Timeless

I was out for six days, and shot the Racetrack, the Badlands and the Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley. I would have shot Badwater too, but the patterns were missing as there has been no rain for some time and the clouds simply vanished as I waited there for four hours. I then shot the Alabama Hills, Owen’s River Valley, Mono Lake, and Lake Tahoe. All in all I took 1164 images, but to be fair, 437 were for this shot and another ~180 will be used for a second star trails shot. Needless to say, I have much work to do with regards to editing. I’ve currently only edited 3 photos, one being this big guy.

This shot has been a goal for a long time. I had such anticipation to get to it and get shooting, but I forced myself to be patient, to be reflective on how I wanted to do it. I spent all of midday at the Gallen Rowell gallery, spending several minutes at each image, and spending much more than that at Gallen’s shot of this amazing, lasting, spiritual, and extremely rare rock. I studied what he had done with it, and thought of how he had blazed such a trail into landscape photography.

As I drove and hiked to this fantastic location, I also thought of Stephen Oachs’ shot, Imagination and wondered how I could bring something different and unique to a nighttime star trails shot from here. In the end, I think I succeeded. I’ve always thought that while I’m clearly following in the footsteps of giants, with half of their talent, I could at least strive to be different, and try just as hard if not harder for my shots.

To make this image, I shot one exposure in which I light painted the foreground. That would be the base shot for my stacked image later. I then shot 436 individual 30” exposures for the stars to be stacked later. Exporting the tiffs took a few hours. Stacking the images took another few hours. I let this run over night.

I awoke Sunday morning like a kid on Christmas to see what Santa had brought me. He did not disappoint, and brought me more than four hours of star trails above this fantastic ancient rock. I edited the original foreground shot with the new top 1/3 from about 6:15am until about 10:30am. Kept finding little things that needed to be fixed or adjusted. I may work on it some more later, but for now, I’m just content sitting back in my chair and staring at it. Wondering how and why it was created. Wondering what the people who created it were daydreaming about as they worked it into this art form. Wondering where those people in those planes up there were headed… You know, the important stuff.