Foto Friday – The Moving Rocks

The Racetrack Playa is about two hours into Death Valley, past Ubehebe Crater, down a long rough dirt road with no services. I’d never been out there before but was adamant that I’d visit the playa while in the park.

I went out with a few friends and we got there well before sunset to scout. None of us knew the location, so we walked around, looked at the rocks, tried to find a composition worth coming back to in the dark. The sunset that evening was flat. No clouds, nothing dramatic. We watched it go and moved on.

Then we waited. In February, sunset comes early, so we had hours to kill before the Milky Way was in position and the moon had set enough to shoot. We finally got to work around 2am.

The rocks themselves are fascinating. Scientists confirmed in 2014 that the rocks move when winter rain fills the playa with a thin layer of water, which freezes overnight. As the ice breaks up during the day, wind pushes the floating panels across the lakebed and the rocks go with them.

To light the rocks, we used a flashlight using basic light painting, trying to get enough detail in the foreground to hold against the sky.

Looking at this image now, I can see the mistakes. The lighting is too harsh, a little blown out where the flashlight hit. The Milky Way processing is something I’d do differently today. I’ve learned a lot since then about how to bring out that detail without it looking overdone.

But none of that changes how I feel about the image. I was out there at 2am in February, standing on a dry lakebed in the dark, flashlight in hand, trying to figure out how to shoot rocks that move around a dry lakebed. The technical stuff I’d do differently. But the rest of it I’d do again.

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