Red Racer – Death Valley National Park

I finally made it out to the Racetrack in Death Valley while road-tripping with the boyz a couple weeks ago. Super clear skies were calling out for a starry night shot. Zack and I spent a chilly hour or two experimenting with different light painting techniques. The one I liked the most was the red “night vision” setting on Zack’s headlamp. We selected this particular sailing stone because it had a wonderful S-shaped track. For the land exposure, we set the long exposure timer for 4 minutes, carefully walked the track with the light pointed at the ground, groped our way back to the cameras in complete darkness…and then adjusted our technique and repeated. We had lots of screw ups. For developing I blended one 2-minute natural starlight exposure together with the red, light painted exposure. The starry sky is from a third25-secondd exposure to avoid star-trailing.