Bubble Trailer Adventures: City of Rocks State Park, NM

A while back we headed to New Mexico for a photo tour, and our journey from California is long enough that we needed to camp along the way. Jonny found a campground near Las Cruces New Mexico which is halfway to our destination Carlsbad Caverns. We left Scottsdale about noon in plenty of time to make it before sunrise, we thought, but ended up making it there after sunset. It was good that Jon had found a great spot using the RV Parky App. The photos on the app are just camper-submitted snapshots, so he used a site called— CampsitePhotos.com which shows a photograph of each site in select campgrounds. He selected space #16 Cassiopeia and we were on our way to a magical evening we will never forget!

 

We drove down a very long straight road watching the sunset fade away to the west, getting darker and darker… and finally reached the park in pitch-blackness. We found our spot and parked, using headlights and flashlights to see the huge rocks surrounding our spot, when we realized the Milky way was visible–OH WOW! Great surprise- and amazingly enough, it was right above the trailer where we would have wanted it! BOOM! “OK, lets shoot NOW and cook the steaks afterward” we said!

So we positioned our lil trailer where she could be seen, but the Honda Pilot was hidden behind a rock.  We set up our tripod and started experimenting with exposures to get a long exposure of 30 seconds so we could paint the rocks, but not any longer because we didn’t want the stars to be blurred by movement. Our Lumix G9 and a 7-14mm lens was the perfect lens width, although I really wished we had a faster wide angle lens, as the aperture we had to use was F4. I’d love to go shoot that again now with my 10-25mm f1.7 lens, even though it is not quite as wide, OR my full frame LUMIX S1 and a 16-35mm F4 since I could go for a much higher ISO. As it was, I shot this with ISO 1600. [The noise is acceptable up to about 11×14, but if I could, I’d really like to make it bigger!]

We painted the sides of the rocks with a small penlight flashlight on a keyring- just a tiny one because our big flashlight was just too powerful. Jon painted the big rock to the right and I painted the close rock on the left. We experimented with the ground but liked the unpainted floor the best. To light the trailer, we used a small Lume Cube, but because it was so bright, we just aimed it at the back side of the rock which made a big soft reflector of warm light- just perfect to light Ms. BT. It also spilled out onto the ground in a beam to the right which was too bright, so I got out a small suitcase, extended the handle up high, and draped it with a towel as a “gobo” or light block. The little bit of light that was still spilling on the ground was just about right.

We actually exposed about 8-10 images with differing amounts of light painting, with the rocks and also of the trailer and ground. More than we actually needed. In the end, we only combined two images to create this shot, which is my favorite image EVER of our little bubble trailer, aka, Ms. BT! Combined with Photoshop, of course.

Like I said, in hind sight, it would have been better with a full frame camera, shorter exposure and higher ISO, but you make images with the gear you own or have with you at the time! It’s still an epic image and memory for us.

One more detail of the story though, which we will NEVER forget: When we were finished light-painting and shooting and we went over to put away the suitcase and set up the BBQ to make steaks, we were met with a swarm of HUGE long- legged and antenae’d CREEPERS all over the towel draped over the suitcase blocking the light! In 30 minutes, it had gathered a whole colony of horrific wiry bugs waving their creepy arms–WHOA!! We immediately backed up into our trailer and made ramen for dinner, saving the steaks for breakfast! Totally creeped out– I just wish so badly that we had taken a picture of them! Surely they couldn’t have been as huge, creepy and awkwardly menacing as we remember them! HAHA ~But we didn’t want to touch anything out there if thats what was crawling everywhere in the pitch blackness! We still laugh about how creeped out we were!!

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