Land Of Endless Compositions: The Trend Nowadays Is To Not Reveal Locations, But It Can Be Hard To Talk

Hello Wayne- I came across your Flickr page and subsequently your web site. Your photos are absolutely stunning! I myself am planning a trip to Joshua Tree National Park to photograph the Milky Way on 9-13. I don't know if this is a faux pas, but where (at least in the vicinity) did you shoot your JT pano from? Studying Google Maps, it looks like a good area with large rock formations and yucca trees would be somewhere in between Jumbo Rocks and possibly Key's View on Park Blvd.?

Hi Anonymous. The panorama was shot out the “back” of the Hidden Valley area. If you consider the main road entry as the “front” of Hidden Valley, then go as far into the deepest part of the parking lot as possible. I parked there and hiked a short distance directly out the back going away from the main road. I had planned to be somewhere else (Trona Pinnacles) that night but relocated to Joshua Tree when the weather forecast said the skies would be clear there. I did not have a lot of time to scout it out, but this area seemed to have all the characteristics of Joshua Tree, and also was “open” allowing you to move around and get the angle of the Milky Way you wanted. It was spring, so the Milky Way will be at a different angle now. Another good spot to check out is Arch Rock. Good luck! Cheers, Wayne

Mittens Panorama by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website, Instagram, Facebook The Mittens Monument Valley, Utah. Panorama of approximately 11 images taken vertically with a Rokinon 35 mm f/1.4 lens. _______________________________________ You need a guide to go into the park at night. Contact Majestic Monument Valley Tours and ask for Quanah. ____________________________________ Thanks for all the kind support over the last year, it is much appreciated! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family! Thanks for all the kind support over the last year, it is much appreciated! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family!

Questions and Answers:

How to stitch photos together for panoramas

Question: Incredible work man! How did you stitch the 14mm shots so seamlessly?! The distortion on my Rokinon 14 makes stitching a huge issue in post.

Answer: Use a lot of overlap when taking the photos! I open the images in either Lightroom or Adobe RAW and use the lens correction function to undistort then as much as possible. If there is not a lens profile for your lens then do it manually and do it exactly the same for each photo. Also, there is less distortions if the camera lens is more horizontal. I get it as horizontal as I can and still get all the sky comfortably in the photo. I use a really wide angle lens. This means there may be a lot of "extra" foreground at the bottom, and I just crop it off. Hope this helps. Cheers, Wayne

The Rubber Duckie of the Badlands (Bad Duckie!) by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: I posted this on 500px as the the Bisti Sphinx, but remarked that it looked more like a Rubber Duckie. Well everyone who bothered to remark liked Rubber Duckie better, so it is now the Badlands Duckie. There was one vote for Napoleon's Hat! It is about 10-12 feet, 3-4 meters high, and sits up on its own pedestal on top os a small ridge. The elevation gives a wonderful view of the badlands in the distance. It may have another name, but I could not find one. The hoodoo in the distance on the lower right is called the Ostrich Hoodoo, which may help for the location. This is a panorama of 15 vertical images, all single exposures, taken with a 14-24 mm lens at 18mm, f3.2, 20 sec, and ISO 6400 and stitched together in Lightroom. Sky and foreground were taken at the same time. Foreground was illuminated with a single dimmable LED light panel with a warming filter, set to low and left on. I've been away from Flickr for a while due to being out in the field photographing quite a bit. I hope to have some good photos to share in the future. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family out there. Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

Fly Away... by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is called The King of wings. It is a winged hoodoo in the badlands of New Mexico. I saw a photo of this hoodoo about 2 years ago and had a real itch to photograph it. Last year I went there and it happened to be the wrong time of the year. I returned this spring and finally got the right night and season. The trail there is not very long, and if you do it just right it is not all that hard. The trail is unusually unforgiving though, especially at night. You can be 3-4 meters, or 10-15 feet off the GPS track and not be able to pass. You may be just off the trail and on a ridge rather than in a ravine. This is especially true at night when vision is limited. It is an unusual place with a partial skeleton near the base, probably from a cow. This is a panorama of multiple vertical images. There is Low Level Lighting, or LLL, to give some detail to the rocks. This is lighting that is very dim and left on the whole time, done with LED light panels. I am not sure of the size, but it is easy to walk upright under the "wing". There must be a massive amount of weight cantilevered from the base. Thanks for taking the time to look. Hope you enjoy! Big thanks to the wonderful Flickr family out there. Please join me at: Website Facebook Instagram Blog

The Ears of the Bear by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook This is Bears Ears National Monument, and these are the unusually symmetric and matching Bears Ears Buttes, the Buttes for which the new National Monument was named. I suspect most people are now aware that President Trump has made it one of his missions to eliminate or reduce some of the National Monuments, this being one. Sigh... This is located in southern Utah, and this part of the monument lies very near Natural Bridges National Monument, which is better known. The are around Bears Ears is mostly high desert on the Colorado Plateau. The Colorado Plateau is huge, occupying large portions of 4 states around the 4 corners region. It averages about 5,000 - 6,000 feet elevation, and there are numerous canyons cut into the plateau, including the Grand Canyon. This portion of Bears Ears is different though. You drive up through the pass between the 2 Buttes which is about 8,000 - 9,000 feet. Once you get over the pass you emerge into lush alpine meadows and a forested landscape that seems completely different from the surrounding area. There are shallow ponds which you do not see elsewhere. I was on a mission to get a panorama of the two Bears Ears Buttes with the Milky Way between them. This proved somewhat difficult because there were so many trees. Anyway, I spend a day driving down barely identifiable tracks through a beautiful wooded landscape until I found this spot. I returned the next new moon to capture this panorama. At this time of the photo I thought it was a bust, but it came out OK after all. I would have liked to move a few feet to the left for perfect symmetry, but there was deep ravine present. As an aside, the days of scouting and looking for places like this are some of my most pleasant days ever. For more images like this please take a look at Wayne Pinkston Photography . Thanks for all the kind support! Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family. It's a pleasure to post here. Cheers, Wayne

Questions and Answers

About Panoramas

Question: Do you use a panorama head for your pano shots, or single frame ultra-wide angle?

