The night I overpaid a taxi driver by 500% to take a photo of the stars.

While on a tour of the salt flats of Uyuni in Bolivia, an image came to my mind and I could not stop thinking of how I would be able to capture it with my camera. At that moment, I decided I would do what I could to capture what I saw only in my imagination.

My girlfriend and I started the day pretty early and walked towards the street where a 4x4 was waiting for us to drive through endless, invisible roads of nothing but white salt and blue skies. This was an amazing contrast to a small town in what seems to be the very literal meaning of "the middle of nowhere". We drove past some very dusty roads and arrived at the train cementery where tens, if not hundreds of old trains laid to rust, with no more purpose than for tourist (like myself) to climb them and take a photo as a souvenir.

This was that moment when the image came to my head. "What if I could capture one of these trains with the milky way in the background?" I knew for sure that with very little light contamination, the stars in the sky would pop during the night.

We got back from the tour after sunset and it was getting colder and colder. It must have been under cero degrees celsius and it was probably the coldest I have ever been. I wore a few layers of clothing...pretty much every piece of warm clothes I had in my backpack. I grabbed my camera, my tripod and started walking around town trying to find a taxi driver that would take me to the train cementery at midnight.

"¿Estás loco? Solo los malos y los borrachos van ahí a esta hora." (Are you crazy? Only the drunks and the gang members hang out there at this time.) This was the response of about 8 different drivers that refused to take me where I wanted to go. I was ready to call it quits and started walking back to the hostel, but I saw a taxi and flagged it down in a last attempt to get that image.

The taxi pulled over, and I told him about my plan. He said he would only go there for 5 times the amount on the tariff chart and that he would wait for only 10 minutes while I took the photo. He made sure to make me feel the danger involved in driving there at that hour. However, I accepted and we were on our way. About 20 minutes later we made it to where I wanted to be. It was pitch black and I could not see the train that was only about 5 meters in front of me. It was cold, very cold...freezing. My knees where shaking and my hands were almost numb when I took my gloves off to set up my tripod and camera. But the sky...

it was one of the most wonderful and magical spaces I had ever been in.
I could see stars from the start of the horizon in almost every direction.

There were voices in the background and glass breaking at a close distance, so I was a bit nervous. I used the light from my iphone to see where the train was and I set up my camera in that direction. I knew the taxi would only wait for 10 minutes and I asked him to turn his headlights off so that I could get the most light from the sky. Knowing I only had a few opportunities to get my settings right for 3 or 4 long exposures the led light from my phone helped to "paint" the train while the sensor captured the Milky Way.

It is definitely not one of my best photos, but it is for sure one of the top ten memories I have of capturing light with my camera.

And yes, I would do it all over again.