. I think the huge growth in ISO capability in the 5D Mk IV has made it a game changer for a lot of astrophotographers. The capabilities of these new cameras are very exciting. Even now we’re looking at
The huge growth in ISO capability in the 5D Mark IV has made it a game changer for astrophotographers
cameras that can shoot video at such a high ISO that you can see the Milky Way and a live action person in the same frame. We haven’t done too many experiments with that, but it’s something we can see on the horizon and we’re excited to try it.
How did shoot the time-lapse videos?
Gavin: We used the same cameras and the same approach. We would try to get the best quality stills – so for example, if we want to finish a video at 24 frames per second, then we have to take 240 pictures to get a ten-second shot. So when we are firing 30-second exposures and can only take two pictures per minute, we have to wait at least a couple of hours to get that much time going by. So we would shoot with up to seven cameras at a time, because we only had one or two nights at these locations at best. We were trying to cover a lot of ground. Harun would take his tripod to one place and I’d go to another. We tried to cover every imaginable angle of what could happen in the night. We would leave each camera rolling for 2-3 hours at a time and then afterwards we’d animate those still images. So, technically, we’re not shooting any actual video at all.
What was the most spectacular location you photographed?
Harun: For me it’s the Grand Canyon, because of its size and diversity. This location has been kind to me and every time I’ve been there something awesome has happened. But the place I felt really at peace in was Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida. It’s a little island 70 miles south of Key West. It’s an incredibly peaceful place with perfect dark skies and it feels like you’re in a different dimension compared to the rest of the world.
What’s the ultimate aim for the project?
Skyglow
Gavin: We want to raise awareness that there’s a problem and show some of the damage this problem can do. But also on the flip side there’s also hope. So part of the book focuses on the International Dark-sky Association and some of these heroes out there who are making a difference and paving a new trail for what can be done.
Harun: If we can get one area, one community to become a Dark Sky area we’ve accomplished a lot. It’s about getting it into the public consciousness that this thing exists because most people don’t know about it. We’re trying to do it virally, in a visually interesting way. Gavin: Part of Skyglow is about hiding the medicine in the candy. Very few people want to read a 40-page document on light pollution. It’s less exciting than showing a fireworks display of some of the most exciting places and the greatest skies you’ve ever seen. There are lots of people in major cities that have never seen the Milky Way and I think that was part of the reason why a lot of our videos were doing really well.
Do you think photography and documentary film-making can help save the planet?
Harun: We’ve moved into an area in history where documentary film-making, especially as it relates to nature and the environment, is going to become a focus. There’s a lot of good we can do as film-makers, but it depends on how you do it. I’m about to work on the third environmental film produced by Leonardo Dicaprio and when I talk to the other film-makers I say, you guys are up against it every time you mention global warming, but I talk about the same thing through stars. Gavin and I have found an
If we can get one community to become a Dark Sky area we’ve accomplished a lot
‘in’ where we can reach more people, even those who are closed off to environmental discussions. They don’t want to hear the word environmentalist; it’s a dirty word to them. But through this project we’ve found a way to talk about a much larger issue that’s become very politicised. We can talk about global warming and carbon emissions in a way without directly broaching the subject. Gavin: We’ve also found it crosses political lines. In America the environment is a liberal issue, a left-wing issue, but Arizona which is a right-wing state, is one of the leading fighters against light pollution. They’re really serious about it. One of the most interesting things is that the political lines do go away because of this universal connection. It’s one of the things that gives us hope and maybe just by starting the conversation about light pollution we can open doors to other environmental issues as well. We’ve been blown away by the broad cross-section of people that seem to care about this issue.
The Skyglow book, DVD, calendar and other products are exclusively available via the website www. skyglowproject.com.