Partial Eclipse, City of Rocks
Three weeks ago I was with some friends at City of Rocks. We had a wonderful time photographing and socializing. About an hour before the sun rose over the mountains the moon, in a partial eclipse was about to set over the western horizon. It was a beautiful, quiet morning, and just soaking it all up was worth the drive. Photographing it was even better. I didn’t have much time to scout location, as it was dark out and I had never been here before, so I took what I was given. The foreground was dark, but the sky was turning out to be quite nice. I had the headlights of the truck to skim across the foreground and throw just enough light to brighten up the brush and the nearest rock formations. This helped create the balance that I needed between foreground and sky.
When mixing light sources like this, be careful. The color of the light from the truck lights is so different from the natural pre-dawn light in the rest of the scene that if you want color, it will be very difficult to correct it. That really didn’t matter to me because I knew from the start that this would be black and white. I just needed light, I didn’t care about what color temperature it was.
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