Scott Jones

A proper landscape photo trip is something like a marathon, an endurance test to determine how badly you want the chance for another good image. This test is easier to pass at the beginning of the tip, before consecutive nights of 3-4 hours of sleep have caught up with you.

When we arrived at Yosemite on Monday, we spent the afternoon at Olmstead Point with a fantastic view of Cloud’s Rest with Half Dome in the distance. (More on this location later, I hope.) After spending the early evening atop massive pieces of granite, we returned to our lodgings in Lee Vining, an odd little town on the western shore of Mono Lake. It turned out I’d succeeded in infecting one of our group with my interest in astral photography, and together we convinced a third to give up on an early night and head to Mono Lake to see what the eerie landscape there might look like under the Milky Way. (Btw, I hope to be posting links to their images as well when they start to show up on their Flickr accounts.)

Mono Lake is a remarkable place, both for the unusual geology that creates tufa formations from an odd chemical reaction of fresh water seeping up from below the lake and mixing with the lake’s very salty water, as well as for the history the location plays in California’s struggle for water. At midnight, there is very little light pollution from Lee Vining, which is the only town near enough to spill artificial light on this section of the shore, and the altitude makes the Milky Way’s gases visible to the naked eye. What is not visible as you stand there in the near pitch blackness, but which does show up in long exposures with a camera, are the billions of stars and colored gasses of this part of the galaxy. The first few exposures are a bit of a surprise when you find out what the camera tells you is there but that you can’t see. The sky simply looks black, the stars all look white, and you can just make out a vein of gasses in a long irregular line across the sky. A 30 second exposure, however, shows that there is much more going on that that.