Welcome back everyone!  Those of you who subscribe via email or RSS may not have noticed that my post was a couple days late, but those of you who generally see the link via Facebook though will know that my website was down for several days last week.  I had been neglecting my website updates because they kept causing issues with the site, but I finally decided I had let that go long enough – the last thing I need is my site getting hijacked and losing all my hard work here!  Anyway, it’s all fixed and up to date now, and Picture of the Week is back!  🙂  If you happened to miss the post altogether, here’s a link to it.

Anyway, having said all that, this week I’m wrapping up my series on Joshua Tree National Park at night!  Thanks for hanging in there with me for 9 weeks (!!) – I had a lot of images that I really liked from the trip, and so in turn a lot I wanted to share with you all, including this week’s!  This particular arch is known locally as Shadow Arch, and is gorgeous from several different angles, but I chose to shoot it from the side facing Cygnus, rather than main body of the Milky Way, just to do something a little different.

To accomplish this scene, I attempted light painting the structure a few different ways, including one that involved me scaling up the face of an adjacent rock, which allowed me to illuminate the top of the arch as seen in the image above.  Honestly, I think this is one of the reasons I like Joshua Tree so much – it’s like a giant playground!

Next week Picture of the Week will remain in Joshua Tree, but we’ll move to the daytime hours.  I took a number of scenes during the day that I wanted to share, but I think I’ll do that in a photo essay style post, so that we can move along to a surprise I have for you all!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson