I've shared several posts from my adventures over the weekend of January 19th through the 21st. I started with a walk at Pixley National Wildlife Refuge and then visited the amazing Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park. After that I did the auto tour at Kern National Wildlife Refuge where I saw some gorgeous birds.
Next on the agenda was a harrowing drive through Death Valley (to which I had never been). I say harrowing, because I had just got my rear brakes done on my car but didn't realize that one of my front brakes was in bad shape too. By the time I got through Death Valley, that brake was pretty much metal to metal. Scary! There are some really steep hills going down into the valley, let me tell you.
But it is truly beautiful. As I've mentioned before, when you're just driving through the desert and not paying attention, it looks monotonous. But when you slow down and pay attention, there are so many diverse things that create a beautiful landscape.
Unfortunately, I got down there just before sunset, so I didn't even get to see a 10th of this wondrous area. I definitely will be taking a longer trip with more specifics in the near future.
But what I did see what gorgeous.
And the sunset was so beautiful.
Even in black and white!
The supermoon was rising as I drove through the Valley. I pulled over to give my brakes a rest. In addition to the beautiful vista, I was surprised by a wild burro that gave a kick and ran from my headlights as I came around a corner!
My goal was to take pictures of the Supermoon at the Goldwell Open Air Museum at Rhyolite, Nevada.
Unfortunately, I had some tripod issues and when I tried to move to a different spot to get some different angles, my tripod wouldn't get stable again. :( So, again, I need to go back.
The next two are cool because I did get some of the eclipse.
I don't know much about astral photography and I don't have any photo stacking software so these are all just basically edited from Raw in Photoshop. I'm going to set a goal to learn more about night sky photography and get better at it over the next year. :-)
xoxo
