Cobblestones on the racetrack playa
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 warm-color LED floodlight to illuminate the black night. In addition I used a cold-color headlight from a low vantage point to illuminate the playa. The low light makes the playa look like cobblestones
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 and a paintery HDR photo from a RAW exposure, merged them selectively, and carefully pulled the curves.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC3960_hdr1bal1pai1g
Cobblestones on the racetrack playa
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 warm-color LED floodlight to illuminate the black night. In addition I used a cold-color headlight from a low vantage point to illuminate the playa. The low light makes the playa look like cobblestones
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 and a paintery HDR photo from a RAW exposure, merged them selectively, and carefully pulled the curves.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC3960_hdr1bal1pai1g