Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Dark and Early
Posted on November 29, 2023
Autumn Chill, North Lake Reflection, Eastern Sierra
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 50
f/18
20 seconds
The key to successful sunrise photography is arriving early—dark and early. Not just to photograph the early morning twilight, but to familiarize yourself with the surroundings to be ready for whatever the rapidly changing morning light delivers.
Exactly how early is “dark and early”? Well, another way of looking at it would be, if you can navigate without a flashlight, you’re too late. I know, I know, you’re sleepy, hungry, and it’s cold, but it shouldn’t take more than one or two mad sprints beneath fading crimson skies to motivate you to pull back those covers and plop your bare feet onto the bedroom floor just a few minutes earlier. And guess what—when you arrive early enough to savor the sunrise rather than rush through it, you’ll soon appreciate the simple purity of air, sound, and light that just can’t be found at any other time of day. Not to mention the sky-spanning transition of color and light that precedes the sun’s arrival.
At popular sunrise spots like North Lake (west of Bishop in the Eastern Sierra), arriving at least forty-five minutes before sunrise has the added advantage of beating most of the people with whom you’ll soon be competing for choice photography real estate. Arriving this early, the chilly air at North Lake is often graveyard-still and the lake a perfect mirror—already worth the sacrifice. And though the sky is so dark to that a few stars still burn overhead, you’re not too early to start photographing. Long exposures in the pre-sunrise darkness reveal even more of the remaining stars, unveil invisible color in the aspen surrounding the lake, and smooth any ripples disturbing the lake’s surface.
The image here was captured a couple of months ago, during the second sunrise shoot of this year’s Eastern Sierra Fall Color photo workshop. In our brief parking lot orientation before taking the short walk to the lake, I’d advised everyone to be very careful about the place they choose to set up because soon there won’t be enough room on the lakeshore to move anywhere else. And since experience here has shown me that people don’t always appreciate how well today’s digital sensors perform in low light, my job once we got out there and everyone had set up was to move around encouraging my group to take advantage of the shadowless early light their eyes couldn’t yet register.
As predicted, the crowd soon increased to the point where we all had to live with the foreground we’d chosen. So when the scene’s features started to reveal themselves to our eyes, my attention turned to helping my group incorporate into their compositions whatever foreground was in front of them. By the time the sun kissed the highest peaks, I still hadn’t taken any pictures of my own. But when small clouds began to form in invisible updrafts playing among the peaks, I was grateful to have claimed my own spot before the masses had arrived.
Surveying the scene this morning, I thought about the iconic autumn Maroon Bells in Maroon Lake (near Aspen, Colorado) that I know only by reputation (Google it—I’d be very surprised if you’ve never seen an autumn image from here). And while the autumn sunrise crowds at North Lake can be a challenge, from what I hear, they’re nothing compared to the Maroon Bells morning mayhem.
I won’t try to claim that this North Lake view is better than Maroon Lake’s, but one thing I do think is better (based on the images I’ve seen of the Maroon Bells reflected in Maroon Lake) is North Lake’s foreground possibilities that enable a tremendous variety of compositions. Not only are there lots of great foreground features that vary significantly depending on where you set up, they also vary from year-to-year, as even very small changes in the lake level make a big difference in the rocks, both exposed and submerged, that are visible.
An added bonus this morning was the frost glazing the grass that lined the lake. With the clouds and light changing quickly, I went to work trying to find the best way to feature all of this morning’s best elements: sunlit peaks, wispy clouds, golden aspen, rippled reflection, frosted grass, and protruding granite rocks. That’s a lot to deal with.
Having allowed my group to claim their own turf before staking mine, I’d ended up at the far end of the line (so I was in no one’s way), then rock-hopping out to a flat rock a couple of feet into the lake and actually extending one tripod leg into the water. Being essentially in the water gave me the cleanest view of the entire reflection and the best control over the rocks/reflection relationship. This morning I dropped my tripod a couple of feet to minimize the empty space between the rocks and the peaks’ reflection. And since the sky above the peaks was (boring) blank blue, I included the absolute minimum amount of blue I thought I could get away with.
