Sailing stone under a starry night
Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, order beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.
We went to the Death Valley in California with the goal to experience the sailing stones on the Racetrack Playa at new moon. Before dark we scouted interesting stones on the playa and marked their GPS location. It was very windy at night, and we waited in the car for the wind to die down. It did not. I decided to go out on the playa in this condition; I found the rocks via GPS location. I used a dimmed-down LED floodlight to illuminate the black night. I placed the light on the ground, which produces these unusual lights & shadows patterns. In addition I used my headlight to illuminate the sailing stone.
Sailing stones are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a playa (dry lakebed) without human or animal intervention. Instead, rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind and shove rocks at up to 5 m/min across the muddy playa. More details.
I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure, carefully pulled the curves, and desaturated the image. HDR processing is very sensitive to noise. I had the ISO at 1600, resulting in substantial color noise. The monochrome looks better in this case.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC3955_hdr1bal1e
Sailing stone under a starry night
Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, order beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.
We went to the Death Valley in California with the goal to experience the sailing stones on the Racetrack Playa at new moon. Before dark we scouted interesting stones on the playa and marked their GPS location. It was very windy at night, and we waited in the car for the wind to die down. It did not. I decided to go out on the playa in this condition; I found the rocks via GPS location. I used a dimmed-down LED floodlight to illuminate the black night. I placed the light on the ground, which produces these unusual lights & shadows patterns. In addition I used my headlight to illuminate the sailing stone.
Sailing stones are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a playa (dry lakebed) without human or animal intervention. Instead, rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind and shove rocks at up to 5 m/min across the muddy playa. More details.
I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure, carefully pulled the curves, and desaturated the image. HDR processing is very sensitive to noise. I had the ISO at 1600, resulting in substantial color noise. The monochrome looks better in this case.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC3955_hdr1bal1e