Night Cactus

When you're exploring someplace new, you are always looking for compositions and interesting subjects to shoot. In a place like Alabama Hills, your options of landscape are plentiful and beautiful beyond words. I stumbled across this bunch of Cottontop cactus on the last evening of exploring this wild landscape, and set my camera up to it. I waited as the sun set, and the stars appeared. I wanted the cactus to be my main focal point, a lone group of cactus in the desert valley, with a stunning wall of the Eastern Sierra behind it. I kept the background out of focus, to create a unique look for a landscape much more unique than I could ever dream of capturing in any image. Thus, the mystery of the blurry mountains and milky way, behind.