Welcome back – very briefly – to the daytime hours!  As you’ve seen over the years, the purpose of my trips to Joshua Tree and the surrounding areas is to take night time images.  That said, I still shoot plenty of daytime images as well, and it seems like every trip I come back with some I want to share.  The bulk of the images this time around are from the dunes area of the Mojave that my buddy Mark and I have made a habit of visiting lately, with one exception.  I’ll explain it, and the title of the post in just a minute.

When you’re aiming to photograph the night sky, you typically don’t want clouds hanging around, because those obviously disrupt your viewing of the starry sky.  Typically the reverse is true for landscape photography, where you’re hoping for anything but a blank blue sky, to add mood and hopefully a splash of color.  While at the dunes, we were blessed with that blank blue sky, but there was enough dust in the air to make the late light air interesting, and the setting sun gets so low to the horizon that the shadows across the dunes are just amazing.  I’ll take a blank sky with beautiful dunes like these!  Mark and I learned our lesson in the Spring, arriving a bit too late to be effective for sunset / blue hour, so in the Fall we got there extra early, had dinner, and then went off scouting the dunes.  If you scroll on down to the Alternative Perspectives section, you’ll see a number of other images from this area, including one of Mark slogging up the dunes with his gear, which I really liked because it offered some scale to the vast landscape.

On another evening of the trip, Mark and I had decided to just go out scouting an area of the park he hadn’t spent much time in, and I’d never been to.  It was cloudy, and we knew it would be an early night because of that, so we intended to stay until dark and then get back to the hotel for some much needed rest.  While we were looking around, the sky just exploded with color over this one particular mountain.  He and I both went scrambling to find compositions that featured the beautiful color in the sky.  It all happened so fast, and was over so quickly, I don’t know that either of us came away with anything terribly spectacular, but even still, as a photographer you can’t help but get excited by the scenario.  I caught back up with Mark after the light had faded, but he was still standing there looking up at the mountain – he turned to me and said “God was on that mountain tonight”.  I couldn’t have agreed more, but it was not at all what I was expecting him to say! Ha!  He later commented that it had been a movie reference (I’m forgetting the film’s name now) from a scene where Moses had been up on the mountain meeting God.  He said he couldn’t help be thinking about that while we were shooting.  Funny how the memory works!

Alright, well I hope you’ve enjoyed this second installment from California.  Next week we head back to East Tennessee for some more night photography.  I’ve been SUPER busy this winter photographing parts of the park I don’t often visit, as well as some old favorites, and I can’t wait to share this series with you.

See you next week!

–Dan Thompson