Night Sky

I'm back from my fabulous trip to Lone Pine, CA via Death Valley. It was so awesomely wonderful that I'm not sure I can find the right adjectives... the scenery in Death Valley was beyond anything I had imagined. The terrain and geological makeup changed every 15 miles or so, and at times it looked like I was on a different planet - truly spectacular and jaw-dropping.

Getting up for sunrise photos and then staying out at night for hours on end in the cold makes for an exhausting experience - exhilarating but exhausting. I took the red eye home from Las Vegas (arrived in Milwaukee at 5:15 a.m.) - it was brutal and exacerbated the whole sleep deprivation situation. Slept 14 hours Wednesday night, 12 hours Thursday night. I'm hoping that a nap today will get me all caught up.

I haven't yet had the time to examine the photos I took (over 1000 of them!) and will post some eventually. But, in the mean time, here's a shot I took one night in Death Valley. I was able to stand in the middle of the road because we didn't see a single car during the entire 6 hours we were out there! On the left side of the picture you can detect the beginnings of star trails. I was actually going for a still shot (read: no star trails), and the exposure seems correct for this for the stars in the right half of the shot, anyway, as they appear as distinct points. But the stars on the left are closer to true north and so, as they move (or, more accurately, as the earth rotates), the trails they leave are much closer together, more concentric.


Scotty's Castle Road, just south
of Mesquite Spring.

Musings

I saw a quote last week and really liked it: The earth without art is just eh.

The last few weeks have been crazy busy and extraordinarily stressful. Normally as I go through the busyness of living -- work, grocery shopping, vacuuming, paying bills -- I have characters and plot points playing in the background of my mind. I've come to realize that this background symphony is what keeps me tethered to the world; it's what allows me to get through the daily minutia, it's the light that beckons when the stress threatens to overwhelm me. But, as I discovered, this light can grow dim. When this happens, the world, for me, becomes quiet, muted, dull. The magic disappears. I know that my detail oriented tendencies exacerbated the level of stress I experienced over the past few weeks: I find it hard to let go. But this same tenacity is what keeps me drawn to the magic of creating characters and plots, of creating my own art.

And speaking of creating art: I'm headed next week to a star trails workshop in California. What are star trails, you ask? They are the captured movement of the stars in the night sky. And they're captured by leaving a camera's shutter open for long periods of time away from all ambient light. I'm making my way to Lone Pine, CA by way of Death Valley. I'm really jazzed about the trip - the scenery in Death Valley is breathtaking and I hope to come back with the best pictures of my life. The caveat, of course, is that I'm still a novice in the picture-taking department, but I'll be with my sister-in-law who's just awesomely talented. I got my first in-depth, on-the-fly, deep in the trenches training with her during our trip to Ireland last year. She's amazingly patient and enthusiastic.

Find your art -- create it, live it.