Landscape Photography

I call the image Starry Starry Night. It is taken at a place called Trona Pinnacles in California - a dry lake bed filled with Tufa spires around 5 miles into the desert from Highway 178. It is located about 15 miles from China Lake (outside Ridgecrest) - the epicenter for the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that happened on July 5th, 2019.

I took this photograph on July 5th 2019 about 2 hours after the earthquake. I never blog but was moved to do so that day - you can read the story here:

https://www.imagesbynick.photography/blog

This images was 4 years in the making. There is only 1 day in the year when it can be taken and the window varies from 15 minutes to about 35 minutes depending on the year. Since it takes around 5 1/2 minutes to take each image there's not a lot of wiggle room. I used Stellarium to plan the shot, figure out the exact date and time when conditions were perfect - July to get the Milky Way at the right height, 10% - 15% moon to illuminate the foreground without blowing out the stars, window between the end of astronomical twilight and the moon dropping below the mountains (30 minutes before moonset).

I originally got the idea while on a field trip with my local PPA Affiliate. Unlike most of the attendees I climbed up one of the tufa spires to get a better perspective. That was when I saw the potential for an epic shot.

The next year I identified a suitable spot but a storm was rolling through so clouds obscured the Milky Way. During the next 2 years I figured out the best lens and exposure settings as well as refining the post processing. Then finally, using a borrowed lens, I captured this one. There had been a 6.4 magnitude earthquake at Ridgecrest the day before but we decided to roll the dice and go anyway.

Equipment:
Sony A7Riii
Sigma 14mm f/1.8
Benro Mach3 9XCF Series 1 long tripod
Dennis DLOW55 ball head
Andoer DH-55D indexing head on top of ball head
Really Right Stuff L-bracket
Cable release
ISO 2500, f/1.8, 25 second exposure for each image

I took the shot from the top of one of the pinnacles - the one that casts the foreground shadow. The pinnacle is about 100' high, loose scree and extremely sharp sandstone. I climbed up in a 30mph wind with the ground still shaking from time to time and the temperature hovering around 100º (and in near total darkness just for giggles).

The shot comprises 12 vertical images at 15º intervals to yield a total of 256º of coverage. With a 25 minute window that year I was able to make 4 usable passes; however only 1 of them was usable. 2 suffered from camera shake due to aftershocks and the last one was too dark. Having a rock steady tripod counts for nothing if the ground is moving!

I used Lightroom to perform the RAW conversion and exported the files as 16 bit tifs. These I stitched in PTGui to produce a large 16 bit tif output file. I then edited the final image in Photoshop - processing the sky and foreground separately. I removed a couple of aircraft trails but left the shooting stars in the final image. The final crop covers about 200º of rotation. Although the source images were pretty clean I did lightly post process the final image using Topaz DeNoise AI to clean up the shadow areas in the foreground.