Back to the daylight!  I sincerely hope you enjoyed my night series from Joshua Tree National Park and the surrounding areas.  I absolutely love that part of our country and so enjoy photographing there.  Typically when I go, as you saw, is to really focus on night time photography.  The conditions there are just so much better than here in the east.  BUT, I also can’t help myself when I see an awesome scene during the day (or when the whether isn’t working in my favor for the night sky).  For this collection of images, if I’m being honest, I still kick myself.  As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my buddy Mark took off to this part of the Sonoran Desert, which I had never been to before, and he had only been once.  We got a little lost on the way out there, and so arrived much later than we’d hoped.  I saw the scene playing out above as we were approaching the dunes (they’re still about 10 minutes away by Jeep from where I took this photo) and so I stopped to grab some photos. 

When we arrived at the parking area it was clear, we were about to miss the light!  I took off – not even grabbing my tripod – and snapped what I could.  I’ve been doing this long enough to know that you always grab your tripod! Arg!  Fortunately there were a few that I used my tripod for, and a one (the vertical image below) that internal image stabilization managed to save, but everything else I took was trash.  Mark and I committed to going back one day though, because it’s just such an amazingly beautiful area.  Absolutely amazing.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson