“Arrow to the Sun” — Death Valley National Park, California, USA.

On our 12-day Southwest trip, led by photographer Marc Adamus, the focus was on adapting to the weather. Every day Marc would look at the weather maps, including live satellite and radar views, and make decisions to drive hundreds of miles, often backtracking, to see the best sunsets and sunrises. Indeed we had already passed through Death Valley a few days before, into the Eastern Sierra, but we drove 200 miles back for the opportunity of this sunset, and it was probably the best of the trip.

Cactus Sunrise — Arizona, USA.

This image, like many of my other photographs, uses a technique called “focus-stacking” to improve the sharpness of the image. A camera lens isn’t capable of capturing the entire depth of some compositions with good sharpness, so multiple shots are taken at different focal distances and blended together.

However, this image was uniquely difficult. It’s a handheld focus-stack (no tripod), which isn’t that special, but with these cholla cacti, even a millimeter of movement means that the needles will align very differently, so the blending has to be done by hand in Photoshop. It was impossible to set up a tripod here though, because there’s a large cactus directly below the camera too, so I needed to extend my arms over it, control my breathing, and take two images while carefully turning the focus ring, doing my best to move the camera as little as possible.

Utah Badlands Sunrise — Central Utah, USA.

This is definitely one of the luckier shots of my trip to the Southwest. I didn’t feel too inspired by this location from the ground, because we were on the higher plateau to the right and looking out towards flatter areas. I thought it would be more interesting to fly the drone and capture the cliffs and formations looking back towards us. It was my first drone flight of the trip, and I intended to do one “scouting flight”, to get a sense of the compositions, and then do a flight to take more shots.

However, while I remembered to charge multiple batteries, I forgot to charge my remote controller! I realized halfway through my scouting flight, that was the only flight I was going to get. And the light became perfect, so I tried to fire off as many shots as I could in that one flight, including this panorama, made from 7 images in portrait orientation. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure how this would look after I stitched the images together, but I couldn’t be happier with the final composition.

If you want this image as a desktop background, check out this blog post.

Cholla at Sunset — Superstition Mountains, Arizona, USA.

If you ever decide to go hiking in Arizona, my two tips are 1. wear thick boots and 2. bring tweezers. Because these “jumping” cholla cacti are as nasty as they are beautiful! Almost every person I was with on this trip got stuck by one, and you cannot remove the spines with your bare hands, tweezers or pliers are necessary.

In fact, while setting up this shot and waiting for the light, a little spiny ball on the ground attached itself to the side of my hiking shoe, went through the shoe, the sock, and a few millimeters into my foot. It wasn’t a huge deal, they’re not poisonous, but if you’re not careful it could be much worse.

Sunrise on the Eastern Sierra — Owens River Valley, California, USA.

I can’t believe that I lived in California for 20 years and never visited the Owens Valley until this past December. With the Eastern Sierra on the west side and White Mountains on the east, both going over 10,000 feet above the valley floor, this is the deepest valley in the United States! Pictures don’t really capture the grand expansiveness of being there.