Tony enjoying the view at Scorpius Arch as the Geminid’s put on a show for us last night!

To get this image I set my camera in manual mode with the below settings in place. I then hooked up my Intervelometer and set the trigger to take a shot every 24 seconds (I gave myself a 4 second buffer as to not overheat the camera). After uploading the photos into Lightroom I scrubbed through all of them and starred any that had a meteor in it. This sounds easy but Joshua Tree is right in the path of LAX and, well, let's just say there were way more planes landing last night than meteors caught by my camera.

After choosing a good amount of images with meteors I selected 5 images I had taken ahead of time for the foreground. 1 with my buddy Tony in the arch; a 5 second exposure with the light on for 1 second. And 4 without Tony in the arch, at a higher ISO and 10 second exposure each to bring shadow detail back into the image. I then stacked all these images and cut out the sky.

Now that I had my cutout of the foreground I placed this on top of one of my meteor exposures. I then placed the rest of the exposures on top of the cut out layer, and using layer masks I blended each meteor into the frame.

Exif Info

⌁ Location: Joshua Tree National Park, CA
⌁ Camera: Canon 6D
⌁ Lens: Sigma Corporation of America 24mm f/1.4 ART
⌁ Filter: Hoya Filter USA Intensifier
⌁ Tripod: Slik USA PRO 634 CBH
⌁ f/2.8
⌁ 20 seconds
⌁ ISO 4000
This is 27 exposures selected from a 1000+ image timelapse
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