View North from Gunga Din, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger

This is a view facing north from the Gunga Din formation in the Alabama Hills above Lone Pine, California. On Friday night we took the workshop to this area for the first shoot. The formation is named after the famous movie Gunga Din staring Cary Grant and others, and filmed in the 1930s mostly in this location.

To make this image, I climbed up about a hundred feet to a small saddle, and left the camera on auto-pilot to take photos while I circulated among the workshop attendees down below. Getting up there was no problem before dark, but finding my way up and back to take my camera down in the pitch black was a little less easy.

The “spider web” of red tail lights in the sky come from the many jets that flew overhead during the shoot—mostly military I suspect from the nearby China Basin Naval Air Weapons Station and Edwards Airforce Base. Hearing the supersonic boom as one of these airplanes flew by left me thinking that the world would probably be improved if we switched the military and education budgets around. Then again, it would probably take quite a few bake sales to pay for the fuel burned up by that web of fancy planes in the sky.