Rise and Shine
Posted on October 30, 2023
Rise and Shine, Mather Point, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 100
f/14
2.5 seconds
Imagine a world unmarred by the din of civilization, a world so quiet you can hear nature’s every stirring, where each breath carries a pristine bouquet of subtle fragrances and the sky is a continuously shifting kaleidoscope of indigo, blue, yellow, orange, and pink. Not a fantasy dreamscape or a garden planet in a galaxy far, far away, I’m describing the world just beyond your front door, before the sunlight and warmth have enticed the noisy, dirty, oblivious masses.
The morning magic begins when a crack of light brightens on the eastern horizon and a few stars still burn overhead. It’s still too dark for the eye to register detail and color, and nearby objects loom as vague shapes. Lacking enough light for the eyes to do their thing, the pre-sunrise experience amplifies the non-visual senses, allowing the sounds like gentle breezes, flowing water, and stirring creatures to mingle with the fresh aroma of dew-laden plants.
For the next 30 minutes, the eastern horizon brightens faster than the rest of the scene. Prodded by the advancing day, the shrinking Earth’s shadow pushes toward the opposite horizon and the sun’s longest wavelengths battle through the atmosphere to color the western sky pink.
Photographing this pre-sunrise show can begin earlier than your eyes might tell you. In fact, the camera’s ability to capture aspects of the natural world that differ from the human perspective might just be my favorite thing about photography, and these sunrise moments provide a wonderful opportunity to engage one of the camera’s greatest strengths. Experienced photographers understand that what we perceive as darkness is just our eyes’ relatively limited ability to gather light, combined with the brain’s insistence on processing this limited input instantaneously. But a camera’s sensor accumulates light, capturing every photon to strike it, stretching the “instant” of perception for whatever duration the shutter speed prescribes.
Another advantage a digital sensor has over the human eye is its ability to extract color from apparent darkness. The human eye uses rods and cones to collect light, with the rods doing the heavy lifting in low light, pulling enough monochrome information to discern vague shapes and detail, but providing little help with color and depth. The cones can’t complete the scene’s color and depth information until much more light has arrived. A digital sensor, though blind to depth, captures photons without discrimination, enabling it to “see” color in very low light.
One particularly special sunrise
Rise and Shine, Mather Point, Grand Canyon
There are a lot of excuses to skip sunrise, but I rarely hear anyone who overcomes the urge to stay in bed express regret after they’ve actually gone out for sunrise. That said, the reasons to miss this morning’s sunrise were both many and strong. In addition to the always popular, “You want us to leave at what time?” (in this case, 4:45 a.m.) and a weather forecast calling for rain, lightning, and thunder, my Grand Canyon workshop group was still basking in the glow of the previous evening’s spectacularly productive lightning shoot at Desert View. How can we top that?
Nevertheless, everyone showed up dark-and-early at the designated meeting spot and by 5:00 a.m. we were setting up our camera gear on the rim near Mather Point. But just about the same time we became aware of lightning brightening the clouds south of us. There was no rain yet, and we weren’t hearing thunder, but these storms moving up from from the south can advance quickly and are easy to miss until it’s too late because we’re all looking in the other direction.
Speaking of the other direction, as portentous as the weather behind us was, the sunrise approaching behind Wotan’s Throne (the flat monolith in the upper left of my image), looked especially promising. Though still not quite ready for primetime, the view just kept getting better. With the arrival of thunder with the lightning, a clear indication that the storm was getting closer, I checked my watch and started counting the seconds: 10 miles, 8 miles, 5 miles… When few splats of rain turned to sheets and stiff wind kicked up, I gave the approaching sunrise scene a (regretful) parting glance and told my group it was time time to retreat to the cars for safety. By the time we were safely sheltered, everyone was soaked and the lightning was within 2 miles.
The actual sunrise was still 15 minutes away. Even though I couldn’t actually see the horizon, I could tell by the light in that direction that it was really ramping up. When I realized the thunder had faded and the lightning seemed less frequent, I checked my lightning app and saw that the threatening cell had taken a sudden eastward detour away from our position. After pausing a minute or so just to be sure, I hustled everyone out of the cars and back to the rim (nearly getting trampled in the process).
Rather than take the time to head to the more conventional view, I stopped at a spot closer to the cars that I’d noted earlier, making it just as shafting light shot skyward from behind Wotan’s Throne. Working quickly, I went with both horizontal and vertical compositions. Because a nearby tree and the textured rock ledge supporting me featured prominently in my composition, I stopped down to f/14 and focused at the far edge of the ledge.
I underexposed the brilliant gold sunlight enough to hold the color, keeping an eye on the shadows side of my histogram to ensure that I didn’t darken them beyond the point of no return. It helped that thick, moisture-laden air in the canyon obscured most of the detail down there anyway, and that the rocky ledge at my feet was a reflective whitish-tan that was easily recovered in post. Turns out, aside from darkening the highlights and brightening the shadows, this image required very little processing.
In hindsight, I shudder to think how close we came to missing this sunrise altogether. Of course if the lightning had persisted, we’d have had no choice, but as wet as we all were it would have been very easy to just motor back to the hotel to warm up and fill our tummies. But we stuck it out, and were rewarded with one of my most memorable Grand Canyon sunrises.
Morning Glory
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A Peek Behind the Curtain
Posted on October 24, 2023
Aspen and Ferns, Bishop Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 400
f/16
.8 seconds
A particular highlight of my annual Eastern Sierra photo workshop is our sunrise shoot at North Lake. Made famous as the default desktop image for macOS High Sierra, North Lake is a small lake in the shadow of snow-capped Eastern Sierra peaks, near the top of Bishop Creek Canyon a little west of Bishop. It’s encircled by aspen, and reflections in its sheltered bowl are quite common. More than once my groups have been fortunate enough to enjoy a light dusting of snow along the lakeshore.
Autumn Morning, North Lake, Eastern Sierra
Depending on the conditions, we’ll stay at North Lake for at least an hour—often longer. But the photography isn’t over when we do finally leave, because just down the mountain from the lake are some of my favorite Sierra fall color spots. In the two miles between North Lake and Lake Sabrina (Pro Tip: it’s pronounced with a long “i,” like China) at the top of the canyon, we can choose between mountain vistas, dense aspen groves, views of aspen lined Bishop Creek, and several small reflective ponds also accented by aspen.
