Dead Horse Point: Chasing Light on the Way to Moab
The trip to Moab started in California with two goals that fit together surprisingly well: put the Jeep through some real desert terrain and make photographs along the way.
By the time we reached Utah, the days had started falling into a pretty good rhythm. Drive. Explore. Scout. Shoot. Repeat.
One of the evenings I was most looking forward to was Dead Horse Point. I was shooting with my friend Neville Guard, a professional photographer who has spent years working in fast-moving, demanding environments. We arrived with enough time to scout compositions before sunset and then stayed well after dark for the Milky Way.
The sunset portion was tougher than I expected.
Dead Horse Point is enormous, and that scale is part of the problem photographically. There is so much happening in front of you that finding a composition that feels intentional can be difficult. The light was decent, but not spectacular, and I came away with one or two frames I liked rather than a card full of obvious winners.
That was actually a good reminder: a great location does not automatically make a great photograph.
After dark, we switched gears and set up for the Milky Way.
The sky itself was workable. My bigger problem was the foreground.
I exposed the foreground the same way I had approached many of my previous night photographs, and once I got the files onto the computer, the weakness was obvious. The darker areas were noisy and soft, and when I tried to lift them in post, they quickly turned mushy.
Topaz helped clean up some of the noise and rescue a couple of usable images, but they still were not photographs I would consider portfolio work.
That evening taught me something more valuable than coming home with a perfect frame: night landscapes really need to be treated as two separate exposures.
The sky may only need 10 or 15 seconds at a high ISO to keep the stars sharp. The foreground is a completely different problem. A longer exposure at a lower ISO can collect far more real light and give you a cleaner, more detailed file instead of forcing you to recover nearly black shadows later.
That lesson followed me for the rest of the trip.
A few nights later, photographing the Milky Way in Arches National Park, I approached the scene differently.
And that is where things started to change.
Dead Horse Point did not give me the strongest photographs of the trip.
It gave me the mistake I needed to make before I made the better ones.