Night nominee

This time-lapse composite compresses an hours-long natural experience over the same remote spot in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park where the heroines of Thelma and Louise met their spectacular end into a single magical image, juxtaposing sunset with starscape . The landscape was first photographed at sunset with a multi-panel HDR panorama, shot with five consecutive f-stops to capture the large dynamic range. About three weeks later, the 1,000 nighttime frames were captured with different equipment, which were aligned and then stacked with SIRIL to show the stars and the Milky Way in a fixed position. The sunset and star shots were combined as different layers in Photoshop, while using Stellarium to ensure that the sunset and nighttime shots were correctly aligned and scaled relative to one another. The long exposure, star tracking, and astrophotographic techniques reveals an otherwise impossible view that transcends human vision.

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.