Yucca Forest at Night

Deserts by their nature are...well...deserty. Mostly open ground, cactus, but certainly not many if any trees.

Sometimes though the yucca grow close together and some species grow tall and you can have a yucca forest. I have encountered several places where there were stands of tall yucca. In the desert is about the closest thing to a forest. When I found this one in Big Bend, I thought this could be an interesting place to photograph on a clear morning sometime.

One morning during my March trip I could see it was very clear and I thought it might be a morning to try the yucca forest. I drove down to the location and began to work on images. A full moon was hanging in the western sky and I thought I might get both star trails and a landscape lit by moonlight. I sat up the 4x5, put on a moderate wide angle (125mm), and focused on the moon since it is an object at infinity and you can actually see it on the ground glass. Then I reframed the image to have yucca and sky facing north.

The exposure wide open at f/5.6 and about 15 minutes. The chrome captured the yucca with some moonlight glow and the Big Dipper is prominent in the sky. Very nice.

This is a shorter image taken in the dark of the night by the light of the moon. It was a clear morning but I had one good image and I thought that there still might be some good images to be had here.