The conditions determine our stops. When it’s cloudy (low contrast light), we can shoot anywhere for hours; when the sky is clear, the best photography is done before the sun arrives, forcing me to be a little more selective to get the most of our limited time.
This year, with few clouds and morning light rapidly descending the mountainsides, after North Lake I took my group to the deep shade at the canyon’s bottom, stopping first to photograph the gold and (a few) red aspen framing Bishop Creek, then moving a half-mile or so upstream for reflections in a couple of pools formed by wide spots in the creek. There’s so much to photograph at both of these locations that the group always scatters quickly—when that happens, I know we’ll enjoy a wonderful variety of images at the next workshop image review.
Always on the lookout for something new, familiar locations like Bishop Creek kick-in my natural urge to explore. But when I lead a workshop, I’m well aware that no one pays their hard earned money only to spend their days (and nights) following the leader to places he’s never been. So, despite the obvious beauty here, I’m usually content to simply step back and take it all in.
Nevertheless, I try not to let that inhibit my explorer’s mindset. As I walk about checking on my workshop students, or simply while taking in the surroundings, I often find myself silently asking, “I wonder what’s over there.” Though circumstances don’t usually allow me to actually find out on that visit, I mentally file the spot away for a time when no one depends on me. But every once in a while an opportunity to explore surprises me in the moment.
I knew the sun this morning would reach us at around 9:00 a.m., so around 8:30 I started making my way around to everyone to let them know that we had about 30 more quality minutes before we’ll head back down the mountain for breakfast. The creek here parallels the road, with all the standard photo spots between the road and the creek. While waiting for people to wrap up after I made my rounds, I thought I might have just enough time to find out what’s on the other side of the creek and crossed the bridge, where I found a barely discernible path into the woods.
This was just a quick reconnoissance mission, so my camera bag remained in the car. At first the path was so overgrown that in spots I had trouble following it, but after about 50 yards it opened into a sublime fern garden, walled by aspen and sprinkled with golden leaves. I knew instantly it was too small and fragile to bring a group to, but I also knew I had to photograph it. So I raced back to my car, grabbed my camera bag and tripod, and was back in business in just a few minutes.
I only had about 5 minutes to photograph, but that was enough to drop low, compose wide, meter and focus, and capture a half-dozen or so horizontal and vertical frames. The treetops were already getting washed out by the advancing sun, so I emphasized the foreground ferns with all my compositions, cutting off the sunlit parts of the aspen—an effect that creates the illusion of infinite depth in this relatively compact space.
When I first arrived back here, the dense forest on all sides made me feel completely isolated. But as I worked my scene, I became aware of people in my group laughing and chatting as they worked their own scenes, and realized that I was only a few feet from the creek. That got me thinking about all the intimate beauty underlying the larger scenes that first draw our attention. In this natural garden this morning, it felt as if I’d peeked behind a curtain and discovered an entirely new world.
This is a reminder to me that even the most in-your-face beauty is comprised of easily overlooked subtleties, and that no matter how beautiful the first thing you see in a scene, there’s always more there. The best photography doesn’t show us the world we already know, it pulls back a curtain to expand our understanding of the unseen world.
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Off the Beaten Path
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Older Than History
Posted on October 17, 2023
Last Light on the Bristlecones, Schulman Grove, White Mountains (California)
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 100
f/16
1/4 seconds
Ask people to name California’s state tree and I’m afraid most would go strait to the palm tree—which isn’t even native to the Golden State. And though the correct answer is the redwood, those of us born and raised in California might argue that the stately oaks that dominate the foothills throughout most of the state conjure the strongest feelings of home.
But without diminishing the other trees, let me give our ancient bristlecone pines some much deserved love. Lacking the ubiquity of California’s palms and oaks, and the mind-boggling stature of our redwoods, bristlecones are largely unknown to California residents and visitors alike. But, not only do these twisting, gnarled trees look specifically designed for photography, for me it’s their fascinating natural history that truly sets bristlecones apart.
All varieties of bristlecone pines can live for millennia, but today I’m referring specifically to the Great Basin bristlecones, which have earned the distinction of being among the oldest living organisms on Earth. Earned being the operative word there.
Slow growth, a shallow and extensively branched root system, dense wood, and extreme drought tolerance contribute to the bristlecone pine’s longevity. How old are they? Well, many predate Christ, and at 4850 years old, the Methuselah tree (whose location somewhere near the Schulman Grove of the Inyo National Forest is a closely guarded secret) had already lived more than three centuries when the Egyptians broke ground on the first pyramid.
My favorite fact about these trees is that the more harsh a bristlecone pine’s environment, the longer it lives—a wonderful metaphor for perseverance that might bolster anyone battling the headwinds of life. Also found at the most extreme elevations of Nevada and Utah, Great Basin bristlecones especially thrive in the high elevation (low oxygen), extremely arid and rocky conditions above 9500 feet in the rain-shadowed White Mountains, just across the Owens Valley from the Sierra Nevada.
In the oldest bristlecones the majority of the wood is actually dead, with only a small area of living tissue connecting the roots to a few surviving branches. Having a relatively small amount of living tissue allows a bristlecone to sustain itself with minimal resources, while the extreme density of its dead wood serves as armor against harsh conditions. And once a bristlecone pine does die, with wood so hard and roots so robust, they can remain standing for centuries.
I visit these amazing trees each autumn in my Eastern Sierra Fall Color workshop. And though they’re technically not in the Eastern Sierra (but do provide spectacular views of it), and are completely devoid of fall color, so far no one has complained. On each visit I send my group up the Schulman Grove Discovery Trail loop, a short (one mile) hike starting at 10,000 feet with a 300 foot elevation gain that tests the fitness of all who attempt it. Compensation for all this effort is the opportunity to stroll among dozens of truly photogenic trees, each with its own unique character, that predate most human history.
All of the climbing happens in the first half mile—just about the time everyone is ready to turn around (or string-up the leader on the nearest bristlecone), the trail levels, then mercifully drops for the remainder of the hike. I’ve been doing this hike for more than 15 years, sometimes multiple times in a year, and if I’ve learned nothing else, I know to give everyone enough time to actually enjoy it.
