In my explorations of the night sky last year, I was a bit obsessed with Zeta Ophiuchus, the prominent red “ball” that you see featured in many of my Milky Way images. My hope this year when I went to Joshua Tree was to setup a scene with it in it, and was lucky enough to pull it off.
The area of the park where my friend Mark and I typically shoot has amazing rock formations, as I’ve been sharing, however it doesn’t have any of the park’s famous Yucca trees. I’ve tried shots with the trees in the past, and frankly ever really come away with anything I was 100% happy with, but this go around Mark pointed me to an area of the park I had never gone to before. The spot has these giant wide open spaces (fields? I guess you call them fields) full of the Joshua Trees, and part of it also runs significantly up hill, and happens to be facing the direction of the rising Milky Way. The running up hill part is important, because it obviously improves your compositions when you’re also trying to include the night sky. Anyway, I went exploring around over there and finally found a tree that lined up perfectly with the rising Zeta Ophiuchus and also had a pleasing shape to it, AND had a nice sight line at 105mm, which is what this image was captured at. That can all be a lot to ask for at times honestly. That said, what I couldn’t appreciate fully until after I had put the whole image together, is how much the shape of the tree mimicked the nebula of the star I was including – that was completely by accident / luck! I’ll take it though!
More next week!
Dan
–Dan Thompson
Trackbacks/Pingbacks