Foto Friday – Boot Arch Under the Milky Way

Alabama Hills sits at the base of the Eastern Sierra, just outside Lone Pine, California. It’s one of those locations where you can point a camera almost anywhere and get something worth looking at: weathered granite boulders, the Owens Valley floor, and Mount Whitney rising behind everything. But Boot Arch is one of the draws for night photographers. The arch frames a clean slice of sky, and if the timing lines up, you can put the Milky Way straight through it.

I was out there with a few friends on a night that couldn’t have cooperated more. No moon, no wind. The kind of dark desert sky where the Milky Way is already obvious before your eyes even finish adjusting. We’d timed the shoot to put the core right in the frame of the arch, and once it got dark enough, the image was more or less waiting for us.

The problem showed up when I got home. I started working on the raw file and kept getting stuck on the foreground. It was too bright, pulling attention away from the arch and the sky above it. I tried a few things, didn’t like where any of them landed, and eventually shelved it.

A couple years later I came back to it. Darkened the foreground down, worked the transition between the rocks and the sky until the image felt like one thing instead of two separate exposures fighting each other. That was the fix. I don’t know why it took me this long to try it.

View more of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .