Welp, this is it!  The last night image from my trip to Joshua Tree in the Spring, and I am pretty certain this has been my longest series of night images – so much fun, and I’m definitely ending on a favorite!

People ask me sometimes about my vision for an image – do I have one when I start, or am I just winging it.  The truth of it is, it can be either, and sometimes both.  Some times I’ll approach a scene and have no idea what it’s going to look like, but as I start light painting, I catch inspiration for what it could look like, and I work from there.  Other times, I know exactly what I want before I walk out the door.  For these dune scenes, I was totally just making it up as I went.  Last week’s image I caught inspiration as I was light painting and my friend Mark and I kept iterating until it was looking the way we wanted it to.  This week’s image, however, I was convinced I didn’t have anything worthwhile.  The dunes in the foreground were so big, and so far away, that my attempts to light paint them were pointless.  I tried doing really long exposures, in hopes that the light pollution would illuminate them some – and it did a little – but it was SO dark out there, I couldn’t really see it on the back of the camera.  To be totally transparent, when I got home, I looked at the images and wrote them off as a failure.

After I got through all the images I made another pass through and started noticing sky images I had never processed, which made me ask the question – what were these supposed to be?  I looked further and was reminded of this scene.  I started playing with the images and suddenly found myself wondering why I had discounted them so quickly!  I definitely want another swing at these dunes, but the more I played with this set of images, the more I was liking what I was seeing!  Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it?  We come to a conclusion and skip on past a diamond in the rough.  Glad I came back for a second look!

Well next week we’re returning to the day time, but we’re not leaving the desert!  I have another handful of images from my time out west that I’d like to share, then we’ll return to the night in the Smokies for a series of images I’ve captured here at home over the summer.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson