As soon as we arrived at the right spot (a couple of hours before sunset) I began to set up my camera for some time-lapse shots and scouted the location for some nice setups for later. Throughout the evening the view was very beautiful, however, camera work only became difficult after the sunset and the darkening night slowly revealed its incredible stars. I knew that for creating a nice video I would require at least 3 different astro time-lapses and that each time-lapse should have a duration of around 10 seconds (even though I did not include all of it in the video, this length was necessary for the editing process). For each time-lapse I needed material of a length of between 90-120 minutes and, as a result (and because I did not want to leave my equipment unattended), I had to stay awake the whole night. Fortunately, there was a guest house close-by, allowing me to warm up whenever I felt too cold (at night the temperature fell to a brisk -4°C). After a really long night, the sunrise brought back some long-awaited warmth and bathed the scenery in beautiful colours. After some final time-lapses and drone shots, we celebrated with a hot cup of coffee, packed our equipment and returned home.
Overall, it was an incredibly uncomfortable, yet extremely beautiful trip. The experience sparked in me a surprisingly deep love for the mountains and nature and I still reflect on it quite often. If you should ever have the opportunity to visit Italy, I deeply recommend you to stay awake and lose yourself in the jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring and cathartic beauty of a starry night in the dolomites.
"Sleepless In The Dolomites" was featured on the Facebook page from National Geographic Travel