Here you can explore a Joshua Tree 360. This was captured at sunrise around the solstice, with the surrounding Joshua trees casting long shadows on the desert floor.
Where two deserts join, travellers are met by a landscape peppered with fantastical trees.
“Their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.” John C. Fremont, 1844.
Fremont’s view of this member of the Yucca family isn’t widely held today. Famously, the trees look like they’re straight off the page of a Dr Seuss book. As a result, Joshua trees are much loved. This is in spite of their prickly bristles, ready to catch the unwary!
When considering my favourite places to be, I’d always thought of myself as a ‘sea’ or perhaps a ‘forest’ person. Photographing deserts has changed that for me. Desert landscapes are not barren or bereft of life beyond the drama of the wide lens. They are fascinating places, visually rich. I had a ranger accompanying me on this shoot, not least to protect some of the mosses. Mosses are one of the group of ‘bryophytes’ that were among the first plants to ever grow on land.
Joshua Tree 360
I was in place for the shoot in the darkness before dawn, a magical time to be out in the desert. This 360 shows the sunrise over Joshua Tree.