The downside of getting started so late was the glassy reflection that we’d enjoyed much of the morning was gone, so I added my Breakthrough Filters 6-Stop Dark Polarizer for a water-smoothing long exposure. By dialing to ISO 50 and stopping down to f/18, with the filter I was able to stretch my shutter speed all the way out to 20 seconds. I turned the polarizer only enough to cut the reflection around the rocks without erasing the rest of the reflection.
Often the seeds of an image are planted long before the shutter is clicked. This image was captured well after the morning’s darkness had left, but as with many of my favorite sunrise images, it wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t been out there dark and early to claim my spot and familiarize myself with the scene’s many variables.
We’ll return to North Lake in my next Eastern Sierra photo workshop
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The Joy of Sunrise
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Playing the Odds
Posted on November 21, 2023
Twilight Moon, Zabriskie Point, Death Valley
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 100
f/10
1/13 second
First and foremost, a good landscape image usually requires…, well…, a good landscape. But merely getting yourself to the good landscapes is only half the image success equation, because good landscape photography also requires good conditions: colorful sky, dramatic clouds, complementary light, a striking celestial object, or some other natural quality that elevates the scene to special.
One way to include these ephemeral variables is to monitor conditions closely enough to respond in time to photograph them. Which of course also requires being relatively nearby when the conditions become favorable. Not necessarily a problem when my desired subject is close to home and the only affected schedule is my own, but my photo workshops need be planned more than a year in advance, so the proximity and react quickly approach doesn’t really work. Instead, the best I can do is schedule workshops to maximize the odds for ideal light, interesting skies, and other photogenic conditions—then cross my fingers.
For example, visiting Iceland in January or February increases the odds for the northern lights and low angle all-day sunlight; June in New Zealand provides the best chance for snowy peaks, and it’s the month when the core of the Milky Way up all night; and early August (+/- a week or so) at the Grand Canyon is generally the peak of the Southwest monsoon’s spectacular lightning and rainbows. While each of these features can be thwarted by uncooperative weather, at least we’re close enough to be there when the good stuff happens.
My annual Death Valley / Mt. Whitney photo workshop is another example of playing the odds. I love clouds and Death Valley. But because Death Valley only gets about an inch of rain each year, it suffers from chronic blue skies. To maximize the possibility of clouds for my DV/Whitney workshop groups, I schedule the workshop from mid-January through early February, when temperatures are farthest from summer’s intolerable heat, and the (still remote) chance for rainfall and (more likely) clouds is highest.
While I always wish for clouds in my workshops, cloudless skies in Death Valley don’t mean lousy photography. Places like Mosaic Canyon and Artist’s Palette are nice in the soft shade of early morning and late afternoon. And few sights are more dramatic than the sun’s first or last rays on the curves and lines of the undulating Mesquite Flat Dunes. Another benefit of cloudless skies is the beautiful pink and blue pastels that hover above the horizon opposite the sun before sunrise and after sunset.
To further hedge my bets, in Death Valley I always give myself one more blank-sky card to play: the moon. Scheduling this workshop around a full moon opens moonlight opportunities, and gives my groups at least two mornings to photograph the setting moon in the pre-sunrise twilight pastels: first at Zabriskie Point, where it aligns beautifully with Manly Beacon, then in Alabama Hills, where we can photograph it slipping behind the alpenglow enriched Sierra Crest, bookended by 14,000 feet-plus Mt. Whitney and Mt. Williamson.
This year’s DV/Whitney workshop, last February, had more clouds than usual—great for our daytime photography, but a source of stress f0r the workshop leader as the Zabriskie Point sunrise moonset approached. But instead of thwarting my Zabriskie moonset plan, I woke this morning to find that most of the clouds had departed overnight, leaving behind just a handful of ideally placed cotton balls for the moon to play with.
