The Sky Rock Petroglyphs located near Bishop, CA are a special and scared place indeed. Sky Rock is kept secret from the general public due to its special patterns and its rarity. Those people in “the know” don’t share its location so that fewer people will visit and its condition could be kept as pristine as natural forces allow. After a fair bit of searching online, I was able to narrow down the possibilities. So, off I headed for a hike not sure how things would pan out. To my pleasant surprise I was able to locate the petroglyph without too much trouble (Phew!). It was fascinating to see the enormous petroglyph firsthand and consider the artist who, probably many hundreds of years ago, composed the intricate petroglyph forms. I have to admit that standing alone above Sky Rock taking in the extraordinary distant views of the High Sierra and the overall magnitude of the high plateau was very inspirational. A beautiful sunset made the evening even more special!
When I arrived at Convict lake for a Milky Way shoot I was surprised by the number of people lined up to take pictures. The crowd continued to get bigger as the night progressed but everyone was very supportive about letting other people in. While there, I met a new MW photographer standing besides me who had been out the previous night and had been unable to located the MW. So, a short tutorial on MW photography ensued about MW location, camera settings and manual focusing. To my pleasant surprise he picked up the information quickly and by the end of the shoot had great images showing up on his camera LCD. I walked away feeling good that night knowing that I had good images to process and that my brief guidance had jump started a budding MW photographer's journey
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.
