Across the Southwest / Adam Schallau

Here are a few photos from my visit to the Very Large Array (VLA) on the Plains of San Agustin. Located approximately 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico, the VLA is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The VLA consists of 27 massive antennas (satellite dishes) that can be spread out along three arms of a Y-shaped railroad track to expand and contract the overall size of the array.

Photographers visiting the VLA should be prepared to use every lens in their bag, but in my opinion, a super-wide such as Canon’s 17-40 on a full-frame camera, and telephoto-zoom are probably the most useful. For the first photo I used a 300mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter (420mm equivalent) to compress the scene making the antennas look closer together. For the second image with the woman walking in front of the array I used the 70-200 at about 80mm. The last photo was captured using a 17-40mm lens at 17mm to give a sense of wide-open space to the image while including as much of the foreground antenna as possible. All images were shot using a Canon EOS 5D full-frame camera.

Keep in mind that when you’re using a wide-angle or super-wide lens and taking photos with lots of blue sky, it’s best to leave the polarizer off to avoid having the sky become very dark or nearly black.

I hope you enjoy the photos. Please click on any image for an expanded view.