Photography Notes from Joshua Tree National Park

Joshua Tree
Nikon D610 + Nikkor 20mm
20mm / f/8.0 / 1/250s / ISO 100

I've gone through my shots from Joshua Tree National Park which I stayed at on September 3, 2016. I was there one night and took photographs with my DSLR from about 5:50 PM to  6:20 AM, a span of about 12 hours that included sunset and sunrise. I also got in some night shots for good measure. I was much more happy with my dusk and sunset shots than my morning shots for some reason.

I did find that it was helpful using my new Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G lens to get the trees in the frame. I like this image which was shot fairly close to the tree and because of the 20mm I was able to capture the entire tree.

I think this shot is nice and sharp and has good color. Yes, it was processed in Lightroom but what isn't?

My biggest complaint, and this was for the entire trip, was that there were about zero clouds in the sky the entire week. I think this shot works because I positioned the camera low, perhaps about 2 feet off of the ground, which caused the tree to fill up the sky area.

A shot of my lens hood

I did end up having a problem with the lens hood on a lot of shots. This lens uses a tulip type shade. When it's on properly it works fine but I knocked my shade so that  it was twisted enough to show up in the shots. What an irritant!

After I got home and saw it, I happened on a YouTube where the photographer (I don't remember who it was) was talking about composition and eliminating everything extraneous in a shot prior to taking it and one way he accomplished that was to make sure that he did a full view around the viewfinder by starting in the upper left and looking all the way around the viewfinder to ensure there was nothing he should get rid of before pressing the shutter release.

I am going to try to adopt that technique and it would have made me realize that my lens hood was in the way. Note that the lower left corner isn't as obvious as the upper right corner; if the entire shot had content like the lower left corner in this shot it might be harder to detect.

Labels for the 16-35mm and 20mm lenses

On the other hand, I wish the hoods had a more definite detent or lock when they were in place as well as when they were reversed for storage or carrying. I also wish they were easier to identify or else that the same hood could be used on multiple lenses. I found I'd swapped my Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6E hood with the 20mm hood because they look almost identical. They don't lock down as well when interchanged though.

Update 9/18/2016: I decided to put a label on the hoods for the 16-35mm and 20mm lenses identifying which lens that they belong to. While doing that I found out that I just wasn't turning the hood with enough force to get it to attach to the lens properly. There's actually a very nice, positive detent that engages on the hoods if you turn it far enough. Cool!

Milky Way at Jumbo Rocks Campground
Nikon D610 + Nikkor 20mm f/1.8
20mm / f/1.8 / 2.5s / ISO 4000

Overall the worst time I had was, again, trying to focus my lens for night shooting. The Milky Way appeared over the top of some rock formations at the campground where there were campfires in the front of the rocks and I thought it'd be a cool shot.

I shot quite a few shots before I got the lens focused.

I was finally able to do live view on a star but it took a long time. The following night I had the foresight to focus the lens before it got dark but at Jumbo Rocks it became a crap shoot.

I really like my 50mm f/1.8D that has a stop at infinity focus and wish the 20mm did too.

In the past I'd been able to find something to focus on even if it meant shining a flashlight on my car which was some distance away but I couldn't do that where I was. There were no buildings with lights at a distance that I could use. Eventually I got a star to come up in live view.

In this shot there was a campfire lighting up the front of the rocks and the top was lit by car headlights turning into the campground. At first I wasn't sure how the headlights would turn out but I kind of like them.I did have a couple of shots where the headlights were too bright (it was surprisingly busy at the campground and I was right near the entrance).

Joshua Tree and a road

One other note I have for this park and in general, some of the cool trees I wanted to shoot that were right next to the road just didn't yield great shots. The subject was okay but I either couldn't get a shot I liked where the road was masked or couldn't get rid of footprints around the base of the tree.

This points out that to get good shots you need to get off the road farther than I did or had time to. Sometimes you can hide things by placing your camera so they don't show up in the final shot. I really liked this tree - it had a lot of branches and no decay or dead branches. Unfortunately it is right next to a road and I couldn't get rid of all traces of the road in the shot.

You really need to be able to walk a bit at this park to get the good trees away from the roads and footprints.

You can see more of my Joshua Tree National Park photographs on my site at http://RandallMorter.SmugMug.com site.