There are rock formations that you really have to use your imagination to “see” – similar to seeing shapes in the clouds – then there are those that are just obvious. Or at least I hope this one is as obvious to you as it is me. I was talking to my friend Mark this time last year about potential subjects and he sent me a few different things he’d found over the years that we’d not been to yet. This particular rock formation was one of them, and I literally laughed out loud! “We HAVE to shoot that!”, I said. It immediately looked like the Grinch to me.
I’m always impressed by how rocks form in the desert. You see all sorts of arches, windows, spires, alcoves, balanced rocks – all sorts of things. Every once in a while they all come together to make something truly interesting. I can’t help but to ask myself how the heck they ever came to be, but then that’s the fun of it all really. “It just did”.
Almost always when I approach a shoot like this, I have some idea of what will line up with the foreground in the sky. For this scene, however, Mark couldn’t exactly remember which way he was facing when he took the scouting picture, and satellite imagery isn’t terribly helpful in this case. So in this case I got to show up and just be surprised by it all. As luck would have it, the California nebula and Pleiades, along with the massive dust cloud that surrounds them, rise just above it, and that suited me just fine! The dust explosion look worked well with the mischievous-looking Grinch face in the rock I thought.
Well this concludes my night series from the early Fall in Joshua Tree National Park and the surrounding areas. I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at it as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing it. That trip yielded some of my favorite images from the desert to date. While I was there, I also got some photos from the daytime, which I intend to share next week. Then we’ll move on to the collection of night images I’ve captured over the winter here in the Smokies!
See you then!
Dan
–Dan Thompson