Mar 11, 2024

Artwork Release: Grizzly Night

by Noah Wetzel

Today I'm excited to announce a new piece to my artwork portfolio, Grizzly Night!

To celebrate, I'm offering a 25% discount on fine art prints of this photograph through March 31st 2024. Use Code: "GrizzlyNight25"

This is a limited edition of 100 pieces. Regardless of artwork style or size, each piece counts toward the total. Once 100 pieces are sold, this photograph will never be printed again.

This photograph took over two years to pursue and three consecutive nights shooting when conditions finally lined up. This was a 3.5 minute exposure in near darkness, utilizing a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky and illuminating the trees with an aerial light painting technique. There's roughly a 20 minute period, where the twilight light is perfect. To capture this image, I utilized a powerful headlamp strapped to the bottom of a drone positioned directly above the trees. With the headlamp angled slightly outward (not perfectly straight down), it allows me to toggle the drone controls left and right, to rotate the drone left and right in the air, thus painting light onto a small group of trees for 20-30 seconds. After painting one group of trees, I move onto the next. I'm never precisely aware of the exact spots I'm hitting, or with how much light. However, throughout my career of shooting complex exposures with natural lighting or artificial lighting, I have a good idea of where to start. Typically, I can come pretty close to the perfect exposure within the first few tries, and each setting is important, especially exposure length. I need the exposure to be long enough that I can fly around and illuminate each section of trees, yet without overexposing one area of the image.

From first scouting potential landscape compositions, then returning to shoot this location in 2020 at sunrise, in the summer of 2020 I imagined this concept...illuminating this grouping of trees with the epic backdrop of Mt. Superior.In 2021 I kept my eyes on the weather, but perfect conditions and my schedule didn't line up. Fast forward to December of 2022. Little Cottonwood Canyon had received a ton of snow early on in the season, and there was a huge storm that was clearing. With little wind (rare in the mountains with big storms), the trees within the frame were stacked with snow (just what I needed, and was waiting for). Loading up my pack with all the heavy gear, I ventured up into the mountains of Alta before sunset to position myself, and hope the conditions were right.Over the course of three nights, I returned, battling the freezing cold temperatures, and waiting for storm clouds to clear. From crashed drones and searching for them in the snow, to hunkering down in pain do to extremely cold temperatures affecting my spine and rib cage that was compressed with a heavy pack, I'd hike 100 yards at a time through the snow behind the frame to stay warm. A couple of the nights I was literally in tears.The first night, I captured "Grizzly Canyon Glow"...a beautiful shot, but not exactly what I wanted. The second night, I didn't even shoot one frame as the clouds were so socked in. And finally, on the third night I was able to capture this.There were some skin tracks in the foreground of the shot that forced me to frame this composition differently (*I intended to shoot the same frame as Grizzly Glitter Freeze below, was forced to shoot much closer to the trees making Mount Superior much smaller in the frame), but I'm very proud of it.

Grizzly Glitter Freeze - This was the intended composition. Captured in 2020 after scouting the perfect location & composition for a beautiful landscape within Grizzly Gulch in Alta Utah.

Burning Grizzly I & II - Captured later that winter in 2020, attempting to capture this location at sunset.

This was a test exposure, to showcase how this image looks without the aerial light painting (without the aerial studio lighting technique).

Grizzly Canyon Glow - December 2022, conditions align with snow stacked trees and no wind. This was the first night pursuing this landscape shot with aerial light-painting.

A few more behind the scenes moments: