Capturing the 2021 Calendar

Over the next few months I will be doing a write up of capturing each image of 2021 Calendar. I will be including what the story and process was behind each image. January’s Image named Tunnel to the Stars was taken inside one of the numerous Ice/Snow caves around Mt Rainier National Park. Around mid summer I really wanted to go explore these caves with friends. I had seen them multiple times before from years prior and shared by other close friends this year as well. After doing a bit of research about Ice Caves around Rainier I was able to narrow my search down to a small area above 6k feet. A quick note, I will be leaving locations and exact whereabouts out of this story to help keep the sensitive off trail areas from greater impact due to increased traffic.

After a quick hike up on the first day of exploring we ended up finding multiple Ice caves during the day time. We even stumbled upon multiple animals around the ice caves including Grouse, mountain goats and Washington’s highest ever recorded Gardner Snake. While walking thru the first entrance pictured in my photo Tunnel to the Stars I was imaging what could be done here artistically. I ended up deciding to return on a different day to capture a late evening blue hour shot and tracked Milky Way Core the same night. The sky is made up of multiple images tracked taken at 50mm stacked then merged together as a pano for better detail. While the foreground was just a single image and far easier to take while the last light still partly illuminating the landscape. Overall around 17 shots were taken just to create this single image.

Thank you to everyone that is buying this calendar and supporting me in this next step in life!

mark