Badlands Milky Way

Description

Badlands Milky Way was a bucket list shot for me to catch glimpses of the South Dakota Badlands at night with all the shapes of the peaks and color of the night sky. Clear skies for a great Milky Way capture. Very serene, velvety smooth sky sparkling with multi-colored stars over rough terrain. This was truly a once in a lifetime catch because of the help from unknown cars that did the light painting for me. It took 4 vehicles to get this shot and I only knew one of them and that was me to get myself there. 2 cars in the background lit the farthest peaks going in opposite directions, with one of them hitting the brakes which lit one mountain in red. At the same time a truck that was about 150 yards behind me swept my immediate foreground with his headlights and I thought he had ruined my shot but those lights helped to expose the landscape. I couldn’t have done better if I had planned it that way.

The Badlands were so named by the Native Americans because of the difficulty in walking through this imposing terrain.