©Bert Gildart: In Organ Pipe National Monument, the skies (as I discovered this past month) are among the darkest found anywhere in the United States. Increasingly, that’s becoming a rare condition, and for photographers, the pristine conditions found in this remote Arizona national monument located along the Mexican border is very good news.

If you understand the theory, and know your camera, you can dramatize your landscape images by back dropping your foreground with concentric lines that ring themselves around the one star in the sky that does not appear to move—the North Star.