Star Trekking

Brandon Yoshizawa brings a human element to astrophotography in his fantastic night-sky images.

- Brandon Yoshizawa

An impending honeymoon in Australia and New Zealand in 2009 was the reason I finally became serious about photography. I wanted to make sure I would be returning home with memorable pictures. The more I travelled, the more my love for capturing these great moments grew. This sparked a passion, and soon I was looking for new ways to portray the beauty of my local landscapes.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I first tried my hand at astrophotography. This allowed me to combine my love for landscapes with my love for the stars; I had always been fascinated with the night sky and would stargaze every time that I went camping.

The challenge with this type of photography is that there’s little or no ambient light and this makes composing and focusing more difficult. I had general ideas in my head of what I wanted for these shots, but they never fully materialised until I was able to survey the site and fine-tune the composition.

The human figure plays a different but meaningful role in each of the photographs. The person standing on the plane shining a light towards the sky