Moving to Los Angeles after leaving Rochester’s gloomy skies had a transformative effect on him, though he praises New York’s cloudy days for honing his skill as a photographer, “You have to work your butt off to get an amazing image,” he says. “It’s a crucible; it makes you have to boil it down and make something drab and gray into something beautiful.” In addition, his formative work in the darkroom with traditional film taught him critical restraint that the forgiving nature of digital photography does not necessarily require. “Working with actual film, you don’t have that immediate gratification; you have to really work and mess up a lot and then learn how not to make the same mistakes in the future.” The darkroom experience laid the groundwork for Bracken’s passion with night and astral photography. “ It’s a crucible; it makes you have to boil it down and make something drab and gray into something beautiful. ” As with many great teachers, the Mojave Desert came serendipitously into his life. A simple adventure with friends became a quest that transformed into an awakening. For Bracken, he soon learned the challenges Mojave presented, both physically and artistically, and he enthusiastically embraced them. For his first trip to the Preserve he over-prepared with camera equipment, and underprepared with camping gear. Fortunately, his adaptability and adventurous spirit delivered: he discovered hammock camping in the process. He revels in the way the night will envelope him in a hammock. The End of the Night (below) flowed from such an experience, when he awoke to the faintest hush of dawn colors and was able to simply reach down and grab his camera to capture the scene. The solitude of the desert adds to the experience, and allows him to better commune with his environment; it speaks to him, telling him how to translate it for us, the viewer. A long road from advertisement and architectural photography, the subtly lit desert vistas demand a new eye. Star trails captured with long exposures hint at the passage of time, and become an allegory of transient human existence versus the timelessness of earth and sky. Into the Night (right), a 15-minute exposure in which stars seem to stream across the sky, is lit with natural ambient unretouched night light, and the permanence of the little mesa stands boldly against whispering star trails. The Milky Way, captured as well in this image, becomes a soft, ghostly cloud draped around the rocky shoulders of the desert. For him, this image was the perfect merging of technology and art. The End of Night 6 THE DESERT LIGHT | Jan/Feb 2018