The trouble with road trips, as opposed to destination trips, is that you actually are required to cover distance every day. Because sun angle matters in these landscape photos, it makes it hard to coordinate the "perfect time" with the actual road trip part of it.
I think we did an OK job timing our arrival in Monument Valley. The classic view (cover image, above) is from the park access point. The Navajo ranger there was concerned we'd arrived too late, but as far as I was concerned we arrived just on time, about an hour before sunset (6:30 PM or so). We drove around the valley base and then went back up to the access point about 1.5 hours after sunset to shoot some landscape-astrophotos.
I guess if I got serious about landscapes and astrophotos I would pick vacation times based on moon phase and stars. We knew that the Milky Way would be rising above Monument Valley when facing east (another reason why it was scheduled to be a sunset visit, not a sunrise visit). What I hadn't anticipated was that the angle between the moon and the Milky Way center wasn't quite perfect. As a result there is quite a bit of background sky light that makes the Milky Way less clear in the photo. We probably could have waited another hour or so for the sky to darken even more, but the reality was that we had another two hours of driving ahead of us (and by this point it was 10 PM).
From a technical standpoint, this was shot on the 6D at ISO 3200, 20 seconds f/5.6 with the Toki 12-24/4 at around 18 mm. Initially I had been using the 6D at 24 mm with the Canon 24-105/4L and it just wasn't wide enough. The trouble with this combination is that the Tokina is not quite designed for a full frame camera. Could this have been shot at ISO1600 with the Canon 40D? Maybe, but I think the noise would have been unmanageable. I guess this shot justifies the rental of the 6D ($80, borrowlenses.com).
