New Yosemite night climb by Miami Photographer Tom Clark

Photographers are faced with certain challenges when shooting at night. It may be difficult to achieve focus on your subject, exposure settings are critical, and the dynamic range of a particular scene may be extremely dramatic. Often times various exposures are required for one scene, which will be layered together in post. This is a technique I’ve come to embrace, and perhaps the challenge is what I enjoy most about nighttime landscape photography.

Adding a person in action to a nighttime shot brings on a whole new set of challenges. Cooperation/communication is added to the mix while patience and discipline become even more important than usual. Brian Tannler, a trained and disciplined climber understands the necessity of good communication making him an ideal person to work with on creating this type of shot.

After a day of climbing at the New River Gorge Junk Yard Wall we decided New Yosemite, a beautiful splitter (rare for the East Coast) with an amazing view of the New River Gorge Bridge would be the ideal route to set up the camera on. Brian’s headlamp helped to highlight the route really making it stand out in the shot.