Night Ruins On The Edges
When the original residents built these Pueblos, there was nothing there. No buildings, no cars, and certainly no streetlights. After they left in the late 1200s, their houses stood empty in an empty desert landscape, sometimes filling up with sand, eventually starting to fall down.
Escalante Pueblo Kiva at sunset, Canyons of the Ancients. That’s Sleeping Ute Mountain in the background.
Lowry Pueblo, Escalante Pueblo and other northern pueblo ruins show Chacoan influences in their masonry and overall architecture - clustered multi story dwellings and Great Kivas. In many cases, Mesa Verdeans re-occupied and modified them in the late 12th and 13th centuries. According to what is likely Hopi oral tradition and some of the archaeological evidence, large-scale raiding and warfare caused the final abandonment of pueblos by 1300 in today's Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.
Modern settlements sprouted near many pueblo ruins for some of the same reasons Ancestral Puebloans built there in the first place: relatively abundant water, rich soil, central location. However, modern construction can make ruins photography more difficult, especially at night. You're shooting on the urban-wildland interface, with all the associated challenges of urban light and possible wildlife encounters.
And Now For Something Completely Different
I've been obsessed with ruins in the Four Corners since my first visit to Chaco Canyon in 1994. It started out as a desire to hike to and through them, and capture some of their stark beauty in warm morning or evening daylight. Sometimes I got lucky with cloud patterns, and low-angle winter light lengthened my daylight shooting hours. I was mostly looking for the same orangey light everybody wants.
But lately I've wanted to do a couple different things with them: choose ruin walls with the Milky Way rising overhead, and light up ruins with my own light in ways that either mimic firelight, or fancifully color the ruins like paintings. Sometimes I try for a combination of all these things.
Night Sky Timing
If you want the Milky Way Galaxy in the background, you need to shoot when it's visible. The clusters of wildly-colored stars in its Galactic Core are only visible from roughly mid-March until mid-November. Outside those times, you get a less-packed but still tight ribbon of mostly white stars. And it's a lot dimmer in December.
For best results, you need dark skies. You can look at several different astronomy apps to figure out when the moon won't be up. One of my favorites, Moon, shows both moonrise-moonset and sunrise-sunset times, along with moon phase for the current day. You can easily select any calendar day and location you want to shoot at. You also get lunar altitude and azimuth for determining position, but that's more information than I need. I just want to know when the moon isn't around.
A Different Pollution
You also need to consider urban light pollution. When I was a kid in Montana, we could see a ton of stars above the family's Glory B Ranch every summer. Even 45 minutes south in Missoula, you could still see lots of stars on clear, cold nights. But today, there's much more street lighting, storefront neon, and house lights than ever.
Apps like Light Pollution Map show you the darkest places to shoot. Areas with the worst light pollution are red, the least-bad locations are dark blue, and there's no color at all over completely dark sky areas. I try for locations with no color, but some ruins are just too close to towns.
Escalante Pueblo in blue, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument
Pueblo ruins in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument sit mostly in very dark sky areas, but some are close to Cortez and Dolores, Colorado. I chose a couple at both ends of that spectrum.
Dan Zafra's Milky Way Calendars put the astronomical information I needed to choose shooting dates together in one place. Using the 2022 calendar for the Southwest USA, I saw that October 22 was at the center of a 4-5 day period of best Milky Way visibility, starting roughly at 7:28 pm. I planned a trip for October 20-22. Once again, though, the weather was a factor - October 20-21 would be clear, with increasing clouds and a possible storm on the 22nd in Cortez.
Because of other commitments, we arrived too late (and too tired after a 5+ hour drive) on the 20th to do any photography. Since I'd been there before and had some idea of its orientation with respect to the rising Milky Way, I chose Lowry Pueblo for October 21. It's also located in a dark sky area, so urban lights would be minimized.
Away from it all - Lowry Pueblo
Lowry Pueblo was likely home to around 100 people when it was occupied. It sits at the end of a dirt road, like many pueblo ruins under dark skies. There's a large isolated Great Kiva in addition to a smaller Kiva at one end of a cluster of around 40 rooms. The smaller Kiva was roofed in the 1960s to protect it from further deterioration. Its interior walls once held a mural painted on covering plaster. (A Kiva is a round room the Ancestral Puebloans appear to have used for community gatherings and domestic activities in addition to religious ceremonies. Modern Puebloans use their kivas mainly for ceremonies.)
The kiva roof is directly south of the main room block, so it's going to show up in any eye-level Milky Way photographs. That meant shooting from an extremely low angle to keep it out of pictures. I also took care to keep it unlit.
Interior 'lobby', Lowry Pueblo, Canyons of the Ancients
As we had at Chaco Canyon the previous month, we parked at the site to scout locations during the day, then prepared and ate dinner in our RV. I'd looked at the interior of the roofed kiva, and liked a walled area with doorways leading to the kiva itself. That was my first shooting location. I shot looking back to the kiva's 'lobby', a 'hallway' view with a doorway to the right into the 'lobby'. My time was limited - I needed to leave by 9pm or so to get us back to a site at an RV campground by 9:30. So I shot just one interior setup with different colors and went outside to check on Milky Way location relative to the main room block.
Milky Way ‘hockey stick', Lowry Pueblo, Canyons of the Ancients
At the end of Milky Way season, you get a vertical river of stars. I lit the top of one wall leading to the base of the Milky Way, placed to continue diagonally into the sky. The wall looked like the blade of a ghostly hockey stick with a Milky Way handle. I also lit a section of room walls and placed them as if the Milky Way was rising above them like smoke trail.
Milky Way 'smoke' above Lowry Pueblo, Canyons of the Ancients
I finally had to declare myself done and meet my wife in the RV for the drive back. I could have spent much longer at Lowry - there were at least a couple more compositions I'd scouted during the day and didn't get to.
Escalante Pueblo Kiva at Blue Hour, Canyons of the Ancients.
Urban Ruin - Escalante Pueblo
We looked at a couple other remote locations in the National Monument the next day, but those ruins were very small or not positioned well for the Milky Way rising to the southwest or a starfield background. Instead I chose Escalante Pueblo ruin above the visitor center. There were some great views of Sleeping Ute Mountain beyond a small kiva, but I could also see automobile and city lights in the valley below. I decided to embrace the juxtaposition of modern and ancient traces and just light the ruin.
Escalante Pueblo Kiva after hours, Canyons of the Ancients
Escalante Pueblo Kiva and Milky Way, Canyons of the Ancients
I wanted to show the Milky Way rising above the Kiva. Clouds were moving in, so I lit up the Kiva for that shot first. Then I lit a series of receding parallel walls with T-doorways. I was using three different camera systems - a Leica M10-R with Voigtlander 21mm f/1.4 Nokton lens, my usual OM System OM-1 with Laowa 7.5mm f/2 and Leica DG-Summilux 9mm f/1.7 lenses, and a Canon EOS R5 with a new to me Rokinon 14mm f/2.4 SP lens. This was way too much equipment to swap off and on a tripod, focus, set exposure and shoot. I could have shot everything with the OM-1 and its lenses. I also wasn't feeling well, so didn't pay enough attention to get the precise foreground focus and depth of field I wanted. Fortunately pictures were sharp enough to be enhanced in Topaz Sharpen Ai, their shadow areas noise-reduced in Topaz DeNoise Ai, and composed well enough to be attractive.
T-doors to the city, Canyons of the Ancients
Enhancement Back At The Ranch
Lightroom Classic's masking features let me separately enhance sky and foreground. I give the Milky Way and stars more brightness, dim the black between stars, and enhance contrast to make them pop. I reduce noise as needed and enhance contrast in lit and unlit foregrounds. However, Lightroom's noise reduction sometimes isn't super effective without overly blurring details I want to keep. That's when I use Topaz DeNoise Ai for selective noise reduction, something I needed in unlit shadowed foregrounds where I wanted less noise but some detail too.
Focus at night is hard. With ruin walls, I temporarily light a foreground detail to focus on, then stop down slightly to rely on wide-enough depth of field with short focal length wideangle lenses to keep everything sharp. If the lit ruin is a bit farther away, I'll focus a lens at infinity during the day to know where to set it at night, use my OM-1 camera's starry sky AF feature to focus on stars, or focus at the infinity stop with manual-focus M-mount lenses. But I somehow managed to slightly misfocus at Lowry ruin, and needed to use Topaz Sharpen Ai to improve focus on ruin walls and Milky Way. This 'oops' was a humbling experience. You always need to stay on top of your game for best results.
Shot Notes
I used combinations of four different lights. I had two AOAM RGB Critter flashlights, each with AOAM's 24" Lumi Saber modifiers screwed in. I also had two Luxli Viola 2 LED panels, one on a Manfrotto 156BLB lightstand. The Viola 2 panels have a campfire preset, so I used that. I was able to change colors on the RGB Critters and dim their light without putting them into strange pulsing operating modes I couldn't get out of. Multiple light sources were especially welcome lighting the Kiva 'hallway' interior at Lowry and the parallel walls with T-doors at Escalante. While others walk through a scene to light everything with just one light source, lightweight lighting gear lets me carry multiple light sources and set up the look of a scene in advance. I can check everything out before any shutter clicks, and get repeatable results in different shots.
It was also pretty windy at Escalante Pueblo the night I was there, and I should have hung a weighted bag from the tripod to keep it more steady. Given travel flexibility, I'd have gone a couple days earlier for better weather, but previous commitments kept that from happening. I've gotten used to shooting what I have over years of scheduled travel.
More Information
- Ants on a Melon (nd) RGB Critter 2.0. Retrieved from https://antsonamelon.com.
- Capture The Atlas (nd), 2022 Milky Way Calendar - Southwest USA. Retrieved from https://capturetheatlas.com/milky-way-calendars/.
- Crow Canyon Archaeological (2000), Oral history. Retrieved from https://www.crowcanyon.org/researchreports/castlerock/text/crpw_oralhistory.asp.
- CYArk (nd), Lowry Pueblo National Historic Landmark. Retrieved from https://www.cyark.org/projects/lowry-pueblo-national-historic-landmark/in-depth.
- Department of the Interior - Bureau of Land Management (nd), Lowry Pueblo Ruins. Retrieved from http://www.npshistory.com/brochures/blm/canyons-of-the-ancients/lowry-pueblo-ruins.pdf.
- Field Museum News (September, 1930), Kiva Revealed on Lowry Ruin. Retrieved from
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/4376596#page/35/mode/1up.
- Gambler's House (March 11, 2009), Aftermath: Mesa Verde. Retrieved from https://gamblershouse.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/aftermath-mesa-verde/.
- Luxli (nd), The Luxli Viola 2. Retrieved from https://www.luxlilight.com/viola2.
- Manitou Cliff Dwellings (nd), Solving The Mystery of Ancient Ones Disapearance. Retrieved from https://www.cliffdwellingsmuseum.com/history/the-anasazi/solving-the-mystery-of-anasazi-disappearance/.
