I had been hoping to catch a good sunrise or sunset image at Hot Creek during our visit to Bishop in 2018. However, a couple of trips for a sunset shoot did not work out to my satisfaction as there was minimal cloud action. The lack of clouds did make for decent Milky Way photography conditions. This is one of the Milky Way shots that was created by combining a blue hour foreground shot with the Milky Way shot taken later during the night. There was not too much steam venting going on this evening so I will definitely be back to this beautiful location in the Eastern Sierras.
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.