It helps that most of the best trees are on the first half of the trail, as are 2 or 3 strategically placed benches. The ultimate payoff is a pair of striking bristlecones standing by themselves on a west-facing slope a little beyond the trail’s halfway point and just after the trail starts descending.
Because we start hiking about 90 minutes before sunset, and there’s no chance anyone will get lost, I let each person go at whatever pace makes them comfortable. And before setting everyone free, I remind them that there’s plenty of time to stop and take pictures (or pretend to take pictures) whenever they need to catch their breath.
I’ve visited these trees so many times, I rarely photograph them anymore—and when I do, few shots ever get processed. But as I got people started this year, I suspected things might be different because we’d been gifted with nice clouds—a welcome sight indeed.
I always let everyone in my group start up the trail before me, then wait at least 5 more minutes, so I can check on each person after they’ve had a a few minutes to experience the grade and thin air. In more than a few prior years I’ve had to race to the target trees, drop my gear, and double-back to check-on/assist others who might be struggling, but that wasn’t necessary this year—everyone made it to the trees by sunset without any trouble, albeit some much sooner than others.
When I first started coming here there were no posted requirements to stay on the trail, and photographers didn’t hesitate to clamor about the base of the trees in search of the best angle. But all this activity threatened to damage the trees’ shallow roots, so in recent years signs have been posted making it very clear not to leave the trail.
This new edict has actually made my job easier, as I no longer need to choreograph an assortment of photographers with conflicting agendas (even just one person scrambling up to the trees can ruin everyone else’s frames). Now we all just line up along the trail on either side of the trees, then shuffle positions when it’s time to change angles.
Clouds dominated when we arrived, but they moved swiftly, shuffling small patches of blue in the southern sky behind the trees. Though the clouds farther west were thick enough to completely block the sun, I was excited to see a small strip of blue just above the ridge that would ultimately swallow the sun for the day—if it held, we’d get nice late light, and maybe even some sunset color. Fingers crossed.
The trail almost completely loops around this pair of trees, providing more than 300 degrees of potential vantage points—some above, some below. My first frames this evening were at the far back of the loop, facing south and maybe 100 feet from the trees, allowing me to include the Sierra Crest and compress the distance between the trees and the peaks with a little bit of telephoto. As the clouds improved, I worked my way closer, shooting more beneath the trees to include more sky as well as well as a few patches of foreground snow.
So focused on the trees and sky, I forgot about the promising blue patch until the uphill treen suddenly lit up like it had been hit with a spotlight. Seeing the downhill had remained completely shaded except for its highest branches, I glanced westward and knew we’d only have a few minutes before the sun disappeared for good—fortunately I was in a perfect position to include the spotlit tree with the best clouds and could just stay put.
This turned into one of those situations where I simply worked as rapidly as I could without descending into actual panic-shooting. I started by checking my my histogram to ensure that I wasn’t clipping the essential highlights on the tree. With visual elements near and far, I had to be careful about depth of field, so I stopped down to f/16 and focused a little in front of the trees, and started shooting a range of compositions, horizontal and vertical, with a variety of sky and foreground (quickly refocusing each time I changed my focal length), firing continuously until the sun left—no more than five minutes.
The sunset color I’d hoped for never quite materialized, but no one complained. The evening’s combination of clouds and light, combined with the patches of snow, made this one of my favorite shoots at this most special of locations.
I will return next year
Trees Near and Far
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Fire and Rainbow
Posted on October 10, 2023
Fire and Rainbow, Kilauea, Hawaii
Sony a7R V
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 250
f/11
1/200 second
One concern about returning to the same location, at the same time, in the same workshop, is finding something new to photograph. But last month’s Hawaii workshop group was so excited about our first shoot of the Kilauea eruption, going back on the workshop’s final night was a no-brainer. Not only were we looking forward viewing the fountaining lava one more time, we all wanted to apply some of the lessons learned from the Tuesday shoot. And Mother Nature delivered a surprise that guaranteed something new for everyone.
Surprise or not, many in the group returned with plans for different exposure or focal length choices; I want to use the knowledge gained in the first visit to position my group better, because the eruption had been so new on that first visit, I’d arrived at Kilauea with no idea of what we’d encounter and how we’d access it. I knew enough this second time to arrive with an actual strategy.
The first night we had to park in the overflow parking lot and walk about a mile along the caldera rim to reach the best vantage points; this time we arrived nearly 90 minutes earlier and drove directly to Kilauea Overlook, our favorite vantage point from the earlier visit. Even arriving that much earlier, we ended up snagging the last three parking spaces in the lot—one more kiss of good fortune to bless this especially fortunate workshop group.
Though the eruption was still going strong, we found the shooting conditions this second evening much different. The first time it was dry, with a mix of sky and clouds; this time we found ourselves surrounded by low clouds that dampened every surface and filled the caldera with a heavy mist. By the end of the evening I’d labeled this a “stealth” rain—microscopic drops that couldn’t really be felt as they landed, but somehow managed to saturate our clothes and accumulate on our lenses. But at first it just seemed a little damp.
As early as we were, the sun still hadn’t set behind Mauna Loa. As we unloaded our gear from the cars, I noticed blue sky visible above Mauna Loa and pointed out to the group that there may actually be enough moisture in the air to create a rainbow if the sun came out. And it wasn’t long after making our way to the rim that the sun did indeed pop out enough to create a fuzzy rainbow far to the left of the lava.
The rainbow’s location was close enough to the eruption that we could include both in the same frame without going too wide, but I wanted to get it even closer to minimize the (not especially appealing) brown caldera floor separating them. This is where understanding basic rainbow science pays off. A rainbow forms a 42 degree circle around the anti-solar point: the point in the sky at the other end of an imaginary, infinitely long line starting at the sun, passing through the back of the viewer’s head, and exiting between the eyes. Since we each have our own anti-solar point (and therefore our own rainbow), which is entirely a function of our position relative to the sun, we can change the location of any rainbow (relative to the landscape) by simply repositioning. In this case I knew I could move about 300 yards to my right before the trail (and eruption view) curved out of view of the eruption and rainbow.
