Joshua Tree

Most people see Joshua Tree in daylight and drive home. This is the argument for staying. Once the sun is gone and your eyes adjust, the core of the galaxy comes up over the trees and the whole desert changes register.
That is my tent, and the light inside it is a headlamp hooked to the ceiling loop. It took about a minute to set up and it does more for this photograph than anything else in the frame. Everything else is silhouette: the Joshua trees along the ridge, the low scrub, and the long orange smudge on the right where some town refuses to turn its lights off.
A frame like this is a balancing act. The sky needs a long enough exposure to hold the dust lanes, and the tent needs almost none, or the fabric blows out into a white blob and you lose the seams and the poles. I lit it, checked it, dimmed it, and kept shooting until the two halves agreed with each other.
For anyone who has slept in the desert and woken up cold and glad about it. Printed and finished to gallery standard, made to put one small warm light under a very large sky. A piece of Joshua Tree to keep, from the hours almost nobody stays for.