I mentioned a few weeks ago that when I go to Joshua Tree National Park, I rarely photograph the park’s namesake Yucca trees because they don’t exist in the area my friend Mark and I generally go to.  As I mentioned in that post, however, I made time for it this year.  In year’s past when I have shot them, I’ve always done so with wide angle lenses, as I do with most of my nightscape images, but this time I decided to try a different approach.  Using longer focal lengths I was able to highlight certain parts of the night sky that I find interesting, along with the trees themselves.  For this image, I shot the entire scene at 50mm and arranged it such that it would feature a part of the Milky Way band I really like, which is the sort of wedge-shaped portion just north of the main core area.  I don’t know why I find this area fascinating, other than it was one of the earliest areas other than the main core that I started noticing in my images.  In any case, I thought it would be fun to shoot it much tighter, so it would be prominently featured, as shown above.  

Fortunately when photographing in the desert, you’ve got lots of room to work with, which definitely makes shooting these longer focal lengths easier.  You can essentially look at the entire field of trees in the direction you need to be facing for the sky, and then just start to pick out trees that you like the shape of!  So nice!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson