Burn out is a hell of a thing, and in 2024 I was feeling it fully. It had been a long while since I had gotten so stuck in my head. I had made leaps and bounds in multiple aspects of my life, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything I really enjoyed. I kept trying to put myself in the mindset to chase the successes I had found the year before, but nothing sparked motivation for me. Especially with photography, something I have always enjoyed. The whole year just seemed to be a major drag. I played less games that year, struggled in my relationship, started to hate my cannabis career, and I didn’t even pick up my camera once. The only thing I didn’t lose focus on was school. Otherwise, I felt like I was just floating aimlessly through existence.

Despite not picking up my Sony, I did snap a few shots with my iPhone from the one camping trip I went on, and from a few shows I attended that year. I always enjoyed taking pictures of flowers with any camera, and Colorado does have some of the most beautiful wildflowers I’ve seen. One thing I appreciate is that despite being an arid climate, we still have so much lush forest land, meadows, and plains. It’s always comforting to know that beautiful things can strive in the harshest climates.

I only went to two concerts that year, but both held tremendous meaning for me. The first was seeing The Early November, my favorite band.

Any time I get a chance to see them, I take it. This time was special because they were playing with HelloGoodbye, another legendary Emo band.

The second show was a bucket list show for me. The Blood Brothers stopped making music together around 2007-8, and I never got the chance to see them before they split.

They had announced a reunion show about a year before their Denver show in November 2024. On the 10th of that month, 4 days before my birthday, I got to check that experience off my list.

Astrophotography didn’t come up once through all this. Even though I had felt so invigorated by how I ended 2023 at The Great Sand Dunes, it all ended with the coming of the new year. A major reason for this was that I began to second guess myself. I kept seeing these magnificent astro photos on Reddit and Instagram that made mine look so inept. Looking back, this was the real reason I didn’t want to pick up my camera. My confidence had been shattered, but there was nothing and no one to blame other than myself.

Throughout the year I tried to think of ways to improve my ability to capture the stars. The answer I always seemed to land on was that I needed better gear. This proved to be a massive problem as I am very frugal, and if you know anything about camera gear, you know it is very expensive. I kept myself from making any large purchases to maintain my savings, and knowing what I do now, I am glad I didn’t.

I also had a few months where I seriously considered modding my Sony a7RIV for astrophotography. The way you do this is by disassembling your camera and removing the infrared cut filter. You then replace it with a specialized ultraviolet and infrared passing filter which allows for the passing of H-alpha light, a type of deep red wavelength of light. If you have seen astro photos with massive red nebulae, this is exactly how the photographer is able to capture that.

The reason I decided against this is because of how delicate the process is, and my lack of experience with taking electronics apart and putting them back together. Even still, I kept wracking my brain about it, thinking it was the only way I would ever capture the quality of astro photos I was after. In retrospect, all of this was completely misguided. What everything boiled down to was that I was having a rough year in all aspects of my life, and was looking for any reason to put myself down. Thankfully, towards the end of 2024, I started to get a better idea of how to improve my astrophotography and pull myself out of the dark, back into the light of the stars.

I was able to accomplish this by scouring astronomy, photography, and nature subreddits to begin to find and develop techniques that would improve the quality of my images with the gear I had. I came away with a lot of great advice for pre-production and post-production. The first thing I learned was the “Rule of 500,” which is a very important thing to learn if you are going to take photos of the night sky with a stationary mount.

500 / Focal Length = Maximum Shutter Speed (Seconds)

The Rule of 500 is a way to avoid chromatic aberration in your photos, in layman’s terms: avoiding trails of light when capturing your photos. The rule states that you are to divide the number 500 by your lens’ focal length. The number you come up with is supposed to be how long you set your shutter speed to, and you are to always do so in seconds, not minutes or milliseconds. This will minimize any chromatic aberration and give you a much cleaner shot with no star trails.

To explain a bit more, as the Earth rotates and you leave your shutter open for long periods of time to allow more light in, the stars will begin to leave trails after about 30 seconds, sometimes less. For example, you probably have seen this when shooting bright lights at night and having your phone camera set to auto. If you move or shake a little, the lights will leave trails. A lot of really great photography projects actually take advantage of this by using long exposure shots to capture “light paintings.” I have absolutely played with the concept in the past, and even did a really fun photoshoot with some friends using DJ lighting equipment.

The next pieces of advice I was a bit more apprehensive towards, as they involved post-production. The first of the two was that I needed to download an editing application that allowed me to stack my images together. This would allow me to stack multiple shots of the same composition together and create a much more detailed image with less grain and allow for things like the core of the Milky Way to stand out a lot more. The second was that I needed to start editing my photos in post, which I hadn’t done in a long while. As a journalist you are told not to edit your images as it may compromise the integrity of your reporting. Edited images are seen as a bit of a taboo according to the Associated Press guidelines, as it can sometimes be perceived as trying to alter the context of the story by sharing a doctored image.

Twin Sisters and the Spire (March 2022) – Twin Sisters, Estes Park, CO – Sony a7RIV, Sony FE 24-105mm F4.0 OSS, f/4, 15s, ISO 12800, Edits: Left – no edits, Right – with basic edits, no stacking.

It took a while to reconcile my feelings surrounding image editing after learning these two things, because I did not want to jeopardize my ethics. That said, I wanted so badly to improve my shots, my skills, and begin to make a name for myself in the world of astrophotography. This all led me to my final revelation, which is that I did need new gear, but not expensive gear. I definitely required a new wide-angle lens that allowed for a lower f-stop, which would give me the ability to set a wider aperture. I would also need to consider buying a star tracker mount for my tripod, which would allow me to capture much longer exposures without having to worry about star trails and the Rule of 500.

As the year came to an end without a single moment spent chasing the starlight, I promised myself next year would be different. 2025 would be the year I push myself to do all the things I had not. Although I had high hopes, I never could have expected the struggles I would encounter. But more importantly, I never expected the successes that I would achieve.