Morning of day two – I fancy the sunrise on the desert, but W stays in bed: no film to make, so he has a well-deserved sleep-in after doing all the driving yesterday. I am not usually a morning person, so the “golden hour” at sparrow fart usually sees me firmly snuggled into the bed-sheets awaiting my daily dose of caffeine to magically appear on the bedside table.
But today I join the photographer line-up at Zabriskie Point; the soft dawn light revealing the canyons’ subtle shades of colour.
The mountains across from us wait for the sun to clear the peaks behind us, and day slowly creeps towards us across the valley.
A breeze is blowing, almost cold, but my azure fuzzy keeps me warm enough. I am going to try my hand at HDR photography; taking three different exposures of the same thing, and then blending them together to make a high dynamic range photo, supposedly resulting in a deeper more intense image. It demands a tripod. My previous attempts with hand held camera have resulted in blended but blurry images – almost right but no prizes for those, unless I put them up as abstracts. We’ll see how these come out.
Some of the photographers venture off down the slopes, I wonder -where are they going, and why don’t they have water with them? Having knowledge of what the Aussie desert does to people, I guess I am the wiser – anyway, I have a husband to pick up, so no venturing forth for me.
Back to the ranch to pick up W. A hearty breakfast at the cafe at the ranch, and off we tootle to some of the attractions of the area.
Badwater flats – where the only water is salt and the only thing living here is a strange type of snail. I am looking for your common or garden variety shelled snail, so I don’t spot them at first. These are shell-less, and I guess that makes sense – they’d boil unless their shells had air-conditioning. The French would have eaten them all by now – precooked and don’t have to add salt.
Artist’s drive and Artist’s Palette where the rock faces are the most extraordinary combination of colours,
The Devil’s golf course – dried out, cracked salty mud where you’d be lucky to find the tee.