Since this was the workshop’s final evening, and we’d all photographed the eruption from here before, everyone was pretty comfortable scattering (rather than sticking close to me for guidance)—which is exactly what they’d done. I hailed as many as I could and explained what I was doing and why, encouraged them to join me, then rushed up the trail.
Not knowing how long the rainbow would last, on the way I stopped a couple of times to fire a frame or two. Turns out I needn’t have worried because the rainbow lasted, in one form or another, for at least 30 minutes. Once I reached the vantage point that positioned the rainbow closest to the eruption, I set up and went to work. The rainbow seemed most intense near the lava, but at times I could make out a faint full arc, and once even pulled out my 12-24 lens to capture a few frames of it. But for the most park I was interested in the tighter, brighter compositions.
Finally working in one spot long enough to get settled, I started to fully comprehend how wet it was. I was wearing a thin rain shell, but could tell that it was already soaking through to my flannel. (Flannel in Hawaii? Indeed—here at 4,000 feet conditions were both wet and windy, with temps in the low 50s.) The wind made my umbrella pointless, so the mist/rain also assaulted my front lens element enough that I had to wipe it clear every few frames.
The difficult problem was getting focus. I’ve come to trust the autofocus on my Sony mirrorless cameras so much, the only time I manually focus anymore is when I have a critical focus point requirement—in 100% infinity scenes like this, I just autofocus anywhere in the scene (wherever my focus point happens to be positioned) and call it good. But the mist this evening was so dense, I could rarely get a focus confirmation—and even when I did, I wasn’t completely confident of it. So I scanned my surroundings and spied a couple hundred yards behind me one of the volcano observatory buildings (near the now shuttered Jagger Museum) to auto-focus on.
This worked well, especially since I use back-button focus and didn’t need to switch between auto and manual focus each time I refocused. Of course each time I changed my focal length I had to pop my camera off my tripod and turn around to refocus, but this became second nature soon enough.
We stayed until dark, battling the wetness and chill to add to our already brimming Kilauea eruption collections. Once darkness fell, the eruption didn’t look much different than it had the first time, so as soon everyone felt like they’d had enough success and addressed whatever problems they’d identified in their prior images, we retreated to the cars and headed back down to Hilo.
Who wants to find out what we’ll see in Hawaii next year?
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Lots More Rainbows
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Let It Rain
Posted on October 5, 2023
Secret Bloom, Rhododendron in Lava Tree State Park, Hawaii
Sony a7R V
Sony 100-400 GM
2 extension tubes (26mm total)
ISO 800
f/5.6
1/50 second
From sleep depravation to empty stomachs, nature photographers will endure lots of discomfort to get their shots. Another source of photographic misery is extreme weather—in fact, one way to distinguish photographers from tourists is their response to rain: while the tourist packs up and races for shelter when the rain starts, the photographer grabs a camera and bolts outside. This isn’t simply some pointless masochistic appetite, there are actual reasons we love photographing in the rain. Off the top of my head…
Seven reasons photographers love rain
- Smooth, (virtually) shadowless light that eliminates the extreme contrast cameras struggle to handle, and enhances color saturation
- Clouds are vastly more interesting than blue skies
- The best stuff happens in the rain: rainbows, lightning, clinging water droplets
- Rain-scoured air creates more vivid sunrises and sunsets
- Replenished rivers, streams, and waterfalls
- Cloud-filtered light enables the long shutter speeds necessary to smooth moving water
- And last, but not least, everyone else is inside, leaving the landscape to us photographers
Case in point
Though the hands-down highlight of this year’s Hawaii workshop was Kilauea’s fiery eruption, that doesn’t mean we lacked for other great subjects. My group also enjoyed the vivid sunrise/sunset color, rugged volcanic coastline, and plunging waterfalls Hawaii is known for. We also found great pleasure exploring the dense, colorful foliage of Akaka Falls State Park, the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, and Lava Tree State Park.
Akaka Falls and the botanical garden are more known (and frequently visited), but this year, largely thanks to the rain, my favorite rainforest shoot came at Lava Tree. A heavy downpour had fallen just prior to our arrival, bejeweling the lush foliage with glistening water droplets, and light rain continued falling as I guided my group along the 1/2 mile loop through the park.
I was especially anxious to get to the back side of the loop, where I hoped to find orchids still decorated with raindrops. Unfortunately, this year the orchids weren’t blooming yet (or they were already done), so I turned my attention to the numerous rhododendron blooms that seemed to be trying to compensate for the missing orchids.
While these rainforest scenes usually start as a hodgepodge of disorganized color and shapes, it usually doesn’t take long for the individual elements to start manifesting. And the longer I stay, the more (and finer) detail I see, until even the smallest thing stands out so clearly that I can’t believe it had been there all along.
On this day I’d chosen to use my 100-400 lens, with two extension tubes totaling 26mm. This setup gave me extra reach to probe the more inaccessible areas, while also allowing me to focus closer and soften everything that’s not my primary subject.
I started at the 100-400’s wider range, gradually working tighter as the surroundings became more familiar. As I walked and scanned, a single rhododendron bloom deep in the dense vegetation stopped me. About 15 feet from the trail, it seemed to float by itself in a sea of green, obscured by so much foliage that I nearly missed it.
When I spy something interesting like this, it’s easy to crash through the forest like an angry elephant, but because I was extremely concerned about dislodging the fragile raindrops, I found myself deliberately stalking my prey—more like a stealthy cougar. (I could have just as easily compared my advance to a slithering snake, but for some reason this cougar analog resonated with me. Go figure.) I set up on the jungle’s edge, about 10 feet away, using the extra reach of my telephoto lens to isolate the flower and its accumulated raindrops.
My umbrella kept my camera and lens dry, another advantage to using a tripod (keeping a hand free to operate my camera). I used a polarizer to reduce the ubiquitous, color-sapping reflections on the wet flower and leaves.
A narrow depth of field that enhances background bokeh is a great way to isolate the primary subject in scenes like this—you can see this in the image’s distinct but soft leaves. Less commonly used is the “shoot-through” technique I applied. By positioning myself so the flower was partially obscured by foliage in front of it, I was able to soften those nearby leaves so extremely that all definition was lost, giving the appearance that the flower is floating in a green fog.
