The neatest way to photograph the “teddy bear cactus”  (Opuntia bigelovii ) is to do it when the sun is low, so as to backlight this fuzzy cholla, and use its shadow in your composition. 

Incidentally, this image was originally photographed with a skyline, and some bright sky at the top of the frame.  However, like images made of the Grand Canyon and similar situations, this photo looks best when the sky is cropped out.  “Cropping in the camera” is an art form, one I am still learning, after decades of photography!

One of the compositional ploys I enjoy using is to have my subject break the horizon, and if possible, be viewed against an interesting background. 

The literature tells us that Joshua Trees only blossom when sufficient rain has fallen in the months prior to spring, and this spring was a very dry one.  In fact, we only found one tree that had impressive blossoms, in our wanderings through the Park.

As it happens, this tree was located quite close to a large sanitary facility in one of the campgrounds,   and was downwind from it.  As I made a number of photographs of these blossoms, I began to notice that the air here did not have the pristine quality that we associated with the rest of the Park.  It was necessary to wait patiently for the breeze to drop before making  my photographs, and I had ample time to ponder the effects of airborne fertilization on this particular tree, and the associated plumbing problems that caused it ... 

I wanted the sky to contrast well with the pale blossom, and so used a polarizing filter on the lens to darken the sky.

The monzogranite rock formations in Joshua Tree provide wonderful sculpted shapes that draw the eye, and demand attention from the camera - so much so that we were impressed by this feature of Joshua Tree as much as the “trees” themselves!

We explored each of the regions in which these formations are found, but kept returning to the “Jumbo Rocks” area in particular, finding it the most attractive.

Rock formations throughout the southwest are a joy for the photographer, the challenge being to find interesting compositions, and to simplify them.  Geologists can probably explain each line and feature of these rocks, but it was the simple shapes and line constructions that caught my attention.  Having an artist wife along, to help isolate good constructions with her magic compositional eye, helped a great deal!

To retain the detail of the rock’s graininess, it is mandatory to use a tripod, and a shutter release cable, for this kind of photography

and I liked the repetition of shapes presented by the others in the background. 

A low aspect ensured the tree would fill the background sky, emphasizing its height, and a polarizing filter nicely darkened the sky behind it.

Joshua Tree National Park presented me with only one disappointment, and that was the light.  Despite diligence in photographing at the Park mostly in periods of low-angle lighting (early morning, very late afternoon), the light never seemed to provide that fluorescent quality that had so much impact in  southern Utah, and Arizona.

When I viewed photos in the Park publication “Joshua Tree - The Story Behind the Scenery” (a wonderful reference that supplied some of the information for this article), I marvelled at the wonderfully warm light that the images display.  Why didn’t I benefit from this?

Closer inspection reveals that the warm light (something I very much enjoy in my images) came not from the sun, but from the use of a blue-yellow polarizer, which I’d already discovered has a ‘glowing’ effect on coloured rock and pale adobe. It’s the colour of the skies in these images that gives the secret away.

Fair enough.  I never go far without mine, and out it came for the duration of our trip to Joshua Tree.  These two images reflect the difference that the filter makes in your photographs.  Which effect you prefer is strictly a matter of taste, and it’s easy enough to make one image with, and another without the filter.  My observation is that my artist wife prefers those made “without”, but the ones made “with” are more likely to be published!

I enjoyed  the opportunity for a “major - minor” type of composition here, with the foreground Joshua Tree rearing against the sky,  and the horizon, and the very similar tree almost a line drawing against the coloured granite rocks.   The late afternoon sun  was throwing nice shadows, and beautifully side-lighting the foreground tree.

Incidentally, I found that using matrix-metering and aperture-priority autoexposure with my Nikon F100 worked very well during our days at Joshua Tree National Park.  From time to time I would check the suggested auto-exposure against my tested techniques of  manually adjusting exposure, and always found it to be very close ... and after a while, I stopped checking.

The Mojave yucca (Yucca schidigera ) is prevalent in Joshua Tree National Park, and might be mistaken for a Joshua Tree at times, if one did not look closely.   They often grow from cracks in the rocks, and can be photographed with rock formations in the background.  Like many other desert plants, it is not a cactus.

The ocotillo (Fouqueiria splendens ) is a common plant (not a cactus!) found throughout the dry country of the south-west. For most of the year,  it appears as a rather tall, skinny, slightly spiny and boring creation. 
 

However, like many of its colleagues, in spring this plant produces the most eye-catching flowers, as brilliant as those of the claret-cup cactus, a wonderful red.

To photograph these flowers in macro, be prepared to include a step-ladder in your camera bag, to balance your camera and tripod on top of the cab of your pickup truck, or to pray for a low branch, as I did...

The joy of travelling the south-west in spring, of course, is that this is the season for blossoming  cactus.  This trip was carefully timed, as Allison had never seen cactus blossoms, and I wanted to increase my collection of cactus blossom photographs.  Since the success of the blossom season depends very much on the prior rain history, it’s an iffy thing to come all the way here from Toronto, hoping to find good flowers.

Despite a claim of very dry weather in Joshua Tree this year (2006/2007), we were able to find both yellow and magenta prickly pear (Genus opuntia ) blossoms (not necessarily in Joshua Tree National Park) that were splendid.   These particular blossoms were growing between two cottages at 29 Palms Resort, perhaps a quarter mile from the Park boundary! 
 

To retain the proper magenta colour of the blossoms, they should be photographed in direct sunlight.  However, to control the contrast of the lighting on the background, they should be photographed in the shade.  This causes the magenta colour of the blossom to migrate to a pinker shade on daylight slide film.

In this case, the cacti were nicely shaded by the adjacent building, and use of my large diffuser (which I had inadvertently left in Toronto) was not necessary.

The “prickly pear” cactus (Genus opuntia ) is well-named, considering those impressive two-inch spines that adorn every part of the plant.

This is distinctly unfriendly vegetation!

Like many other natural phenomena, getting really up close and personal can make for some very unusual abstract macro photography. A 180mm macro lens kept me well out of “bleeding” range, and allowed me to fill the frame with the spines.