Zabriskie Point is an extremely popular sunrise location, so I got my group out there nearly 45 minutes before sunrise. We ended up being the first ones out there (better to be 10 minutes early than 1 minute late)—too early, in the pre-dawn darkness, to capture detail in the daylight-bright moon and the rest of the scene in a single image, but since the moon was still fairly high, I suggested to everyone that they compose it out (shoot beneath the moon) and just concentrate on revealing the foreground in the sweet, shadowless light.
While waiting for the foreground to brighten, I enjoyed watching the clouds dance around the moon, alternating between obscuring, revealing, and framing. The darker the sky, the better the moon stands out, but when the sky is too dark, an exposure that captures detail in the moon also has an unrecoverably dark foreground (either its completely black, or there’s too much noise in the processing-recovered darkness). As the sun approaches the horizon behind us, the lighter the sky gets and the easier it becomes to get detail in both the moon and the landscape. But soon the sky becomes so bright, contrast between the moon (which isn’t getting any brighter) and sky is lost and the moon becomes less and less prominent.
My window for photographing a full moon is from 15 minutes before sunrise/sunset to 15 minutes after sunrise/sunset (maybe a few minutes earlier/later if I’m extremely careful with my exposure). At sunrise, the best moon photography is on the earliest side of this window, when the moon/sky contrast is highest; the easiest exposure (greatest margin for exposure error) is toward the end of the window. And of course this unfolds in reverse at sunset.
To ensure that I don’t miss any of the best photography when the moon exposure window opens, I always start a few minutes before my 15 minute window opens so I can identify later in Lightroom the earliest usable image. The image I’m sharing today wasn’t my very first usable click that morning, but it did come 14 minutes before sunrise, when the contrast was still high. I chose this one because it came shortly after the pink hues of the sun’s longest rays started pushing the Earth’s shadow toward the horizon, absolutely my favorite part of sunrise. For me, capturing the moon in this night/day transition is the Holy Grail of full moon photography.
Locations like Death Valley are always great to photograph, regardless of the conditions, so it always feels like I’m playing with house money there. But looking back at all the things I bet on when scheduling this workshop, I can see that this year most of them paid off. Thanks to the (long shot) clouds, we got beautiful sunset color at Dante’s View one evening, and on the dunes another. One morning the clouds cleared enough to paint the dunes in beautiful sunrise light (one reason we do sunrise and sunset there), and another morning just enough hung around to enhance, without obscuring, our beautiful moonset. We all felt like winners.
I actually have a couple of openings in my upcoming Death Valley workshop
Moons Over Death Valley and the Alabama Hills
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One Morning in Middle Earth
Posted on November 15, 2023
Middle Earth Morning, Matagouri Trees Near Glenorchy, New Zealand
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 100
f/16
1/40 second
Having reached a much anticipated break in my workshop schedule, I’m excited for the opportunity to carve out a little time to process images from past trips. For as long as I’ve been doing this photo workshop thing, I’ll return from a workshop, take a cursory trip through my captures, process one or two (maybe a couple more if time permits), make a mental note of the images I want to return to, then get to work on the business stuff that has to take priority. But about 80 percent of those “return to” images just seem to languish on my hard drive like the books on my Kindle that I always plan to get to later.
With no illusions of making a significant dent in this multi-year image accumulation, I started browsing my 2023 trips with no particular agenda, finally landing on the folder from the New Zealand workshop Don Smith and I do each June (winter Down Under). I got no farther than the images from our first morning…
Journey With Me
After leaving Queenstown (FYI, without a doubt the most beautiful city I’ve ever laid eyes on) dark and early, our sunrise stop is a sheltered cove on shore of Lake Wakatipu. Despite dense, low clouds obscuring the cross-lake mountain views Don and I love so much about this spot, our group enjoys nice reflections in the always crystal clear water (people actually drink from the lakes in New Zealand!)—not spectacular, but a lovely start to a day that will soon get much better.
