Arche Nebra
Client Arche Nebra Museum Category Campaign Location Arche Nebra Museum Location Nebra (Thuringia), Germany
One night for one picture.
As a museum, the Arche Nebra exhibits the oldest portable depiction of the night sky. The bronze plate with gold applications is over 4,000 years old and depicts the moon with stars.
To represent the purpose of the building in one image, I am working on a concept to photograph the museum under the light of the stars. Half a year after the project was launched, the conditions for the shoot were perfect: cloudless sky, new moon setting early in the night, and the Milky Way in exactly the planned alignment. It took 11 hours to photograph all the necessary images. The shoot ends with 200 long-exposure shots of the night sky and several images of the building, which are combined into a final photo. Now the real work began. To animate the comets in the sky, 100 individual images were needed, each consisting of 50 star layers.
The end result is a very special set of images that show the unique character of this building in all its beauty.
What's behind it
More than 200 individual image layers are behind the final comet image. The base is a photo taken during the blue hour and exposed to the interior lighting of the Arche. This is followed by images in which the building and grass were illuminated with a flash. To crown the motif, 200 star images were placed next to each other to represent the movement of the stars as lines.
In the end, it took about 8 hours of work for this unique architectural photo.