Staying dry
Any time I travel to photograph someplace with even the slightest chance of rain, I make sure I’m armed with basic rain gear:
- A thin, waterproof shell that fits over whatever else I’m wearing (shirt, jacket, or whatever the temperature calls for)
- Waterproof pants that fit over my regular pants—I have an unlined pair for moderate temperatures, and a lined pair what I think it could get cold, and decide between when I pack
- Waterproof hiking boots
- Waterproof hat
- Wool or synthetic shirts, pants, and socks that will keep me comfortable when my rain gear causes me to perspire (no cotton!)
- Umbrella for my camera—because I’m dry (see above), I can dedicate the umbrella 100 percent to keeping the rain off my lens
- Towel to dry things (especially my lens!) when they get wet—I often borrow one from my hotel, which isn’t a problem as long as I remember to return it
- Plastic garbage bag to drape over my camera when it’s on the tripod waiting for me to do something productive—if I forget a garbage bag, the hotel’s laundry or trash liner bags work fine
- And don’t forget your hot-shoe cover. The hot-shoe is exposed electronics, and I’ve seen multiple photo trips ruined because someone tried to photograph in wet conditions without one. And if you don’t realize that your hot-shoe is exposed until you’re already out in the rain or snow (or just away from home, you can dummy-up temporary protection with a strip of tape or (as one of my workshop participants did), cutting a piece of plastic from a disposable container to fit the slot.
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Let It Rain
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Sometimes It’s Better To Be Lucky Than Good
Posted on September 30, 2023
Making Mountains, Kilauea, HawaiiSony a7R V
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 1600
f/5.6
1/500 second
As a rule, landscape photographers resent being told “you’re so lucky to have seen that.” We work very hard to get to our scenes in just the right conditions, and to create the compositions with the exposure settings that portray them at their best. But I have to admit that luck is a factor as well—sometimes more than others.
For example…
Sunrise Mirror, Mono Lake
One time my brother Jay and I spent an afternoon exploring the north shore of Mono Lake, searching for alternatives to the mayhem of heavily-photographed South Tufa. Navigating a maze of barely passable unpaved roads, we found a remote spot that required a half mile walk through sand and shoe-sucking mud to reach, but it looked like it would be worth returning to for sunrise.
Rising a couple of hours before the next morning’s sun, we made our way in that general direction, but in the darkness couldn’t find the exact spot (or even the exact road). Nevertheless we did find a place to park, so we blazed a new trail to the lake, where we waited for sunrise.
Though luck isn’t what got us out of bed that morning, it had everything to do with all that followed. For starters, we were quite fortunate to randomly wind up at the spot we did. But the real luck was the clouds the sky delivered this morning, and the perfectly calm lake surface that mirrored them perfectly.
Rainbow Bridge, Colorado River, Grand Canyon
For good reason, rainbows usually feel like gifts from heaven. Knowing the science behind rainbows can certainly make finding them easier, but that knowledge can’t actually create the conditions necessary to form a rainbow.
Each year I schedule my Grand Canyon Raft Trip for Photographers to maximize the opportunity for dark sky (moonless) Milky Way opportunities, clear (pre-monsoon) water in the Colorado River, and blue in the Little Colorado River. Rainbows are never a consideration when I make these plans.
I’ll take a little bit of credit for seeing the conditions and anticipating the possibility of a rainbow on this rainy May afternoon in 2016, but of course had absolutely nothing to do with the actual manifestation of those conditions. Yet there it was, a vivid double rainbow spanning the Grand Canyon walls, exactly as I’d fantasized for many years. Do you believe in miracles?
Aurora Reflection, Glacier Lagoon, Iceland
If you know anything about the northern (and southern) lights, you know that they’re caused when Earth’s magnetosphere is overwhelmed by electromagnetic radiation from the Sun. You might also know that this solar activity follows an 11 year cycle from one “solar maximum” to the next. And it stands to reason that midway between these electromagnetic peaks is the solar minimum, when the Sun is relatively quiet and auroral activity reaches its nadir.
It just so happened that in 2019 Don Smith and I chose the most recent solar minimum to make our first visit to Iceland, scouting for our Iceland photo workshop scheduled to debut the following year. We chose winter to increase our aurora odds, but given the Sun’s quiescent status really had no right to expect a northern lights show. Of course that didn’t prevent us from spending each night shivering in the cold dark, peering into a frustratingly black sky.
So imagine our surprise when, just as our trip was wrapping up, a confluence of magic conditions graced us. First, on the trip’s final night we just happened to be at Glacier Lagoon, where floating icebergs bob atop a mirror-like lake just downstream from Jökulsárlón Glacier—a made-to-order aurora landscape. Coinciding with this visit was a reprieve from the clouds that so frequently obscure Iceland’s night sky. And even more fortunate, of all possible nights the Sun chose this one to deliver the most breathtaking solar display of that winter.
A Kilauea Eruption
My latest lucky break, so lucky that I actually shake my head and chuckle whenever I think about it, came in my Hawaii Big Island workshop earlier this month. Kilauea hadn’t erupted since June, and since its historic eruption in 2018 had actually spent much more time asleep than awake. The volcano was still sound asleep the Friday Jay and I departed for Hawaii, just three days before the workshop, and remained that way as we went about my annual pre-workshop scouting routine on Saturday and Sunday. (You can read about what happened next in my I Was There blog post.)
On Sunday afternoon we headed down the Puna Coast, a beautiful volcanic coastline that also happens to be off the cellular grid. But in the several hours we were down there, Kilauea came back to life and we instantly jettisoned all plans for the evening and beelined to the caldera. I felt especially lucky to photograph the eruption at its peak, on the night it started, from the closest possible vantage point—that was shut down permanently about 30 minutes after we started.
When I took my group back up to Kilauea a couple of days later, I had no idea where we’d go or even if there would be another spot with a direct view of the eruption. Guiding them into Volcanoes National Park, I just followed the crowds until I encountered a detour that terminated in a parking lot near the rim. There we learned that a one-mile walk would indeed enable us to view the eruption.
