Explore the Mono Lake Tufas under the Milky Way

This past spring, I got the urge to photograph the Milky Way over the other-worldly landscape of Mono Lake, a large, desert saline lake at the edge of the eastern Sierras in California. One of the the lake's defining features is it’s incredible tufa rock formations, a variety of limestone. The eastern Sierra is also known for it's dark night skies, which make the perfect backdrop for light painting and photographing the tufas under the gorgeous Milky Way.Knowing that the Milky Way is visible in the northern hemisphere from April through October, I picked a weekend of the new moon in mid-April and forecast meteor showers to book a room at nearby dog- and budget-friendly Murphy’s Motel in Lee Vining, and keep my fingers crossed for clear skies.After 1:am, I parked at a popular and well marked gravel parking lot at the end of Test Station Road, and walked the loop trail down to the lake shore.It was fun to play around with a little light painting on the tufas. I came prepared with a powerful LED flashlight, and colored gels to get different effects. I also used my little red headlamp, and a battery powered string of purple Christmas lights set up hundreds of feet away to get a pleasing color composition that was barely detectable by the naked eye during the exposure.

Gear Settings Used:Camera: Canon 6D,Lens: Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8,ISO: 3200,Exposure: 25 seconds,Aperture: f/2.8,File format RAW.

As the long night wandering among the Mono Lake tufas photographing the Milky Way started to wind down, the hours before sunrise when the millions of stars started to fade in the skies over Battleship Rock conjured a beautiful blue glow, and eventually photographers arrived to capture the sunrise, just as I was leaving to get some sleep!