I love the drive along Lake Wakatipu’s northeast shore. I’ve made it more times than I can count, and each time I like to imagine I’m being transported back to Middle Earth. This morning is no different.
A few miles beyond our sunrise spot, the clouds start teasing us with ephemeral views of the Thomson Mountains’ snowy summits across the lake, but the overcast’s overall persistence only adds to the drive’s ethereal feel. With clouds still ruling the sky as we enter the tiny village of Glenorchy at the top of the lake, we stop at Mrs. Wholly’s General Store for warm greetings, hot coffee, and tasty treats (not to mention handmade New Zealand wool goods), and to allow the overcast time to clear for the journey’s next leg. Clouds or not, this stop has become something of a workshop tradition.
The world really starts changing after putting Lake Wakatipu, Glenorchy, and the paved road in the mirror—a transformation enhanced this morning by patches of blue sky and a brightening landscape that hints at the sun’s imminent arrival. Despite the missing pavement, the road is quite smooth as we approach tiny Paradise, known in Middle Earth as Parth Galen and Lothlórien. Just beyond is Mt. Aspiring National Park—Isengard and more Lothlórien.
Now the undulating terrain is punctuated by native matagouri trees; in the distance, the highest peaks of the Humboldt and Richardson Mountains are starting to emerge in all their snowcapped glory and our transition to Middle Earth feels complete. The view is spectacular and the group wants to stop to photograph, but Don and I know this route well and ask our driver to continue to a spot that will allow us to add a foreground of matagouris to our dramatic mountain background. In a couple of minutes we round a bend and pull to a stop in front of a stand of twisted matagouri trees jutting from a frosty pasture.
Seeing the trees and the distant mountains haloed by the last vestiges of the diaphanous clouds, I barely avoid getting trampled as the group rushes out to capture the scene. As beautiful as the mountains are, I’m especially thrilled by the trees and want to find the best way to feature them without diminishing the peaks.
I digress
Rendering our three dimensional world in a two-dimensional medium requires a paradigm shift for photographers accustomed to capturing the world as it appears to their eyes. But while it’s impossible to create a true three-dimensional image, it is possible to create the illusion of that missing dimension.
Creating illusion of depth starts with of a couple of simple principles. First, never settle for your primary subject. When your primary subject is in the distance, look for a complementary element nearby. Conversely, when your subject is in the nearby, pay special attention to the image’s background.
While leading lines, like a fence, road, creek, or lakeshore, can guide the eye through the frame, you can also create virtual leading lines with a prominent rock, shrub, or tree that your viewers can subconsciously connect to other visual elements. Your complementary subjects don’t need to be especially compelling, they just needs to provide a brief stopping point that starts your viewer on a visual journey between the scene’s near and distant elements. When possible, I try to connect my complementary elements diagonally to move my viewers simultaneously across both of my (2-dimensional) image’s planes.
An easily overlooked flaw that can rob a scene of depth is merged visual elements on different front-to-back planes. For example, even though to your eye that distant rock is clearly behind the tree right in front of you, unless the two are completely separated horizontally (left/right, up/down), in the camera’s two-dimensional world they’ll appear at first glance to be a single object. Often the solution is as simple as moving left/right, forward/backward, or up/down.
Meanwhile, Back in Middle Earth
I start by scanning the scene to identify the most striking tree, then position myself to put the tree front-and-center in my frame. Once there I realize that I can actually frame the tallest peaks with the tree’s most prominent branches and set up at a spot that puts the other nearby trees along a more or less diagonal line that recedes from the primary tree. I compose the scene as tightly as I can to minimize the now empty sky and relatively bland grass at my feet.
While the exposure itself isn’t particularly difficult for my camera, the way I achieve it is important—given the need for front to back sharpness, I start by stopping down to f/16. With no wind this morning, I just go with ISO 100 and dial my shutter speed until the histogram looks good.
