Nighttime in the Badlands

These images were inspired by my buddy Travis who seems to shoot at night as much as he does during the day.

After shooting sunset on Friday, after a long trip from Minnesota, Dale and I decided to do some nighttime shooting with the help of the moon, which was full. I've shot at night before but generally in the hours before sunrise. We stopped at three locations on the way to our hotel in Wall, SD. This was the first, and best, of those locations. As I mentioned the moon was full but we were kinda guessing when it came to the terrain.

This image was actually a test shot with my 24-105mm lens at ISO 1600 with a 2 minute exposure at f/5.6. My desire was to make a much longer exposure to get longer star trails with this image validating the exposure.



Here is the second image, same lens but the ISO was cut back to 200 and the aperture was reduced to f/8 which yielded an exposure of 32 minutes. The noticeable changes are the length of the star trails as well as the better defined shadows in the first image. I prefer the first image, which one do you prefer?

After two more stops we set off to our hotel, getting in after midnight and having to wake the night lady to check us in. That was the fastest checkin I've ever had. We were so beat we decided to skip Saturdays sunrise and get some sleep.

BTW, these images are straight from the camera with no changes made by me.

Roger