See our work
Chasing Darkness
Our clients
There are places on this earth where the sky still belongs to itself — where light pollution has not yet reached and the Milky Way stretches from one horizon to the other like something out of a painting you would not believe was real until you are standing under it. We went to find one of those places. Our client, Nomad Escapes, a boutique travel agency specialising in off-grid experiences, commissioned us to document one of their signature stargazing expeditions in the high desert of Atacama, Chile — the clearest skies on the planet and the darkest nights we have ever worked in.
The brief was both exciting and technically brutal : capture the experience of being under that sky in a way that makes someone who has never left the city feel what it is like to be completely swallowed by the universe. Photography and video. No artificial lighting. No compromises on authenticity. Just the sky, the desert, the people looking up, and whatever we could pull out of that darkness with a camera.
This was not a shoot we could prepare for in a studio. Everything we know about light — how to find it, how to use it, how to work around it — had to be relearned from scratch for an environment where the only sources of illumination are the moon, the stars, and the faint glow of a headlamp pointed at the ground.
Date:
Timeline:
01 weeks
Categories:
Astrologie
Into The Dark
The expedition ran over four nights, departing from San Pedro de Atacama each evening at sunset and driving forty minutes into the desert until the last traces of the town's light disappeared behind the dunes. Twelve participants per night. A guide, an astronomer, and the two of us.
The first night was a calibration exercise. We tested focal lengths, exposure times, ISO limits, and tracking equipment while trying to stay present enough to anticipate the human moments happening around us. Astrophotography and documentary photography pull in opposite directions — one demands a tripod and long exposures, the other demands mobility and speed. Finding the workflow that served both took until the second night.
By night three we had our rhythm. Wide angle lenses on the tripod for the landscape and sky frames — exposures running between fifteen and twenty-five seconds to pull enough light from the stars without motion blur. A second body handheld for the participants — faces turned upward, breath visible in the cold desert air, the particular stillness that comes over people when they are confronted with something genuinely bigger than themselves. That stillness is what we were really there to photograph.
The astronomer pointed out Jupiter on the second night and watched twelve adults go quiet in a way that no presentation or meeting room ever produces. We got the shot. It is the one the client put on their homepage.
For video, we built the piece around sound as much as image. The Atacama desert at 3am is one of the quietest places on earth. Wind drops. No insects. No traffic. Just the faint crunch of footsteps on dry earth and the occasional quiet voice pointing at something overhead. We recorded that silence deliberately and built the entire sound design of the film around it — because a film about the night sky that does not make you feel the quiet of it has missed the point entirely.
On the final night, the moon rose at 2am and washed out the faintest stars. The group watched it climb above the horizon in complete silence for nearly ten minutes. Nobody asked us to stop filming. Nobody needed to.
Project Details
Client — Nomad Escapes Type — Brand Content · Photography & Videography Location — Atacama Desert, Chile Date — August 2024 Duration — 4 nights on the field · 2 weeks post-production Deliverables — 36 photographs · 1 documentary short (5'10") · Full social media package Photography — Thomas Renard Videography & Edit — Nadia Kamga
03 / PORTFOLIO