The final critical decision I need to make is exactly where to focus. The closest tree is about 10 feet away; at f/16, my hyperfocal app gives me a hyperfocal distance of about 13 feet. But those numbers are never precise and in fact vary depending on many variables, so I always like leaving myself some hyperfocal wiggle room. Focusing on the tree itself will soften the mountains, and focusing right at the hyperfocal distance will still give me nearly 4 feet of sharpness in front of the tree that I don’t need (since focusing on the hyperfocal point gives “acceptable” sharpness from half that distance to infinity). So I focus a little farther back—using that small piece of wood about 3/4 of the way to the second tree—to ensure distant sharpness. Click.
After leaving here we continue into the dense forest of Mount Aspiring National Park. No Elves or Hobbits this time, but it’s only our first day…
Don and I still have a couple of openings for New Zealand 2024
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The Illusion of Depth
Back in My Happy Place
Posted on November 7, 2023
Autumn Spiral, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 50
f/16
13 seconds
Auroras, lightning, and a volcanic eruption—anyone viewing this year’s images might think my camera and I are most drawn to Nature’s purest drama. But as breathtaking as these phenomena are (they are!), I think I’m happiest with a camera in my hand when I’m working to extract subtle beauty from Nature’s quiet places. Rare, dramatic beauty is an instant stimulant that grabs your eyes and pretty much demands to be photographed. Not so much for the peaceful scenes that subtly soothe, but that doesn’t mean their beauty can’t compete—you just have to work for it.
Extracting photographs from these quiet places combines observation, position, and subtraction: observing to identify the scene’s essential elements; positioning to create relationships between these elements and the camera; subtraction of all that’s not essential through careful framing and/or management of the exposure variables. It’s rarely quick work, but I’m never happier than when I feel like I’ve created a synergy between these components.
My Yosemite Valley happy place has to be Bridalveil Creek. I’m not talking about the nearby view of the fall itself, I’m talking about the area just beneath the fall, where the creek tumbles and pools among granite and maples. Rather than feasting on views of Yosemite’s magnificent monoliths and waterfalls, I come to Bridalveil Creek to meditate and create in Nature’s more understated beauty.
Lacking the most photographed views of Yosemite’s icons, the Bridalveil Creek area probably shouldn’t be the starting point for a first-time visitor. On the other hand, when timed right, this (relatively) peaceful spot does provide a wonderful respite from Yosemite’s teeming masses, as well as ample opportunities to stretch your creative muscles.
Bridalveil Fall is the only Yosemite Valley waterfall that reliably flows year-round, but its volume varies tremendously depending on the season, the prior winter’s snowpack, and the amount of recent rainfall. In spring, Bridalveil Creek is an angry torrent that splits into three distinct channels just beneath the fall, each spanned by its own stone footbridge that provides an excellent platform for photography. In wet years all three channels run year round; in the driest years, by late summer two are nothing but dusty, rounded boulders, with only the east-most bridge offering views of flowing water.
I visit here each time I visit Yosemite, but my favorite season by far is autumn. Whether one, two, or three channels are flowing, by autumn the remaining water has lost the urgency of spring, pausing to rest in still pools before descending the next cascade. And autumn is when the suddenly yellow maples shed a seemingly infinite number of leaves that settle briefly atop rocks, accumulate in nooks and crannies, blanket the forest floor, and drift atop the swirling pools.
I always start my workshops’ final day at Bridalveil Creek, setting my groups free to roam the trail and its bridges, clamber down to the still pools, and rock-hop the cascades in search of inspiration. Early in the workshop many students are still battling their cameras and personal vision, but waiting until workshop’s end to bring my groups here gives everyone three-plus days to settle into the photographic zone that’s necessary to get most of their time here.
I never considered that I might lose this spot until 2019, when the NPS started work on a much anticipated overhaul of the whole Bridalveil Fall area. To speed the work, they decided to close everything (parking lot, toilets, trails, and creek access) while they rerouted the trails, reconfigured the parking lot, and (my favorite upgrade) replaced the aromatic vault toilets with actual flush-toilet bathrooms. Though I was disappointed that I’d have to forego my happy place for a year or (God forbid) two, I rationalized that the promised improvements would be worth the sacrifice. When COVID happened, I resigned myself to maybe another year of waiting.
