How I Got the Shot: Ryan Ranch Ruins in Joshua Tree National Park

Ryan Ranch Ruins in Joshua Tree National Park, © 2016 Lance Keimig

The Location

Last September I spent a week in Joshua Tree National Park, and stayed in five different campgrounds within the park during that time. It was a great way to get to know this gem of the California desert a bit better. I had visited before, but I wanted to dig a little deeper before leading a workshop to Joshua Tree this year.

Joshua Tree is a large park in Southern California that lies in both the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The lower, hotter and drier Colorado Desert makes up the eastern half of the park; the higher, wetter and slightly cooler Mojave Desert makes up the western half, which is home to the famous, wily trees.

“Over the years, I have developed a field workflow that I follow for every image I make.”

One of my favorite spots turned out to be the adobe ruins at Ryan Ranch, one of the smaller, less popular campgrounds. Ryan Ranch and the adjacent well supplied water to the nearby Lost Horse mine. The house was destroyed in a fire in 1978. The remains have been stabilized, and make excellent subject matter for light painting, and in particular a great opportunity to work on a series of lighting variations.

Scouting and Prep

For this shoot, I scoped out the ruins earlier in the afternoon after setting up camp. I saw a westward-facing composition that included two different structures that played well off of each other, and would be easy to light independently. This was going to be fun.

I set up my shot as it was getting dark, and planned to make good use of the very last bit of daylight on the western horizon.  Over the years, I have developed a field workflow that I follow for every image I make. By using a standardized method with consistent, repeatable steps, I have a high success rate with relatively few images lost to technical problems. The steps that I follow are:

1. compose
2. focus
3. expose
4. light
5. adjust
6. repeat

In this case, I saw the composition almost immediately. I’ll often begin with high ISO, hand-held shots to rough out a composition, but in this case, I already knew what I wanted to do. I went right to the tripod and made my first exposure. I still used a high ISO and wide aperture to keep the exposure time short, as I was interested in only the composition at this point.

High ISO test for composition—20 seconds, f/3.5, ISO 6400

The biggest challenge would be achieving critical focus using hyperfocal distance, because my foreground element was quite close to the camera—less than 10 feet away. As it was an important part of the composition, it had to be sharp. I hadn’t yet decided if this would be a star-point or star-trail shot, but either way, I also wanted the stars to be tack sharp.

Using the Field Tools app, I concluded that f/6.3 would give me sufficient depth of field when focused at the hyperfocal distance of 16.5 feet. (For more information on how I did this, see “Use Hyperfocal Distance To Maximize Depth Of Field At Night.”) I measured the distance from the back of the camera to a spot on the ground in the scene by taking five and a half big steps. I then put a flashlight at that spot, returned to the camera, focused on the light, and shot a test image to confirm that both the foreground structure and the stars were sharp.

Next, it was time to figure out the ambient exposure. By this point, it was almost completely dark, with just a hint of glow left on the western horizon. I used the high ISO testing technique, and came up with 30 seconds for my ambient exposure with an ISO of 6400 and my preselected aperture of f/6.3.

At this point, I had composed using high ISO shots, focused using the Field Tools app to determine the hyperfocal distance, and determined the exposure with high ISO testing. Then I decided to stick with 6400 for the time being to maintain star points. It was time to play!

Getting the Shot

Using a Coast HP5R flashlight with a full CTO gel, I stood about 3 or 4 feet in front of the middle-ground structure, out of the frame behind the foreground structure, and swept the surface of the adobe with one quick pass of the light at low power, and also lit the ground toward the camera with a momentary flash of light.

Next, I stood out of frame camera-right in the foreground, and did a very quick pass with the flashlight along the vertical edge of the foreground element. Because I was using ISO 6400, it didn’t take much light to get the job done.

Variation #1—30 seconds, f/6.3, ISO 6400

After doing several variations, I decided to try something different. For the next exposure, I chose to go long. The equivalent exposure to the previous one would have been 16 minutes at ISO 200, but I instead decided to go for 20 minutes just to get some longer star trails.

Aside from the star trails, the main difference between the short and long ambient exposures was that the extended time allowed for the last bit of twilight to build up on the horizon. The star trails created leading diagonal lines that paralleled the slope of the foreground element.

The light painting differed in that I moved closer to the rear wall, which had the effect of making the light harsher and more directional, and it brought out the texture of the surface. For the foreground wall, this time I lit from camera-left, scraping the light along the surface of the wall, leaving the edge in shadow.

Variation #2—20 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 100

For the final frame, I used a variation of the lighting technique from the first shot. I adjusted the exposure to an equivalent 3 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 800—mainly because I wanted more time to light than I was allotted in the 6400 ISO version, and as this photograph was meant mainly as an experiment in lighting, I was less concerned about having long star trails.

For the light painting in the rear, I moved further from the wall until I was standing just behind the foreground wall, pointing back to the other structure. Notice how the light is softer and more even, and spreads across a larger area of the ground. The light on the foreground wall is similar to the first lit version, but is cooler because I removed the CTO warming gel from the flashlight. I also took a step back away from the camera (i.e., toward the scene), which had the effect of keeping the camera-facing surface of the front wall in shadow, which emphasized the curved line rather than the texture of the surface. I made a few other variations, but these are the ones that I liked the best.

