On my most recent trip I found myself drawn to using the Leave a Legacy monoliths as a reflecting point in my photos. I shot several sunset photos using them and when leaving that night was drawn to using them for some more photos. The tops are nice and wide, so I simply place the camera up there and used a small lip vaseline from my pocket to elevate the front of the lens slightly to get the angle I wanted. The reflection here is alright but I think I’m going to do this one more time as I am sure I can get more of the purples and yellows reflected with a slight angle adjustment.
Editing on this shot was incredibly simple. I did some basic camera raw slider adjustments followed by a targeted levels adjustment using luminosity masks of the shadow areas. I used Color Efex 4 Pro Contrast and made a slight bump to the saturation. I did a quick round (5 minutes) of dodging and burning and finished it off by brightening up the stars a bit.
