July 17, 2019
So where did I leave y'all in the last installment? Ah yes, by Arch Rock out in Joshua Tree. Well after I shot my Milky Way Pics I did a bit of light pinting to the loud chorus of Light! by the cockroachs, eh I mean photographers on the ledge. So I re-setup down by some rocks below the arch, which was fine until the guys screeming Light! a few minutes earlier started down though my shot with bright headlamps. After they left, myself and my collegue repositioned ourselves a bit further back, while the new folk up on the ledge crawled to the lower part of the arch to do light painting, ugh. We headed back to the Ryan Mountain Trailhead and noticed some nice rocks along sice of the road near Jumbo Rocks Campground. After getting a shot there, it was on to the parking by the trailhead to get my car for one more location that I had in mind. We ended up stopping a bit short of the location I had planned and finished our shots at Intersection Rock.
Looking though the Arch
Let me say at the outset, this was too late in the season to be photographing the Milky Way and Arch Rock. To get a good shot up on the ledge, looking though the arch, it was about a month or two too late. The guys on the ledge were also shooting too early, the light from the sun had not completely disappeared from the sky. Anyway, my colleague and I setup our cameras on the ground below the arch. But as we started shooting the guys started coming down across our frame of the arch and their headlamps shined right into our lens at times. Now I was shooting stacked images so those images were tossed, so I merely had fewer images to stack. My colleague doesn't shoot multiple images and stack so he was a bit more peeved that I was. While I would normally shoot 40 images(15 second exposures for a total of 10 minutes), I had to settle for 25. I also stacked the foreground from the same images, using the usable shots that didn't include photographers and headlamps.
