Alyn Wallace’s Photographing The Night Sky — Pre-orders now available

Alyn Wallace is one of the world’s leading night sky photographers and a great communicator. His Photographing The Night Sky is an encyclopedic guide that will answer all of your questions about landscape astrophotography and explain all the latest techniques to help you create stunning photographs of the night sky and its wonders.

Alyn Introduces his book.

I am very pleased to announce that signed copies of Alyn Wallace’s Photographing The Night Sky are now available for pre-orders, in both softback and a limited edition hardback. His book is due back from the printers at the end of August. I will be running a report from our printers in Maribor, Slovenia as the presses begin to print.

BUY signed Softback RRP£64.95..Signed Pre-order Price £59.95

BUY signed Hardback RRP£89.95..Signed Pre-order Price £79.95 A limited edition of 1,000 signed copies. As of Tuesday 12th July there are just over 400 hardback copies remaining.

Below you can flick through 30-plus spreads from Photographing The Night Sky, view the contents pages as well as various spreads from Alyn’s book.

Some stats: Alyn’s book is in a square 25cm x 25cm format (like James Rushforth’s Iceland volumes) with nearly a 5cm spine, there are 576 pages, and it weighs around 3kg. It’s a big book, very big, one to keep on your desk or coffee table and pour over.

It was October 2017 when Alyn first contacted us by email and soon after, whist I was walking on the moors above where I live in Hebden Bridge (West Yorkshire, UK), we had our first chat. Looking at his work and talking to him, plus with his background in engineering, it was clear that he was the right person. I also recognised a wild streak in him, he’d be fun to work with. His original pitch was for a night sky book of UK locations, in a similar vein to our photo-location books. This soon evolved into a technique, planning and processing book, with a section on the world’s best locations for night sky photography.

It is a big ask to do any fotoVUE book, you’ll know this if you have any of our books, not only must the author (who is local to the area their book covers, or knows the area well) take a stunning portfolio of images (typically 300/400 images) but the writing is a mix of the technical and the creative, providing not only precise location information and shooting advice but also more creative writing covering natural history and culture. The work is then edited, checked, laid out and printed to the highest standards. It is a lot of hard work, and expensive to produce, but we are committed to producing a book that is not only beautiful to look at and interesting to read but will make a positive difference when you are out taking photographs.

Layout has been done by two graphic artists who are at the top of their game. Nathan Ryder (Ryder Design) did the layout and Simon Norris (Little Fire Digital) is the digital artist who created with Alyn all the superb diagrams that illustrate Alyn’s book. Susie Ryder (website) did her usual excellent work of editing the text and over one hundred photographers contributed images to Alyn’s book. Thank you to everyone involved. Thank you also to Dr. Sean Dougherty (right) the Director of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile who not only hosted Alyn during the solar eclipse in 2019 but has kindly written the foreword to Alyn’s book

Alyn’s book was especially challenging. Despite digital cameras and modern processing software, landscape astrophotography is one of the most challenging genres of photography and there is a steep learning curve to master this dark art. However, one of Alyn’s strengths (he has many) is his skill in explaining often difficult concepts, in simple, understandable terms that can be grasped readily, and his passion for night photography shines like the moon from every page. He will be with you step by step as you master landscape astrophotography. As well as his book to help you he also publishes regular tutorials on his You Tube channel.

LOOK INSIDE: a selection of pages from Photographing The Night Sky

 

It’s been nearly five years in the making, but we believe Photographing The Night Sky will be the most useful and beautiful book you will buy. One of the first things we did was to look at all the night sky photography technique books, there are some great ones out there, and we critiqued them, making conclusions on how Alyn’s book could be the best.

BUY signed Softback RRP£64.95..Signed Pre-order Price £59.95

BUY signed Hardback RRP£89.95..Signed Pre-order Price ££79.95

So here we are, a few weeks away from publication, whilst these times are challenging for most of us (from a publishing perspective, paper costs — and other costs — have risen by nearly 40% because of the pandemic/Brexit/war/energy/cost of living crisis), as photographers we are lucky having a deep appreciation of the night sky, the landscape beneath it and Nature all around, a great escape from today’s challenges, and we are sure that Alyn’s book will increase this enjoyment.

Author

       


Mick Ryan

Director of fotoVUE and Co-author of Photographing The Peak District
Mick Ryan is the founder and the director of fotoVUE. He is based in Calderdale having spent the last seven years in the Peak District. He also spends part of the year in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York. He is the founder of Rockfax guidebooks and introduced well-designed large-format photo-topo...
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