Click on the image for a larger view – Sheldon

Check out this view from the hills just north of Joshua Tree, California. How did I do it? Well, for starters it’s actually three images carefully pieced together in Photoshop. The key is to use a tripod to stabilize the camera, then simply pan across and take several shots.  You gotta be quick cause the clouds are moving and of course to get these types of night shots you’re leaving the shutter open for a while as it is.

After I grabbed the above shot, I thought we were done, but while I was busy taking the panoramic shots one of my guides, Steve, stacked rocks together into a rock sculpture further down the ridge we were working on. To get to our location on top of the hill at night we brought headlamps to lead the way as it can get quite dark on a moonless night in the desert.

My experience with light painting leads me to stay away from white lights when going for the trail effect. The problem is they light up to much other stuff you don’t want in the shot. My other guide, Jason, had a bad ass headlamp with blue and red LED settings, with a fat green power light on the top. We kept his on the blue setting for the LIGHT PAINT SCULPTURE shot. The other headlamp we were using was on a red setting. You can check my camera settings here.