The Pinnacles, Western Australia: Ancient Limestone by Day, Milky Way by Night

There are few landscapes in Australia as strange and photogenic as the Pinnacles, out in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Thousands of limestone spires, some barely knee-height, others towering several metres, rise straight out of a stretch of golden desert sand — the kind of scene that looks almost artificial until you're standing in the middle of it.

How They Formed

The Pinnacles began as ancient seashells, broken down over thousands of years into a lime-rich sand. As vegetation grew over that sand and later decayed, it created acidic conditions that dissolved parts of the surrounding sand while cementing harder limestone cores in place. Wind erosion over millennia gradually stripped away the softer surrounding sand, leaving these tall, weathered limestone columns standing exposed — essentially a landscape sculpted by the slow disappearance of everything around it.

Shooting by Day

During daylight, the Pinnacles reward the same golden hour approach that works for most desert landscapes — low, warm light raking across the sand throws long shadows from each spire, exaggerating their height and texture in a way that flat midday light simply can't. The colour of the sand itself shifts dramatically depending on the light, from a pale gold in full sun to a much deeper orange-red at sunrise and sunset.

Walking the loop track through the formations lets you find compositions with spires layered at different distances, which helps convey just how many of them there are — a single spire in isolation doesn't tell the same story as a field of hundreds stretching to the horizon.

Shooting After Dark

This is where the Pinnacles become genuinely special. Nambung National Park sits well away from any significant city lights, which means the night sky here is about as dark as it gets in a place that's still relatively accessible. On a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way arcs directly overhead with a clarity that's hard to find anywhere near a major city.

Photographing the limestone spires silhouetted against that star field completely changes the mood of the location — what feels alien and sculptural in daylight becomes almost otherworldly at night, with the spires reduced to dark, jagged shapes against a sky absolutely packed with stars.

Astrophotography Basics for a Location Like This

For Milky Way shots among the Pinnacles, I generally work with a wide-angle lens, a wide aperture (f/2.8 or wider if possible), a high ISO in the 1600–3200 range depending on the camera, and a shutter speed of around 15–25 seconds — long enough to gather light from the stars, but short enough to avoid noticeable star trailing at wide focal lengths. A sturdy tripod is non-negotiable on sand, since even a light breeze can introduce vibration over a long exposure.

A small handheld light — even a phone torch, used briefly and carefully — can be enough to "paint" a touch of light onto the foreground spires without overpowering the stars, giving the formations definition against the night sky rather than leaving them as flat black silhouettes.

Two Very Different Days at the Same Place

Very few locations let you get such contrasting results within a single 24-hour visit — warm, textured, shadow-heavy landscapes by day, and a genuinely dark-sky astro landscape by night, all from the same patch of desert. It's one of the reasons the Pinnacles remain one of my favourite Western Australian locations to shoot.

You can see both sides of it in the Western Australia Wall Calendar, available here. It sits alongside the rest of my landscape calendars, including the Night Sky Wall Calendar for anyone who loves dark skies as much as I do.