Final variation—3 minutes, f/6.3, ISO 800

Chris Nicholson and I will be leading a workshop in Joshua Tree National Park from April 21 to 26, as will Gabriel Biderman and I the following week. Both weeks will include this location as well as the historic structures at Keys Ranch, an area that is usually off-limits at night. I’m looking forward to returning to these spots then to see how our NPAN workshop participants work with these fun and playful structures, and also to see how a year and a half has changed the way I see them.

Note: The second week is sold out, but we have a few spots remaining for the first week of the Joshua Tree workshop. As is the case with all of our Passport Series workshops, we’ll be teaching here only once. We hope you can join us!

Lance Keimig has been photographing at night for 30 years, and is the author of Night Photography and Light Painting: Finding Your Way in the Dark (Focal Press, 2015). Learn more about his images and workshops at www.thenightskye.com.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT

How I Got the Shot: Under the Bridge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park

Under I-80, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. © 2016 Tim Cooper.

The Location

Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a gem in our system of parks. It has a completely different flavor and feel than its western counterparts.

Being located so close to Ohio’s metro areas of Akron and Cleveland, it provides a host of photographic opportunities that other more remote parks may lack. Old train stations, bridge spans, barns, farms, railroad tracks and turn of the century towns all provide unique light painting subjects. This is one of the very many reasons I’m excited to be leading a night photography workshop in Cuyahoga Valley with fellow NPAN instructor Chris Nicholson next May.

During a recent visit I tried my hand at light painting the I-80 bridge span that floats over part of the park like a Roman aqueduct. I knew this would be a challenging shot that would require different white balance settings and multiple exposures to give me time to paint the entire underside of the bridge plus the headstock and piers. Here’s how it went …

Getting the Shot

The first order of business was to determine a rough composition and exposure, so I arrived at the location just after sunset. This allowed time to focus and compose in the fading light. My initial exposure was at ISO 100 for 90 seconds at f/13 (Figure 1). I used my Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens on my Nikon D4s. The overcast sky created a heavy blue cast that was apparent when I left my camera’s white balance set to daylight as seen in the image below.

Figure 1: Test shot to determine composition and sky exposure

By the time I was finished fine-tuning the composition and settings, the scene became dark enough to begin light painting. I made my first exposure to capture the proper brightness and color of the night sky. The sky was a mix of low clouds that were picking up the pink/orange cast of the sodium vapor lights of nearby Cleveland, so I set my white balance to 3900 K to keep the color cast from being overly pink/orange.

The exposure was ISO 200, 5 minutes at f/8. This longer exposure would allow enough time for me to move around while painting the underside of the bridge. The image below (Figure 2) shows the night sky from this exposure, which is the sky I used in the final composition.

Figure 2: Sky exposure

The next order of business was to nail my light painting. I used my 300-lumens Coast HP7R flashlight to paint the underside of the bridge. I placed a warm gel inside of the Coast LF100 filter holder so that my bridge would have a warmer look than the sky. After some experimentation I decided that the gel I had with me wasn’t warm enough, so I changed the white balance setting on my camera back to Daylight (direct sun).

I began painting by moving about 100 feet to the right of my camera so that I could paint the bridge at an oblique angle. I was able to cover the entire right half of the bridge in about 2 minutes. After painting from this position I moved about 100 feet to the left of my camera and painted the other side of the bridge. During the remaining minute I crossed the road and shed a little light on the near bridge piers.

Notice in Figure 3 that the light on the underside of the bridge comes from both camera right and camera left. Working from so far off axis from the camera kept the painting on the underside of the bridge from looking flat.

After experimenting with light painting, I found that ISO 400, 5 minutes at f/8 provided the right amount of time and illumination for the underside of the bridge.

Figure 3: Light-painting underside of the bridge

My first exposure (my first "real" exposure, not the test shot) from earlier provided the night sky. The second provided the illumination of the underside of the bridge. For the last exposure (which remained at ISO 400, 5 minutes at f/8), I focused my attention on the bridge piers (Figure 4).

Crossing the road, I again went off camera right and painted the nearest pier at steep angle. I then moved to camera left and painted the other pier. Painting at an angle to your subject always provides a richer, deeper image that reveals more texture in the subject. Due to the sheer length of the bridge I was unable to paint the distant piers from an angle so I had no choice but to paint them from the front. Light dims over distance so I spent the bulk of the exposure illuminating the far piers. The close piers received the same amount of light in far less time.

Figure 4: Light painting bridge piers

Sometimes our subjects are just a bit to big to paint in one exposure. In these cases, it’s helpful to know a little about post-processing. My final image (Figure 5) is a composite of the photos seen in Figure 2 for the sky, Figure 3 for the underside of the bridge and Figure 4 for the bridge piers. I used Adobe Lightroom for the initial tonal and color edits on the images, and then finished the composite in Adobe Photoshop.

Figure 5: Final Image

Learn more techniques from Tim Cooper’s book The Magic of Light Painting, available from Peachpit.

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS FROM NATIONAL PARKS AT NIGHT