Stars and Storms: Badlands National Park

Rising from the Great Plains of South Dakota, the sculpted ridges, eroded spires, and sprawling formations of Badlands National Park create a landscape that seems to belong to another world. Here, the forces of wind, water, and time are written across the earth, shaping a rugged and colorful terrain. For photographers drawn to the dramatic interplay of land, weather, and sky, the Badlands offer an extraordinary canvas.

During the summer, powerful thunderstorms often sweep across the open plains, transforming the landscape with shifting light, turbulent skies, and distant curtains of rain. Towering storm clouds gather above the prairie, their immense scale and restless movement contrasting with the intricate textures and sculpted forms of the Badlands below. Land and sky seem to collide, offering remarkable opportunities to capture the raw beauty and power of nature.

There's a hard-to-describe feeling I get when watching an approaching thunderstorm. It's equal parts excitement and anticipation, with perhaps just a dash of primal fear thrown in. The wind picks up, the temperature rapidly plummets, and then you can feel in your mouth the faint, metallic taste of moisture in the air. Clouds gather into towering, dark masses, swallowing the sunlight and casting the landscape in an eerie, shifting light. The first distant rumble of thunder rolls across the landscape, low and muffled, like something enormous stirring beyond the horizon. There is a subtle electricity in the atmosphere that seems to prickle against the skin. Thunder deepens into a powerful, resonant roar that can be felt as much as heard; I call the big storms "growlers" because they seem to emit a constant, low, throaty rumble, like some ravenous predator drawing slowly and inexorably near.

There is something both exhilarating and humbling about standing beneath a storm-filled sky—a visceral awareness of nature's immensity and might.

Standing beneath a starry sky at night is another experience altogether, trading the thrill of the storm for stillness and quiet wonder, with only the faint sound of coyotes calling in the distance breaking the silence. As a designated International Dark Sky Park, Badlands National Park offers exceptional opportunities for astrophotography. Darkness settles around you, and everything seems to fall away, leaving you suspended between our familiar world and the immense, mysterious expanse above. Beneath clear, moonless skies, far from the glow of major cities, countless stars shimmer in the vastness of space, their light arriving from distances almost impossible to comprehend.

The Milky Way stretches across the darkness like a luminous river, offering a celestial counterpart to the ancient formations below. You feel a strange mixture of insignificance and belonging, a sobering awareness of your tiny place in the vast cosmos, balanced by the profound sense that you are part of something infinitely larger than yourself.

In the Badlands, the sky is never simply a backdrop. It is an essential part of the story of the landscape itself.

The gallery below features photographs I made in the Badlands in 2026, capturing the dramatic skies, majestic storms, and celestial wonders that make this landscape so compelling. If you would like to learn how to create images like these, I invite you to join me for one of my Stars and Storms Masterclass Photo Workshops in 2027, where we’ll explore the art of photographing the landscape beneath both storm and star filled skies. The experience is a profound one; I've had a number of clients who have signed up for my Badlands workshops more than once, including a few who have taken it as many as three times. There's always something new to explore in the Badlands, and unique artistic truths to discover.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•