So we set out on foot, still not really sure what to expect, finally encountering our first view of churning magma about 1/2 mile down the trail. Everyone was so thrilled by the sight that I had to herd them forward with promises (hopes) of even better views ahead. To my relief, the view soon opened up to provide a full view of the entire caldera floor, complete with fountaining cinder cones and flowing lava—everything a volcano watcher can hope for. More than one person told me that evening had checked a long coveted bucket-list item for them.
We returned a couple of nights later for one more shot at the eruption, and to apply lessons learned from our first visit. On this second visit a dense mist had settled in the caldera, making focus sometimes difficult, but also painting a towering rainbow as the sun set behind Mauna Loa. By the end of the workshop, every single one of us had once in a lifetime memories and the images to savor them by.
When the eruption started, I marveled at my good luck that it happened the day before my workshop started. Little did I know that the eruption would end the day after the workshop wrapped up, and my workshop group couldn’t have thread the eruption needle more perfectly if I’d have planned it that way. Like I said, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
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Fortunate Photography
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Storm Chasing Grand Canyon Style
Posted on September 19, 2023
Electric Sunset, Desert View Lightning, Grand Canyon
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 200
f/8
10 seconds
Before returning to the Hawaii trip, I want to wrap up my Grand Canyon trip with another image from the wonderful lightning show on the last night of the second workshop. I wrote about this evening, and the frustrations that preceded it, in my August 29 “Feast or Famine” post. I’ve actually processed three of my favorite lightning strikes from that evening, and it occurs to me that viewing them in sequence adds a little context to the experience—not just for this storm, but for most of the best storms I’ve photographed over my many years storm chasing here.
My approach to photographing Grand Canyon lightning is to take advantage of the broad, distant views along the canyon’s rim to keep a safe(-ish) distance from the storms we photograph. These wide views are a prime reason I use (and strongly recommend to all of the photographers in my workshops) a Lightning Trigger LT IV from Stepping Stone Products in Colorado (I get no kickback or other perks from Stepping Stone—they’ve even discontinued the 10% discount my workshop participants used to get). Not only does the Lightning Trigger miss fewer lightning bolts than any lightning sensor I’ve seen, my groups and I have captured lightning up to 60 miles away—a huge advantage for the kind of lightning photography I do at Grand Canyon.
Since at least 80% of the storms my groups photograph are too distant for the thunder to reach us, the lens I recommend (and use more than 90% of the time) is a 24-105 (for anyone who doesn’t have a 24-105, a 24-70 is a good second choice). Since we can only guess where the next lightning bolt will strike, this focal range is wide enough for the loose compositions that ensure lightning somewhere in the frame, and long enough to pull in even the most distant lightning the LT captures. And we make our composition decisions with the full understanding that we’ll almost certainly be cropping any resulting lightning image—one of the few times I’m grateful for every single one of the 61 megapixels on my Sony a7R V’s sensor.
Having a distant vantage point has the added benefit of providing a ringside seat for the storms’ evolution and motion. I’ve watched storms develop in place, going from puffy white clouds to towering thunderheads in a matter of minutes. Often the storms will drift up from the south—some traveling great distances and lasting an hour or more, others building and dissipating quickly, only to be replaced by another new storm just a little farther north, until the activity reaches the canyon.
The North Rim is the best place to view these northward-trending storms. Since our North Rim lodging is right on the rim, we’ll often just hang out on one of the (lightning rod shielded) view decks at the lodge and wait for the lightning to come to us. Usually the storms don’t make it all the way across the canyon, but we have been chased inside a few times.
The South Rim is a little trickier for lightning photography for several reasons: more people; our hotel is 15 minutes from the rim; and many storms sneak up behind us. But when we do get in position to photograph a storm on the South Rim, it’s a real treat because this is where we find Grand Canyon’s most expansive views.
The Grand Canyon south-to-north storm path I describe is simply a tendency—far from a rule. We’ve also photographed many storms that have moved down from north of the canyon, as well as many that have moved toward us from up- or down-canyon. The storms can move east-to-west, west-to-east, or curve from a north/south to an east/west path (or vice versa). And then there are the storms that just stay put, dumping rain and stabbing the rim with lightning in one spot for more than an hour.
Because of the storms’ unpredictability, it’s very important to keep a constant eye on them, monitoring the general direction of movement. For safety reasons of course, but also to make the most informed composition decisions. Unlike pretty much every other kind of photography, in lightning photography you really don’t know where the scene’s most important feature will be. The difficulty is balancing the best composition for the scene, with where the lightning is most likely to strike.
I got my latest reminder of this for the Desert View lightning shoot on the the workshop’s final night. After starting the day with lots of optimism, we’d pretty much given up hope for a lightning experience. Sunset that evening was Desert View, one of my favorite Grand Canyon locations. The sunset was a treat, but as the sun dropped, I noticed the rain increasing about 15 miles down-canyon (west), to the point where I thought in might be worth breaking out the Lightning Triggers and crossing our fingers.
Fortunately, this was in the direction of one of Desert View’s best compositions, so we weren’t really losing much pointing this way. Meanwhile, I noticed some clouds with potential moving up from the south, just east of the canyon. Though the clouds to the west looked a little more promising for lightning, I liked a northeast-facing composition (wide enough to capture any lightning out there) even better and soon pointed my camera in that direction—a luxury I had (to choose the best composition over the best chance for lightning) because I have more than enough lightning images already.
To make a long story just a little shorter, I got nothing with my northeast composition, but the people facing west weren’t having any luck either. The (still unproductive) cell to the west seemed to be in a great hurry to move north, across the canyon, and I encouraged everyone pointing in that direction to adjust their compositions accordingly (and to keep their fingers crossed)—while I stubbornly stuck with my composition in the opposite direction.
As soon as the western cell made it across the rim, it made a 90 degree turn and started scooting across the North Rim, directly in front of us. It took a couple of excited exclamations (that could only mean lightning across the canyon) to change my mind, and I turned my camera in that direction (now northwest).
I like the Desert View compositions due west (where the rain had been), and northeast (where I’d been pointing). But the lightning was firing directly across the canyon—my least favorite canyon view at Desert View. So I widened up enough to include some of the really nice view to the west—if I’d guessed right, I’d get that view on the left of my scene, with lightning on the right.