When the park reopened after the pandemic, and on every visit since, Bridalveil Creek has my first Yosemite Valley stop. And while it always looked like an active worksite (barricades, equipment, and stacked construction material), progress seemed to be frustratingly slow. In fact, despite those signs of activity, I rarely saw any actual activity underway. Even my NPS contact couldn’t give me a date for reopening.
It was more of the same in 2021, 2022, and for my winter and spring workshops earlier this year. So, after seeing no announcement online or in my daily Yosemite news e-mail, I approached this year’s Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections workshop resigned to another year of Bridalveil disappointment. That pessimism was confirmed when I drove by the Bridalveil Fall parking lot Tuesday morning (on my pre-workshop scouting run) and saw it still locked tight with no sign of activity. Sigh.
This was my first trip to Yosemite since early May (I don’t visit Yosemite in summer), and while I was aware of some traffic-flow improvements made to the valley’s east side since my last visit, I had no idea how extensive they’d been. So I decided to make another loop around the park to reset my bearings (it’s never a good look when the workshop leader gets lost), which took me past the Bridalveil Fall area one more time. This time I decided to park and check out the short hike to the creek from the other side—I’ve done this many times, as recently as my previous visit last spring, and have always found the trail fenced off and signage making it very clear they want no one back there. So imagine my surprise (not to mention delight), when I found this side open with full access to the creek! The parking lot and bathrooms were still closed, but I found the trails and all of the bridges open.
On Friday, for the first time in four years, I guided a workshop group back to Bridalveil Creek. As much as I wanted to explore my favorite Bridalveil Creek haunts, I remained on the trail and bridges where most of my workshop group had gone to work. But, as often happens here, one-by-one they set out to explore farther afield, until with about a half-hour before I’d instructed them to be back at the cars, I found myself completely alone on the middle bridge. Though 30 minutes is hardly enough to time do any quality work here, I couldn’t help beelining back to one of my favorite spots—upstream, around a motorhome-size rock, and a quick scramble over rocks and a log down to the water. The last few years before the shutdown this spot had been partially largely by fallen trees, but I was very pleased to see that part of the improvement process had been dead tree removal.
I’d told the group about this spot before we started and thought one or two might still be there, but they’d all moved on and I found myself alone with maybe 20 minutes to work. I’m very familiar with the little cascade back here, and the pool it lands in, but depending on the amount of water and the timing of the fall color, the scene is different each time I visit. Sometimes the leaves form a mosaic on the pool’s surface, but this time I found most of the leaves huddled at the far end and out of the composition that came to me first.
Since speed was essential, I just went with that first composition, which was some version of the cascade tumbling over the rocks and into the pool. (For scale, I estimate that this cascade, from top to bottom, is at least 6 feet and no more than 8 feet high.) I knew that even an exposure of just a second or two would render the cascade as a gauzy veil, and that in the deep early-morning shadow of Yosemite Valley’s south wall, not to mention the trees and an overcast sky, a multi-second exposure would be nearly impossible to avoid. Seeing little flecks of floating foam, I decided to just lean into the long exposure to streak the foam and emphasize swirling motion on the pool’s surface. (I didn’t need a neutral density filter because I was satisfied being in the 10-15 second range by just stopping down to f/16 at ISO 50.)
There was so much sheen on the rocks and glare on the water that a polarizer was essential (and even with polarization maximized, I couldn’t eliminate all of it). The polarizer had the added benefit of revealing submerged rocks that would have been exposed in drier years. As I worked, an occasional leaf would ride the cascade into the pool, or drift down from overhead, to take a couple of laps in the pool before sinking or exiting stage left. No problem—their yellow swirl lasted just long enough to add a final touch to my happy little scene.
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Autumn at Bridalveil Creek
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 