From our just completed spring Death Valley visit.. An image and thoughts.

I have always believed that a good image is just that, no matter how it is achieved. An image is a capture of a particular place at a certain moment in terms that the artist chooses to present. The creative process is unleashed when the imagination and the technical collide! Imagination is the key. The technical is only the tool that unlocks the treasure.

Zabriski Point in Death Valley National Park is by far my favorite sunrise setting. That’s a big statement considering all the options our parks present. None the less, given the choice, I’ve found myself back at this location time and time again.

When asked where the best place to shoot the lunar eclipse this month the answer was quick and decisive. Death Valley! Where specifically? Zabriski!

The shoot started at 2AM and ended at sunrise!

OK, I had the idea but this was an eclipse taking place some two hours before sunrise. The landscape would be dark and the moon, even when in full eclipse, would be bright. So how was this image done? I wanted to create a lunar feel. I knew I would not be able to hold both moon, and landscape with the same exposure. Opening the shutter for an extended period of time would blur any motion and over expose all highlights.

I first did exposures of 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes and 4 minutes at f/2.8 and f/1.2. I wanted a “soft surreal feel” that the wide open aperture would provide. Next I was careful to get an exposure that would render the moon as it would have been when the angle lowered into my composition. I knew of course that the moon was moving quite quickly and I wanted to make sure not to blur it with an exposure longer than a half second. This was only possible wide open with an ISO of 1000! With a 50MM lens I was not as much concerned with depth of field as with movement. I did not want an egg shaped moon.

For this “image” I used the frame shot for the landscape that had a now fading eclipse in it and made a composite with the frame I had shot earlier of the moon in full eclipse. This gave me the orientation and composition I wanted with the full eclipse.

Certainly not a documentary photo and not intended to be anything but my image, and like a lot of things in life, it was the journey as much as the destination. If it’s not fun to imagine and then try, in the end I’ve found, the resulting image will show it!