I ended up with three really nice lightning images this evening, each well after sunset. The first one (shared above) came the earliest, when I still had most of the down-canyon view I like so much. The second came nine minutes later, after it had become clear that the lightning was moving east and I needed to adjust accordingly. The final strike was six minutes later, after the darkness had really started to take hold, but the activity had moved far enough east that I could completely change my composition to include the up-canyon northeast view I like so much.
I think from this series of images you can really get a sense for the storm’s movement, and my attempts to balance the best composition with the potential for the best lightning. I’m not always as successful as I was this evening, but I guess that’s part of the thrill of lightning photography.
Join me at the Grand Canyon
Lightning Sequences
Here’s a collection of groups of 2 or 3 images captured together (same shoot); I’ve placed each sequence together, in the order they were captured (it’s probably easier to see the sequences if you click through the gallery)
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I Was There
Posted on September 13, 2023
Fountain of Fire, Kilauea, Hawaii
Sony a7R V
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 800
f/5.6
1/1250 second
I have several childhood memories of the natural world that are forever etched in my brain. The oldest is probably the time in Yosemite when I helped my dad with an ill-advised lightning shoot atop Sentinel Dome, then later that evening, just down the road at Glacier Point, enjoyed rainbow across the face of Half Dome. Another was waking in the predawn darkness to view my first comet, 0 magnitude (very bright) Comet Bennett. Then there was the first time I laid eyes on the impossible blue of Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, Alberta.
All of these experiences laid the groundwork for my life as a photographer, fostering an unconscious desire to save and share them before the memory faded. Of course no picture can accurately convey the experience of “being there,” but I somehow found comfort in the knowledge that, because I’d preserved a small piece of the event, a part of me could revisit it any time I wanted to.
With my camera to prod me, the frequency of these indelible “I was there” moments with Nature has increased: a rainbow over Yosemite Valley; lightning strikes, accented by a small rainbow, on the rim of Grand Canyon; the Milky Way above erupting Kilauea (many times); a total solar eclipse; a rim-to-rim rainbow from the bottom of Grand Canyon; the northern lights dancing in the Iceland dark.
On Sunday of this week I was gifted another. With my annual Hawaii Big Island workshop starting Monday, my brother Jay and I arrived Friday so I could check on all my workshop locations. For the first seven years I did this workshop, I never had to worry about Kilauea because it had been erupting continuously since 1983. Then Pele sent a “don’t ever take me for granted” message in 2018 with a dazzling pyrotechnic display, before promptly rolling over and going to sleep.
Since then Kilauea has stirred periodically, but scheduling workshops more than a year in advance means relying on luck to catch Pele awake. I missed in 2018, 2019, lost 2020 to COVID (no eruption anyway), and just missed it in 2021. I completely lucked out in 2022 with one of the best displays I’d ever seen. But this year things appeared to be back to business as (recent) usual. The volcano had been quiet since June, and though Pele had been showing signs of stirring for a couple of months, by the day before my workshop I’d resigned myself to another year without a Kilauea eruption. Not the end of the world—there is more than enough to photograph here without an active volcano—but a disappointment for all of us who had been crossing our fingers.
Jay and I spent Sunday afternoon out of cell phone range, scouting along the Puna Coast. So imagine my surprise when we emerged from cellular darkness to see two notifications from the USGS in my inbox. When I saw Kilauea in the subject line, my heart jumped. But when I opened the first e-mail and saw that it started with, “Kilauea is not erupting,” I quickly skipped to the second one, which had a timestamp just 26 minutes later.
The first sentence jumped out at me: “Kilauea is erupting.” I didn’t bother to read further before punching the gas and detouring straight toward the volcano. The eruption had started at 3:15 p.m., and at exactly 5:00 p.m. we were rolling up to the Visitor Center. There we learned that we could view the eruption right across the street, from Volcano House.
We raced over there and could clearly see the smoke and orange glow above the caldera rim, but only occasional bursts of lava that jumped high enough to crest the steep crater wall. Rather than photograph there, I decided to see if there might be a better view. At the steam vents we found more of the same. But while there we ran into a couple who told us the best view was at Keanakakoi, on the other side of caldera. So off we went.
At Keanakakoi we snagged one of the last parking spots, grabbed our camera bags, and bolted down the trail (a paved road now closed to non-official vehicles). After a brisk one mile walk, we made it to the vista about 10 minutes before sunset.
I’ll never forget sight greeting us directly below: the caldera floor churned with at least a two-dozen lava fountains of varying size, surrounded a honeycomb of just-cooled black lava separated by thin, glowing cracks. Splitting this fiery orgy was a large lava river and several smaller ones. We instantly joined the throngs who had jumped the improvised rope placed no doubt to prevent us from plunging to our deaths (safety-schmafety).
What followed was a clicking frenzy. I started with my 24-105 lens, eventually switching to my 100-400. (I also snuck in a couple of quick iPhone photos—the lava field was close enough to fill the frame without cropping). Monitoring my RGB histogram, I quickly determined that an exposure that completely spared the red channel skewed the rest of the histogram far to the left, which of course made perfect sense and was no problem because pretty much the only thing that mattered in this scene was the orange lava.
So focused was I on scene below me that it was a couple of minutes before I registered that I was working in what might be the windiest conditions I’ve ever photographed in. I’ve probably experienced stronger gusts (I’m looking at you, Iceland), but this wind was steady, brutal, and relentless. So strong in fact that it nearly ripped the glasses of my face, and forced me to actually keep one hand on them most of the time.
Given the rapidly approaching darkness, with most subjects this wind could have been a significant problem. But because my primary (only?) subject was imbued with its own built-in light source, and was in constant, frenetic motion that required an extremely fast shutter speed anyway, I found it all quite manageable—I was actually more concerned about getting blown into the maelstrom than I was about camera shake.
Throughout the evening I varied my exposure settings, shooting wide open with shutter speeds varying between 1/500 and 1/1500 second, and ISOs ranging from 800 to 3200. Focal lengths ranged from fairly wide (wider than 50mm at the start) to 400. In fact, many of my 100-400 frames were closer to the 100 range so I could include groups of fountains. I tried to time each shot for peak explosiveness in whatever fountain or fountains I’d targeted, but honestly, since these peaks came every second or two, that wasn’t much of a challenge.
