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| Impeccably choreographed fireworks display. |
A couple of weeks ago Outdoor Photographer Magazine issued a call for potential cover photos. Always up for a challenge, I first created a quick set on Flickr of vertical landscape shots to sort through. There were some good candidates, but I really wanted this, so I decided to keep the cover in mind as I pursued night shots in the Eastern Sierra this week.
My first stop was Mono Lake. I arrived at 9pm, just as the stars were coming out and the Milky Way was starting to peek over the southern horizon. It was the night of the new moon, so with little ambient light to illuminate the foreground, I brought a selection of flashlights to provide light on the tufa rock formations. I used my typical 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 6400 dark night exposure, but I added a small amount of fill light. My LEDs were too blue on the light-colored tufa towers, and direct incandescent flashlight beams were too bright and created too much contrast. I was able to resolve this by moving around during each exposure and reflecting light off of nearby tufa towers, and if none were available, even using my face and hands as portable, positionable reflectors. Cup your hand, and the light is even controllable in general directions! I shot a variety of stills and star trail sequences, finishing with the shot above which allows enough room for a magazine title, articles and so on.
So one decent shot down, I moved to the Buttermilks, where I had a North Star star trails shot in mind. I arrived at 2am, but someone was parked there, camping where I was going to shoot! By the time I moved to another campsite, there was no way I was going to get up in 2 hours for sunrise... I slept in!
I was generally headed toward Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, so in the morning I explored 4WD roads and checked current conditions in the Bishop Creek drainage, then moved on. I arrived at the Alabama Hills, again just in time for night shots.
Far Away from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.
Rainbows I found in the Owens Valley on October 5, 2010 while scouting conditions for the Fall Colors workshop. The rainbows move across the landscape as the sun moves across the sky.
Best viewed in high definition over on Flickr!
The wind was literally ripping water off the wavetops in Mono Lake on Sunday. Gusts up to 80MPH were reported in the Eastern Sierra valleys, with up to 145MPH forecasted on the ridges.
Fall colors will linger on primarily in wind-protected areas.
Fall colors peaked in many areas of the Eastern Sierra by last weekend. I enjoyed some of the most varied and saturated colors in years along the June Lake Loop on Friday. I returned on Sunday to find ample colors remaining, but the colors were faded and by the afternoon hevay winds had arrived and many of the trees were having their leaves blown off. Pockets of good color and some green leaves still to change do remain, and trees at lower elevations such as cottonwoods down by Bishop have a slightly later season, but many of the largest aspen forests have declined substantially after Sunday's storm.
My next photography adventure was heading out to shoot the Perseid meteor showers. After a realtively weak showing at the first night at Mono Lake, in part due to the large amount of dust in the air there (great for sunrises, not so great for seeing stars or meteors rising over the eastern horizon), I drove down to the higher and clearer Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.
Even worse, someone who stopepd to help had overextended the jack, breaking the handle in the process. I had both cans of Punture Seal and an air compressor built into my minivan, but my jack was too short, so I shot the crescent moon descending behind some communication towers while we waited for an adequate jack. 
After several people stopped we eventually were able to get the truck down off its jack, and drive, inflate, drive, inflate our way to highway 168 before the leak in the tire got too bad to reinflate. Fortunately we had been able to flag down a flatbed tow truck on its way to another call, who would now be looking for her as he drove out. Jean urged me to get back up there and shoot, so I headed back up.
To make a long story short, I was off to a late start, but I found a shooting location which would not get lit up by late arrivals, and set my camera and intervalometer timer loose to capture hundreds of consecutive 30 second shots.
As my kids and I were flying around the Eastern Sierra last week, it came up that they hadn't visited the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. It's an amazing place, and given the heat of the Owens Valley that week, an elevation of 10,000+ seemed like an even more attractive place to be.
In addition to being interesting for their exotic shapes, bristlecone pine trees are very long-lived. One nicknamed "Methuselah" was measured via a coring tool to be 4789 years old in 1957, so it should turn 4842 this year. In 1964 another specimen "Prometheus" was determined to be over 4000 years old, but the coring tool broke, so permission was given to cut it down. It turned out to be at least 4844 years old when it was killed.
We reached the Patriarch Grove after sunset, but we still had enough light to get some shots.
My daughter found this unique "wooden arch" etched into one of the tough old trunks.
The next morning we woke up in BLM's Grandview Campground at an elevation of roughly 9000 feet, and we found a scorpion outside the tent... right next to our shoes!
My memory gets a bit hazy on the details as I dragged myself through a sequence of relatively sleepless days, but eventually I woke up early enough to shoot a timelapse sequence of the sun rising over the Bodie Hills off towards the horizon.
We didn't venture into the Bodie Hills on this trip though. Instead we stuck along highway 395, heading up to Big Meadow near the town of Bridgeport to meet with Tom Lowe of www.Timescapes.org. We found a nice patch of iris growing in an irrigated pasture (replacing the ubiquitous sagebrush in the area), we explored some side roads where I shot some "sundog" rainbows in the sky, and we watched some large young hawks sitting in a nest on a power pole, while "Mama hawk" circled overhead, watching us. 
We finished the day back in the iris field, with Tom filming my daughter walking in the warm light of the setting sun.
