"Quietus" a new image taken in the Anza-Borrego Desert

This new composition is simply entitled, "Quietus." This term is often synonymous with "a release from life or death" but I have always associated with meaning "anything that eventually ends"... I apply this term to what happened to the dinosaurs and hence my choice for the title of this image...especially since the metal dinosaur sculptures pictured here under the Milky Way look to be in a firestorm.

The famous dinosaurs ruled this earth for over 100 million years before their reign eventually ended and they suddenly died off. Many theories exist as to why a massive extinction happened on earth about 65 million years ago that caused the demise of most life at the time.

The most popular theory rationalizes that a huge asteroid crashed into the earth causing a massive fire explosion that generated such a cloud of dust around the earth that sunlight was blocked out for almost a year, killing off plants that needed the sunlight to survive. A large scale domino effect of animals that lived off those plants subsequently could no longer survive and died off, followed by predators that lived off of those animals dying off, etc. The dinosaurs were so large that they needed the most food to survive, so their fate was sealed, and they all died off as a result. Smaller animals, such as the mammals and birds, made it through the tough times and exist as what wildlife we see around us today.

So, this is another new image captured in the Anza-Borrego desert last Saturday evening. It is highlighting two metal T-Rex sculptures by Ricardo Breceda that are facing off under eternal stars and the Milky Way that appears to be afire.

To tie in with my title of "Quietus" and the demise of the dinosaurs,I wanted the impression of fire to be in this image along with the emotion of the dinosaurs, so I took the artistic liberty of changing the colors of the Milky Way here to be more red-orange and flame-like. it was quite easy as the lower part of the capture was already yellow as a result of the light pollution from the San Diego Metropolis to the west.

I need to give Chip Morton a call out and thanks for helping me to light-paint the sculptures correctly in this image...to get the lighting just the way I wanted, it was a two person job, and I would not have been able to do it by myself.

And Chip paid a bit of a price of pain at this spot when we were originally setting up for the shoot. As it was dark, and as it was in the desert, by accident, he walked briskly into a cactus (close to the T-Rex sculpture on the left) hard enough to get his lower leg impaled with a numerous cactus spines. He was making all sorts of crazy noises of pain, so much so that originally, I honestly thought he was joking around. of course, he was not (for a change)...One of the quills drove in pretty deep, and I had to help pull it out extremely cautiously to make sure it did not break off in his ankle--which would have cause numerous complications that probably would have ended our evening early. So I guess you could accurately say on this night, Chip took one for the team...OUCH.

Camera settings: ISO-1250, 24mm at f/1.4 for 15 seconds captured at 8:45pm on Saturday 10-25-2014.

I hope this composition and message finds you well.

peace,
D. "Bodhi"