October 2025 (One Month - One Picture)
Explore Landscapes #101
In the Mojave desert, early morning tends to bring a calm stillness, it’s quiet, and it puts me into a contemplative flow-state—ready for photography.
First Light at the Pillars | © 2025 Jon Norris
October 2025 | Joshua Tree (CA) | Lisbon (Portugal) | Chesterfield (UK)
Another busy month in the books that involved a business trip to Portugal for a conference, a visit to see my Dad in the UK, and was book-ended with workshops and an astrophotography shoot in Joshua Tree.
I started the month leading a weekend workshop (G’day Theresa) - which saw us shooting from first to last light.
There’s something so incredible about witnessing the first light of the day—and I never get tired of doing so. I’m not naturally a morning person, but over time, I’ve learnt that (for me) it’s the best time of the day for photography. In the Mojave desert, early morning tends to bring a calm stillness, it’s quiet, and it puts me into a contemplative flow-state—ready for photography.
I find it exciting to drive out into the park while it’s still dark, looking left and right and building a picture of what’s out there in the darkness. I pull into an empty parking lot. The anticipation for the day ahead builds in my head. I pull on my boots on, grab my backpack and tripod, put a headlamp on, and walk along a familiar trail to our shooting location.
As I set up I can see the granitic skyline starting to get a bit of definition against the dark sky. My eyes perceive so much more tonal detail than my camera, and can differentiate the blacks, darks and shadows, in the background of the scene.
Slowly at first I start to perceive more detail in the foreground as the dark sky slowly brightens. Then the colors start to appear. Yellow, orange, pink and purple. As they build, the granite rock formations facing them start to glow.
There’s a short window of time where the light and colors are subtle and all blend together nicely in the scene ahead of me. I shoot in brackets of 7 exposures (with 1-stop intervals) to give myself the most latitude in how I decide to post-process.
And then, almost as quickly as they arrived, the colors fade into daylight, and that can only mean one thing. It’s time for a tailgate coffee back at the truck before heading to the next shooting location.
