Alright, this week I’m kicking off my series of images from the Arizona desert!  It’s not often that I get to photograph with friends when I’m out of town.  It does happen every so often, but generally speaking I’m by myself.  This trip was an exception however.  My good buddy Allen had to be out in LA for work and so I timed my trip to Phoenix so that I’d be out there at the same time, and we basically met in the middle – the middle of nowhere that is!  Our goal was to find some really dark skies and spend some time photographing the Milky Way, which we did, but along the way I found some desert scenes that I really liked!

For this particular image, we were driving around looking for cacti that had a “classic” look to them… whatever that means.  Basically we were looking for cacti that were attractive.  I spotted this one on the side of a gravel road and decided it had the look I was going for.  My thought was it would look cool with the Milky Way behind it (it did, as it turns out), but as the sun was setting, it lit the scene up perfectly.  The mountains in the background look especially jagged with the late light, I thought.

Next week, the Milky Way! 🙂

–Dan Thompson

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