The great weather in Death Valley last week brought out lots of tourists and made getting into dinner a tough proposition. So with an hour to spend before we'd be seated there wasn't enough time to go back and look at images, so my daughter Annie and I decided to have some fun with our flashlights and the old Twenty-mule team Borax wagon out in front of the Furnace Creek Ranch. If you've never done it before there is almost no limit to the fun you can have with a flashlight or two (or your flash units) and just about any subject you can light up...The idea is really simple. Just set your camera for a long exposure (we used 30 seconds) and then use that time to light up the subject. If the surroundings are dark enough you can even run around the scene with the light and be "invisible" in the final image. The trick is to figure out a good balance of lighting. The most important thing to remember is that light falls off quickly with distance (technically as the square of the distance) so if you are lighting your subject so that part of it is further away you'll need to spend much more time lighting that portion.In the case of the wagon we found that because it was nearly black out Annie could move down the side of the wagon lighting each wheel in turn from a constant distance. Enough light bled onto the rest of the wagon to give it a nice glow. To get a little light under the wagon we added a remote flash behind the wagon that helped provide a little more detail. One advantage we had was our Surefire A2 flashlight. It's nearly daylight in color--very similar to the color of a camera flash--so it balances very well with remote flash units. We could simply set our White Balance to shady (either in camera or in Photoshop if shooting Raw) to get a really warm tone to the light. It's not easy to get the lighting perfect in a single shot but we wound up with a couple frames I liked so I used Photomatix Pro to combine the images into a single "HDR" version (it wasn't really HDR, but Photomatix provides lots of nice options for merging multiple images of the same scene--you could of course do that yourself in Photoshop). The resulting image had the shading I wanted but I didn't think the monotone of the weathered wagon wood worked well with the warm glow so I simply used Silver Efex Pro with an Antique preset to give me a historic looking image.There were two other tweaks to the image I needed to do before I did the B&W conversion. There was an unpleasant "Keep Off" sign that I brushed out with the Stamp tool and a stray car headlight threw too much light onto one of the wheels. I used Image->Apply Image in Photoshop to apply the inverse of the blue channel using Color Burn mode on the spots where the headlight light fell. Twenty mule team wagons (which didn't always have 20 mules) are a Death Valley classic. Death Valley was home to several major Borax mines. The difficulty of building a railroad into the Valley and the distance of the mines from any navigable river meant that thousands of tons of the minerals had to be moved by wagon. The wagon trains always contained several trailers and a large water tank for the mules on their very dry journey. In this case our final image is a little more interesting rendition of a classic icon of Death Valley history than a simple "snapshot" taken during the day and better yet was a great way to spend the time until our dinner was ready!