In the middle of August, deep in the Ligurian Alps of north west Italy, close to the French border, a family holiday led me to a waterfall above the village of Rocchetta. By day it was the perfect spot to cool off, a twenty minute hike up from the village to a pool fed by falling water, cold enough to shock the heat straight out of you. By night, it became something else entirely.

The climb up with a full pack of camera gear was hard going, all hands on rock in places, and by the time I arrived I was as soaked and overheated as if I’d never left the water. But the effort fell away almost as soon as I set up. The waterfall roars constantly, drowning out everything except the loudest of the valley’s night sounds, and there’s a strange comfort in that kind of relentless white noise. It has a way of making a landscape feel completely enclosed, like the world beyond the ravine simply doesn’t exist for a while.

The image was a star trail, framed to hold the whole scene together: the tree-lined valley walls, the lush growth clinging to the rock behind the falls, and the water itself blurring into silk as the stars wheeled slowly overhead. While the exposures built up frame by frame, I had time to spare, and nothing left to do but wait.

So I got in the water. Lying on my back beneath the waterfall, the roar filling my ears and blocking out everything else, looking straight up at a sky black enough to show every star it had, was one of those moments that reminds you why you do this. Cooling off from a roasting night, suspended in noise and darkness at once, waiting for the last frames to finish. It’s hard to think of a better way to spend half an hour, or a better argument for chasing the night sky in places most people never think to look.