Ghost Town Photography on a Stormy Night

The moon was nearly a quarter moon, so as the clouds began to break up, it was backlighting them as the stars started to peek through.  We went to Bodie’s classic, rusty 1937 Chevy and did some light painting to give it a little extra character in the moonlight.  People say that it may be the most photographed car in the world.  It is certainly the one that I have photographed the most!  The clouds started to break up as we were shooting the Chevy, so we decided to go see how conditions were after the rain down on Main Street.

We walked down Green Street to Main Street, and found that the puddles we had seen earlier in the day had been refreshed by the passing storm.  You don’t find standing water in the high desert very often, and it doesn’t last long, so we were lucky to have just followed a passing storm, twice now in the same day!

We captured a variety of buildings in various puddles, and the sky gradually cleared and showed more stars as the moon neared the horizon.  We moved to capture the green truck downtown, which I understand is a 1940 Ford commercial vehicle, before starting to head back towards our gear and our vehicles.  With the moon now out of the sky, many of the participants had time for one last shot of the Milky Way by the mining headframe up by the parking lot before we hit the road.

Having started the drive to Bodie at 3:30 am to get there by 5, I had some coffee at 10 pm to keep energized, but now I was too tired to sleep, so I just drove home, arriving around 2:30, 23 hours after I had left.  

It was a long day, but we enjoyed two of the best and most interesting special access sessions that I’ve experienced, in the 20+ that we’ve arranged over the past 4 years.  They just keep getting better the more we do it.  I can’t wait for the four more dates we have scheduled in Bodie from June through October this year!

I didn’t have room to include all of the photos that I wanted to show you in this blog post, so I’ll be publishing more via DripThat, a new app and community which facilitates the telling of stories through pictures, video and text.  You can find the DripThat app in the Apple App Store (http://bit.ly/1dhaequ), and you can connect with me in the community to see more of my photos from my road trips: https://dripthat.com/pr?id=jeffsullivan

Shooting Bodie’s Wheaton & Hollis Hotel and reflection

 Our next night photography workshops in Bodie will be June 13, July 11, August 15, and October 11-12, 2015.