Answer: When I call it a panorama I have taken multiple images and stitched them together, usually vertical images. 

I use an Acratech Ballhead that I like a lot. I also use an Acratech Leveling Head which I love. The leveling head makes panoramas much, much easier to get all the images in a horizontal plane. There are lots of leveling heads out there, and this is the one piece of equipment that I would strongly suggest. As long as it works the brand does not matter. At first I only used it for panos, but then I started using it for every night photo and life got a lot easier. Once you level the camera and take that first long exposure photo, it is so much easier to recompose the shot. If the camera is level then you can just swivel it from side to side, or up/down (a little trickier) and the camera remains level. I can usually get the composition right in 2 shots rather than taking multiple shots. Sometimes it takes more, but it is a lot faster to get the composition right with the leveling head. Also you can switch from Hor to vert and not have to change much. I also use an Acratech “L” Bracket almost always when mounting the camera vertically and it helps a lot with panos. It’s much better to help preventing parallax. 

I just wing it on overlap, and overlap a lot. I also use a Acratech Nodal Rail to position the focal plane over the point of rotation. This prevents parallax and the computer can reconstruct it better. In reality though, I only use the nodal rail when there is something  in the foreground that is close, and parallax might be an issue. If everything is far away then I just use the L bracket and it all works out just fine. 

I am learning double row panos, and using special software for that like PTGui pano software. If you want double rows think about this software. For the really high MWs I use the widest lens I have and do them vertically. I have had decent luck with my 15 mm Sigma fisheye lens vertically. I do some lens correction on each image in Lightroom or Adobe RAW and then stitch them together and it works out OK. Just do lots of overlap.

Cheers, Wayne

A Walk in an Alien Land by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: This is the most delightfully "otherworldly" place I have experienced at night. This is the "Egg Hatchery" or "Alien Hatchery" of the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico. They are appropriate names. This is a small flat plane between the hills, maybe the size of 1 or 2 football fields (whichever kind of football you prefer). Scattered around the surface are rock formations that look like giagantic petrified eggs and broken eggs. Many look like they are setting on egg cups or holders. At night the erie shapes and shadows let the imagination run wild. This is a panorama, and it may not show the detail well, but I wanted to show the feel of the landscape. I still need to process the closer version of the "eggs". It's a wonderful place to visit but take a GPS device. There are no trails and you find the areas of interest by GPS co-ordinates. Otherwise you wander around forever. This is a panorama of 210-240 degrees, created by 12 vertical images combined in Lightroom. All are single exposures (the sky is not added). Canon 6D camera, Nikon 14-24 mm lens at 14 mm, f 2.8, 30 sec, ISO 6400. Hope you enjoy! All comments are welcomed. Thanks! Please join me at: Website Facebook Blog

The Forgotten Arm, Part 1: by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Painted Hand Ancestral Puebloan Ruins “The Forgotten Arm” is actually a boxing term describing “a move in which one arm is used to hit the opponent, causing him to "forget" about the other arm, which is then used to deliver a harsher blow” (Wikipedia). I am going to borrow this phrase to describe the Northern Arm of the Milky Way, or arm of the Milky Way we see extending North in the Northern Hemisphere. Our sun actually lies in the Orion Arm or Orion Spur, a minor arm of the Milky Way between the Sagittarius Arm and the Perseus Arm. Since we are looking from within the Milky Way, we see it as a disk-like structure edge on, rather than a spiral. A large part of what we see when we look away from the Galactic Core is the Perseus Arm. I call this northern portion the “Forgotten Arm” because we go to so much trouble to shoot away from it, and work to include the Galactic Core in our photos instead. We even have “Milky Way Season”, implying the season is over after the core moves below the horizon in our Northern Hemisphere winter. The “Northern Arm” is still up there, and has lots of interesting structures to see, and is photogenic in itself. Among structures in this region are the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), other Galaxies including Mirach’s Ghost Galaxy (NGC404), the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), and others, as well as star clusters including the Double Cluster (DC), Spiral Cluster (M34), Open Cluster (C28), Dragonfly Cluster (DF) and others, as well as Nebula including the Heart Nebula (IC1805), and Soul Nebula (IC1848). I will try and label some of these structures. There will be 2 photos, one with landscape, and one magnified and labeled. More to come, Cheers Wayne

Kiss the Sky by Wayne Pinkston Via Flickr: Website Instagram Facebook Sunset Arch in the Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah, USA. This was taken during a workshop with Royce Bair (highly recommended!). Hope you enjoy! A big thank you to the wonderful Flickr family for all the support and encouragement! Cheers, Wayne