From one adventure to the next!  This week I’m transitioning Picture of the Week from Poland, to Joshua Tree National Park in California. I am finally getting back on the road again for work in a somewhat limited fashion after COVID, and I desperately needed to get out to Los Angeles to get caught up on a backlog of things.  Since I hadn’t been there in what seems like forever, I decided to take a nice long weekend to play in the desert as well for good measure.  I had an absolute blast, though this trip looked a lot different than trips I’d made to the park in previous years.  This trip I essentially spent no time in the park during daylight hours (and in fact was awake very few daylight hours!), but instead spent my time chasing the Milky Way in the night sky, and it was gorgeous!

For my first night in the park, I decided to try the Cholla Cactus Gardens.  I actually tried shooting there a number of years ago and sort of struck out; I just never really found a composition that I liked.  This time, however, I had the benefit of having been there a few times before, so I knew what to expect, and I had plenty of time to wander around and find a view that I liked.  For me, the challenge is that the cholla are really oddly shaped and most sit against the backdrop of the mountains, making them hard to get separation to show depth in the dark.  For the image above, I found a shorter one that I could get right up on and then used a flashlight to light it up from the side.  The ambient light of astronomical twilight then served to light up the background just a touch, as my Milky Way imaging session was wrapping up.

After having spent the entire night in the garden, I decided to go ahead and stick around for sunrise.  A few of the images I captured (and some different views of the cacti) are below in the Alternative Perspective section.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson