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.

First Milky Way Photo of the Year (for me)

No, it's not an award, it was the first photograph I shot of the Milky Way this year. 

After dealing with some minor health issues until mid-April this year, I've finally started getting out again. This weekend I had arranged an exclusive photographer access to the Tonto Natural Bridge State Park near Payson, Arizona, but decided to cancel it due to predicted inclement weather. Instead, I headed to the Chiricahua National Monument in southeast Arizona, which was predicted to have cool but dry, cloud free weather.

Some Planning

I was hoping to get a Milky Way and/or other star shots. By checking out the Photographer's Ephemeris, I found that the moon was also cooperative, being a waxing crescent one day after the new moon, and with a moon set at about 8:30PM. That means no bright moonlight to contend with. If you haven't used the Photographer's Ephemeris, it's available online (and as a download). Here's a screenshot of the information available from Massai Point for 5/7/2016. Note that the pin can be moved by dragging and dropping to any location. It shows not only the sun and moon rise and set times, but the angle for the actions:

Photographer's Ephemeris

Using the Stellarium application, I found that the Milky Way should be pretty visible by 1:30AM on Saturday morning, through until a bit before sunrise, approximately 4:30 AM. If you haven't used Stellarium, it's a free app that shows you space objects at selected date and times. It's free and available for multiple operating systems. I use it on my Windows 7 desktop and my Kindle Fire. Here's a shot using the Massai Point location at about 2:30 AM on 5/7/2016, clearly showing the orientation of the Milky Way:

Stellarium

Wilcox, Arizona

Friday night, 5/6/2016, I packed my Exploder, got my dog, and headed to Massai Point. We left home in Phoenix, AZ at about 11PM. We drove straight through to Wilcox, AZ, arriving at about 1:30 AM. I wasn't sure if I was going to spend the entire day and following night there so when I fueled up at the Circle K, I picked up some jerky, Doritos, and another gallon of water (I already had a couple of gallons of water with me). I tried to go through the McDonald's drive through but they were closed (no 24 hour service there if you're passing through and relying on them to be open!). 

I ended up stopping at the Shell station in Wilcox to get some coffee. The station was attended by a man who was hosing down the parking and fueling lot. I asked him if he had some coffee and he said he did. He had to unlock the door for me to enter, and I bought a large coffee. I was skeptical about how it was going to be - it didn't look like he'd been brewing coffee recently and the streets of Wilcox were pretty much empty. It turned out to be okay; I'd had worse in the Navy at 1:30 AM!

It's about 36 miles from Wilcox to the Chiricahua National Monument, and then about another 12 miles or so to Massai Point, or almost 50 miles beyond Wilcox. I drove a tad slow along the way because there were a lot of mice, desert rats, and cotton tail rabbits running across the highway and I didn't want to ruin their morning. 

There's also a bit of that road that has some alarming hills, at least to me. There are blind hills that have curves right after the summit and I've been surprised by them in the past when I drove faster (the speed limit varies from 45 to 65 MPH along the highway). When I got to the park gate there was a fox crossing the road near the cemetery.

The road up to Massai Point only recently opened up to traffic. It had been closed for road work. There were a number of places where the pavement has not been replaced as the culverts had been repaired or upgraded. I even had to dodge a tree that apparently had just fallen down that night and was jutting out into the road, blocking the east bound lane! I believe it had just fallen that night because in the morning, when I went back down from Massai Point, it had been removed.

Massai Point

I arrived at Massai Point at about 2:40 AM. It was dark! When I shut off the Exploder's lights, I was engulfed in darkness. There were some city lights on the horizon in spots, but the parking lot was pretty dark. (Here's a link to the aerial view of Massai Point in Microsoft Bing Maps - better than I could get from Google for some reason.)

Massai Point is at the end of Bonita Canyon road in the park. It's a bit over 6,000 feet in elevation. The parking lot area is oriented sort of south west to north east. It overlooks the wonderful hoodoos but I couldn't see them at all in the basically moonless night. I did find a couple of trees that I could place in the foreground of my shot of the Milky Way that was obvious to the naked eye and stretched from horizon to horizon. 

I took in the view a bit before worrying about the photograph. I'm getting close to 60 years old and it's only been since taking up photography in the last few years that I've even had a desire to notice the Milky Way. However, I spent time camping in my youth in remote places and I would have thought I'd have noticed it before. But apparently I didn't nor was it pointed out to me. Perhaps it was never visible because my youth years were spent mainly in Washington and Oregon and it may not be very visible there. I think that's sad and amazing at the same time, but I'm thankful now that I live in a place where there are some remote areas such as the Chiricahua's and near Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that it is very visible.

After letting my dog Elmer do his business, I put him back in the Exploder with the windows rolled down. I set up the Nikon D610 with my wide angle Nikkor 16-35mm f/4 on my Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod. 

Shooting the Milky Way

I had a hard time focusing for some reason. Normally I use live view to focus night shots but it took me a while to get it configured. I guess it was just too out of focus. 

I had the camera pretty low to the ground since I wanted to include the trees in the shot and they weren't that tall. That meant sitting on the pavement in the middle of the parking lot. That's okay at that time of day - no one else was up there and since they'd have to have their headlights on to drive up the side of the mountain, I'd see anyone approaching. But in the dark I got startled a few times when I turned my head and saw a dark patch on the pavement. This is rattlesnake, mountain lion, and bear country and the park has many warnings about that to remind you (and make you nervous if you're alone in the dark).

