Badwater Sunrise

Badwater Sunrise
Badwater Sunrise, Death Valley

Badwater Sunrise

Sunrise at Badwater, Death Valley
at Badwater,

“There's a bad moon on the rise”

“There's a bad moon on the rise” rolls the lyric of the old Creedence Clearwater Revival song. No, I'm not that old but I'm not that far off either. As I write this post I'm listening to the track “Outside” by the Foo Fighters. If you saw the ‘Outside' episode of the Sonic Highways series you'll know the song was inspired by and recorded at Rancho de la Luna in the near Joshua Tree, California. Outside is my favorite track on that album and perhaps the lyric below captures part of why the fascinates me:

Oh, I found the space between the spaces
Standing in the nothing, and time reclaims you
And as the wind will beat you down
And the wind the only sound
There's something out there

My First

The first desert I lived in was the Libyan Desert. I lived there on-and-off for almost five years. I like deserts. I certainly prefer them to jungles. And, after reading this article in The Guardian on the ongoing tragedy of the heatwave roiling India at the moment I have a much better idea of why. The absence of humidity in the Libyan Desert is what made working there tolerable even if it was hot in the summer.

at Badwater in

in late February is not that hot. Waiting for the sun to rise I was wearing a ski-jacket shell over my sweater and I was wearing gloves, only partly to protect my hands from the sharp salt crystals of Badwater. A short time later I'd be down to just a t-shirt on top, the temperature swings that much during the day!

Sunrise at Badwater, Death Valley
at Badwater, Death Valley

Photo Recipe

The goal was to capture the starburst as the sun crested the Amargosa Range. There's a brief window of time as the sun crests (at sunrise) or descends (at sunset). To capture the starburst you need a small aperture and you can't avoid some degree of flare. The small aperture results in very noticeable spots from any dirt on your sensor which is impossible to avoid if you change lenses in a desert. You can minimize the opportunity by ensuring you turn the camera off before changing lenses, but you can't totally avoid getting dust in the chamber. The ‘Visualize Spots' feature in Lightroom comes in really handy to address those that do manifest in the image.

To get this perspective I used a wide angle lens placed very low to the ground – about six inches off the ground in this case. The Gitzo tripod I have allows me to reverse the column and suspend the camera, upside-down, below the tripod head. To frame the shot I used the ‘live view mode'. I also used the electronic level of the Canon EOS 5D Mark III to level the camera.

Multiple layers processed through Lightroom CC, Photomatix, and CC
Black and White conversion through Topaz B&W Effects

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