The stars fell like snow. The damp, cold breeze made any patch of bare skin numb to the touch. The bog gave off that bitter, but pleasant scent that bogs do. As I walked on the frosty boardwalk it snapped and cracked as if in defiance of being awaken from hibernation.
If anyone has ever tried night photography they will know that it is very difficult to compose a photo and set the focus in the dark. Through trial and error I composed the shot to include as many stars as possible, while still including the tower and the edge of the woods. While taking test shots I noticed that the camera was picking up the northern lights. They were making the sky next to the horizon a bright green, orange and red color that I couldn’t see with my eyes.
It was a beautiful clear night and the sky was full of millions of stars. Saint-Louis-de-Kent lit the horizon to the south. The night was peaceful. The stars continued to fall and I continued to watch thinking about how fascinating it all is. I regretted leaving my gloves in the car and tried to keep my hands in my pocket. After half an hour I walked back to the camera to check its progress. I still had time so I returned to the tower to enjoy the continual barrage of falling stars and the silence.
When the time was up I took a quick look at the results before I packed up the camera to go. The picture looked a bit dark but I thought it was workable. While returning to the car I whistled a random song to break the silence and to make sure I didn’t spook any animals. The picture of a bear on the Kelly’s Beach Boardwalk that was recently posted on Facebook crossed my mind but the night remained silent.
I couldn’t come to Kouchibouguac without going to the beach. My next stop was Kelly’s Beach. I walked out to the beach with plans to do a time lapse of the stars off the end of the boardwalk. I didn’t know that the end of the boardwalk is removed in the winter to protect against storm surges. I needed another foreground element and took some test shots of a piece of driftwood. I dropped the camera down low on the tripod to include as much sky as possible but it just didn’t work for me. Using the driftwood wouldn’t allow me to get much sky in the picture. I aimed the camera higher to only include a wedge of the ocean and some dune grass. The lighthouse at Cap-Lumière blinked through the grass. The resulting time lapse clip can be found here: Beach Night Time Lapse.
When I got back to the camera I decided I was going to finish at 2:00. The sky cleared up and the stars were still falling so I decided to stay until 2:15. It took me exactly 1 hour to whistle my way back to the car, drive home slowly, watching for animals, and climb into my warm bed. I was thinking of how I could do things better on my next trip when I fell asleep.