I really wanted to take some shots and get back in my vehicle!

I zoomed in with the live view, found Saturn which was very bright, and focused on the planet. I still had a hard time seeing the trees on the LCD so eventually I took shots and re-composed as necessary to get the trees in the shot.

I also used a number of shots to adjust my exposure. The shot below ended up at 16mm focal length, f/4, 25 seconds at ISO 1600. I wish I'd used more of a 17mm focal length; the images are generally a bit sharper if you don't have the lens into either stop. I also wish I'd tried bumping up the ISO another stop and shortened the shutter speed. The stars have some elongation and I really wanted more of a pin-point star shot. But it's still pretty cool and after being in the pitch black for an hour or so, I had enough of tempting fate.

The shots remind me of one of my photography books recommendations - you really need to get to know your camera so you can adjust it in the dark. Turning on a flashlight really makes you loose your night vision (and if you're with someone else, it can ruin theirs or their shots!). While I can adjust my camera in the dark, I couldn't get the text on the LCD to be dim enough. And how do you adjust that? By using the camera menu which was also brighter than heck. It points out to me that if you're going night shooting, if you can, it makes sense to make any adjustments during the daylight before you start the night shots so that you can hopefully avoid using the menu or other bright lights.

Here's the best of the shots I got, processed in Adobe Photoshop. This time I used some processing tips from a YouTube video from Kenneth Brandon. The bright orange/yellow object on the right edge is Saturn.

Milky Way from Massai Point, Chiricahua National Monument, 5/7/2016
Nikon D610 with Nikkor 16-35mm @ 16mm, f/4, 25.0 seconds, ISO 1600

My first Milky Way Picture

The Plan

On Saturday, 6/20/2015, a fellow photographer invited me to try shooting the Milky Way from the Superstition Mountains which is about 40 miles east of Phoenix, by Apache Junction. He had seen a great picture on Facebook and wanted to try it too. I always like going to the Superstitions so it was a man date! (He had his wife along so it wasn't quite that weird.)

We decided to meet at the gate to the Lost Dutchman State Park which is at the north-west end of the Superstition Mountain range at around 8:00 PM.

I decided to look online for additional information about shooting the Milky Way so I'd hopefully be more prepared. I found a number of images such as this one on Flickr by Beth Myers. I noted that she used a Nikon D610 (YAY) with apparently the Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. She shot hers at 3:02 AM on 5/3/2014. She used f/2.8 at 30s and ISO 1600 with a 14mm focal length. Since the full size image is 6016 x 4016 pixels (the size of the full images) I think she was fairly close to the mountain.

Stellarium Screen Shot from the Stellarium Website

Next I wanted to see what time the Milky Way would be visible. I found out about Stellarium, a really slick and FREE (for desktop use) application that not only shows the stars from the location you enter, but it has a real time simulator that you can control the speed of to see how the moon, planets, and stars and constellation move across the sky. 

Using the information from this application you can find out what time the Milky Way will appear vertical, for instance. It roughly shows the location, displaying the major compass coordinates on the screen. It's really slick - I also paid for a version to install on my Kindle Fire HD, which I took with me to help visualize where the Milky Way should appear.

Mice and Men

We met at the park gate as planned, or there about. I got there early and had wandered into the park and took some pics while waiting. Spoiler alert - I liked these earlier pics as much as or more than the Milky way pic. Here's one of them:

Dusk over the Usery Mountains

I really like the gold of this picture with some subtle green. This is pretty much Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC) with the saturation bumped, some burning, etc.

When it got dark enough we started taking some pictures. They just weren't very inspiring. We could see the Milky Way in the pictures a bit, but one thing I'd read was that you really should be able to see it with your naked eye (or eyes) in order to capture it well. And we couldn't. 

I believe the issue was that it was pretty hazy. Normally I can see the Superstitions from Phoenix itself. On the drive out I could not see them from Phoenix but had to get closer, maybe to where I was within 15 miles or so, to see the mountains through the haze. I think that caused two issues: 1) it reduced visibility of the Milky Way, and 2) it captured "light pollution" in the atmosphere which also reduces the contrast of the Milky Way to the dark, empty space.

Here's my best picture, and this was edited quite a bit at this point:

Milky Way over the Superstitions #1

Post Processing

I found a good, succinct tutorial video that I watched (I really don't like videos much because I have to turn on a lot of other gear that I use for my recording studio in order to play audio from my PC). I watched it because the guy also offers some FREE presets for Adobe Lightroom specifically for processing night / sky / Milky Way images. The guy's name is David Kingham and his tutorial / presets page is http://www.davidkingham.com/night-photography-lightroom-presets. I used his advice and presets to get the picture above to the point it's at.

I wasn't very happy with it, though, compared to the Beth Myers image mentioned above, or others I'd seen. So I decided to try playing with it some more. Basically I took a copy of the above image (easy to do in Lightroom with a [CTRL][']) and tried to mainly bump up the exposure so that it wasn't so dark. Well, that lightened up everything too much so I used some filters to darken the sky above and below the Milky Way. I'd also used David Kingham's "star de-focus" preset on the upper and right stars but I thought it blurred the stars too much so removed most of that effect. Here's the final version which I like better:

Milky Way over the Superstitions #2

This was with my Nikon D610 and Nikkor 16-35mm f/4 lens. Exposure is 25 seconds at f/4, ISO 1600, and focal length at 16mm.