After several false attempts I finally ended up at Schulman Grove as the Milky Way season was drawing to a close. This ancient bristlecone pine is obviously very popular as several like minded photographers showed up as the evening progressed. Amazingly, everyone worked together to light up the tree with two low level lights. Taken with a Nikon D850/ 14-24mm, f2.8 lens Settings for MW was 14mm, f2.8, 13sec at ISO 6400, 10 exposures were blended in Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce noise.
Our stay at Bishop was coming to a close and I had been patiently waiting for the weather to change so that there was more cloud action in the sky for a sunset shoot. Finally, a day before our departure the cloud patterns started looking promising so it was a mad dash to Mono Lake. It had been a couple of years since my last visit and the tufas can be over whelming from a composition standpoint. The sun was close to setting over the hills as I frantically searched for a composition I liked. This ended up pretty decent but dealing with sun flare was a significant challenge.
I showed up at Mono Lake but was not well prepared to shoot the Milky Way as I had forgotten to pack my low level lights. So this image is a composite with the foreground shot during blue hour.
