Why it’s a favorite

This year was a year of discovery in Joshua Tree.  I’d seen a day time image of this truck last year, and after extensive digging through satellite images managed to the find the location.  My buddy John and I ventured out there in the four wheel drives, not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.  We even had a backup plan if we got out there and the site turned out to be kind of lame – as it worked out though, it was a treasure trove of images for me this year.  I enjoyed the location so much I actually went back a second time in the fall.

Without knowing the exact orientation of the sky, I had already visualized how I wanted the truck to be lit before I even saw it in person.  John and I managed to pull it all off, and as luck would have it, it lined up perfectly with the rising Milky Way. From a technical perspective, this image also represents a few firsts for me, but you’d need to really know what you’re looking at to catch the details I’m excited about.  Regardless, this one is a keeper for me.

Why it’s a favorite

One of two as-yet-unpublished images for this year’s collection; I’m thrilled with this image of Cygnus setting in the far reaches of the Mojave desert.  I’ve been eyeing this particular mountain range for years – basically every time I go out to Joshua Tree I stop to take pictures of it, but I’d never come away with anything I really like.  Turns out I had just been visiting in the wrong time of year!  When I typically go during the spring, the night sky objects aren’t reaching all the way over to this location, but by early fall, that has all changed.  Like the image above, this image represents a technological advancement for me personally – thanks to a new filter that allows me to focus in on some different light spectra, and bring out colors not typically seen in deepscapes like this.  For the casual observer, it probably won’t matter, but hopefully it’s an impressive image in its own right.

Why it’s a favorite

The second of two images in this year’s collection that I haven’t gotten around to publishing yet, and another that took a lot of digging to find.  My buddy Mark actually spotted it first on satellite images, and he’d actually been close to it before when out exploring.  The old truck sits in a low spot out in the desert though, and you have to be almost right on top of it to spot it – so he’d never actually seen it until the two of us went and found it together.  Like the other truck above, this one is a bit of a mystery.  I’ll talk more about it when I publish the photo by itself, but suffice it to say it was a lot of fun to go looking for and then setup and shoot.  Thanks to clearer satellite images and a video online that we found that does a walk-around, I was able to work out ahead of time how the truck lined up with the night sky, and so had a very complete vision for what I wanted the final image to look like.  It’s perhaps no accident, then, that both images I had a really good vision for ahead of shooting both ended up in my 5 favorites post!

Why it’s a favorite

I commented in a post last week that this was one of the few times I’ve ever witness fog back in the Walker Valley.  I was thinking about it more yesterday, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen it happen three times in all the years I’ve been going back there.  Given that, you know you’re in for some unique images when it happens, and that’s totally one of the things I like about this image.  I’ve shot this same little cascade a few times before, but never had lighting conditions or fog like this before, making it a stand out in my mind.  It also just all came together with the beautiful fall colors and the nice flow rate in the river.  It’s definitely one of those “right place, right time” type of images.

Why it’s a favorite

Some times there are images you can visualize way ahead of time, as I mention above, and sometimes you have a serendipitous moment like I did with this one.  I mentioned in my post a couple weeks ago that I saw this scene play out in my rearview mirror as I was driving down the Foothills Parkway, and immediately pulled over on the side of the road to photograph it.  I was lucky in that the conditions held long enough for me to capture it all well – a rarity in and of itself!  That atmosphere of the image, the beautiful side lighting, the peak colors; everything just really came together with this image.