Night nominee

"The Green River Overlook is among the most dramatic sights of the Island in the Sky unit of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It overlooks a canyon carved by the Green River, the top layer of which passes through a formation known as the White Rim sandstone. It looks like a terrestrial extension of the dusty nebulas that darken the central belt of the Milky Way.

Taken in the late fall, the foreground image was shot as an HDR panorama just after sunset, when the sandstone was dimly illuminated by sky glow. The night sky was captured with a fixed tripod and composed of about 1,000 frames of the stars and galaxy. Those frames were then registered with SIRIL at the approximate midpoint of the sequence. The twilight and nighttime shots were then aligned accurately using Stellarium and composited in Photoshop. "

Nathan Myhrvold is photographer, chef, scientist, and author. As the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, Myhrvold embraces the power of technology to push photographic limits. He and his team build custom cameras, robotics, and software to capture the world in new ways.

Myhrvold’s photography has been featured in publications including Smithsonian Magazine, Digital Photo Pro, Popular Photography, Galerie, and Bloomberg Pursuits. He is the founder of Modernist Cuisine, author of The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Modernist Cuisine at Home, Modernist Bread, and Modernist Pizza.

He pioneered food photography techniques to take the avant garde photographs in his award-winning cookbooks, which garnered worldwide recognition and led to the opening of Modernist Cuisine Gallery, the first gallery in the world devoted to food photography.

When not photographing food, Myhrvold travels the globe to visually document nature and wildlife. His recent innovations in snowflake photography have resulted in the highest resolution snowflake camera in the world. An avid researcher and lover of space, Myhrvold did postdoctoral cosmology work with Stephen Hawking and is currently developing new astrophotography techniques.