This was a big year of hiking for me. Death Valley, California was the second major hike in 8 months and I was super excited! The trip wasn't as extreme as some of my previous adventures in that it was a "base camp hike" - meaning that every day we would get bused to the start of the hike and each night we would come back to our campsite. No need to carry everything with us all day, every day! So this opened some new options for me - namely the ability to carry more photography gear!

Going into the trip I decided that I wanted to capture light in different and unique ways - considering a lot of this landscape is desert I thought that to be a challenge. So I brought a few lenses including my brilliant Fuji 16-55mm f2.8 zoom as well as my new FLM carbon fibre tripod with the amazing Scratch head.  Everything was shot on my Fuji X-T2. I ended up bringing the tripod with me each day since our hikes would typically start early in the morning and not end until after dark - the opportunity for night shots was amazing. Also, since we were in the sun about 90% of our day I experimented with starbursts into the sun. I achieved some shots that I liked a lot. The tour company liked them too as they ended up licensing quite a few of them for their promotional materials.