Every once in a while I got a strong whiff of sulfur, a reminder of the risks of being so close to a volcanic eruption. It seemed like we’d been out there at least an hour when I was aware of shouting behind me. I turned to see rangers running around shoeing us from the edge and at first thought all of us on the other side of the rope were in trouble, but it turns out we were being evacuated, and they meant business. A review of the timestamps on my images showed that what seemed like more than an hour was in fact only 33 minutes.
How close were we to the eruption? The image I share today, a simple isolation of one of the eruption’s many lava fountains, is 400mm uncropped. (I learned later that we’d been only 1/2 mile away.) Unfortunately, this very-close view has been closed since our evacuation that evening, with no guarantee it will open again until the eruption abates. With this closure in place I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get my group a good look at the eruption—a concern that was erased in spectacular fashion Tuesday night. But that’s a story for another day….
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I Was There
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Here Comes the Sunstar
Posted on September 4, 2023
Day’s End on the Rim, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 100
f/20
1/8 second
As striking as they might be, some people find sunstars (AKA, diffraction spikes, sunbursts, or starbursts) gimmicky and cliché. When I (and pretty much any other landscape photographer) arrive at a location, of course I hope for some combination of dramatic clouds, vivid color, and soft light. But when the sun dominates the scene, it turns out that including a sunstar is usually the best way to get the most out of the moment.
Adding a sunstar to a photograph does have its challenges: Including any part of the sun in your frame introduces lens flare, not to mention extreme (often unmanageable) contrast. And poorly executed, a sunstar creates an unappealing eye magnet that overpowers the rest of the scene. And while a sunstar doesn’t capture the literal experience of watching the sun’s arrival or departure, it’s almost always better than a washed-out blue sky.
For a long time I considered sunstars merely a lemonade-from-lemons solution—the best way to play a poor hand. But over time I’ve come to appreciate a sunstar’s ability to represent the brilliance of gazing directly into the sun—minus the corneal damage. Like blurring whitewater and waves or freezing airborne droplets to convey motion, a sunstar can serve as a proxy for a natural phenomenon that’s impossible to duplicate in a still photo.
The truth is, the sun is a powerful conveyer of emotion. We all have fond memories of watching the day’s first or last rays as the sun peeks above, or slips below, the horizon. And who doesn’t feel relief when moving from sunlight to shade on a blistering summer afternoon, or from shade to sunlight on a chilly winter day? A sunstar can freeze these natural transitions in a still image, subconsciously stirring their associated emotions.
So what’s going on?
A sunstar forms when brilliant, direct sunlight (or any other bright light) diffracts (spreads) as it passes through the overlapping blades of a lens iris (its aperture). These are the blades that open to admit more light (small f-number), and close to limit light (large f-number).
It’s true that the more circular the aperture opening, the more pleasing a lens’s bokeh. But it’s impossible to get past the fact that you can’t make a perfect circle by connecting a series of straight lines (which is what each aperture blade is). Adding blades helps keep the aperture iris more circular, but as the lens stops down (smaller aperture) to allow less light to pass, the angle between adjacent blades steepens and the more the emulated circular shape (remember, it’s never a true circle) becomes a more obvious polygon—connected straight edges, one for each blade, with each blade intersecting its adjacent blades at identical angles totaling 360 degrees.
As sunlight crosses the straight line made by each iris blade, diffraction spreads spikes of light in both directions perpendicular to the blade. If the lens has an odd number of iris blades, each spike will appear in your sunstar—2 spikes for each iris blade. Lenses with an even number of blades consist of pairs of exactly parallel blades opposite each other around the opening; the diffraction spikes of each matching pair overlap, so you’ll see just one spike for each blade. In other words, the amount of spikes in your sunstar is a function of the number of iris blades in your lens: with an even number of blades you’ll see one spike per blade; with an odd number of blades, it will be 2x the number of blades.
Light diffracts (spreads) as it passes through a small opening—the smaller the opening, the greater the diffraction. Since diffraction reduces resolution, we usually we try to choose apertures that minimize diffraction. But when a sunstar is the goal, a small aperture makes the sunstar more distinct.
Sunstar how-to
If you’re still with me, you’ll be happy to know that creating a sunstar is much more straightforward than understanding its optics. Here’s a quick recipe:
- Start with a brilliant point of light: You can create a sunstar with any bright light source—the moon, stars, or even an artificial light such as a lighthouse, or car headlights—but I’m going to talk about the brightest, most ubiquitous, and easiest light source: the sun. Rather than using the entire sun, it’s usually best (but not always—you decide the look you prefer) to block most of the light with the horizon, a cloud, or some terrestrial feature, such as a rock or tree. And clouds and atmospheric haze can reduce the brilliance enough to significantly limit your sunstar. Sometimes I’m not even aware of clouds or haze until I see the sunstar spikes are faint, spread out, or non-existent.
- Different lenses will yield different results: Experiment with your lenses to see which one gives the most pleasing sunstar effect. As a general rule, wide lenses are better, and the better the quality of the lens, the better its sunstar effect. Prime lenses tend to do a better job, but today’s best zooms create beautiful sunstars too, especially at their widest focal lengths. Remember, the number a sunstar spikes is determined by the number of diaphragm blades.
- Remove filters: The more glass between the sun and your sensor, the more reflections and lens flare you’ll get, so remove your polarizer (which has no benefit anyway when you’re pointing at the sun) and UV filter. If you must use a graduated neutral density filter to hold down the dynamic range, go ahead.
- The smaller your aperture, the better your sunstar: A wide-open aperture is a nearly perfect circle (not good for sunstars), but the angle between the diaphragm blades increases as the diaphragm closes down, improving the sunstar as the angles increase. For my sunstars, I generally stop down to f/16 or smaller (larger f-number)—usually f/18 or f/20.
- Size matters: The larger the visible portion of the sun, the bigger the sunstar, but also the more lens flare and blown highlights. Conversely, if most of the sun is blocked, you’ll get a smaller sunstar, but it will also be more precise and delicate. There’s not absolute ideal size, it’s more of a balancing act to find the right mix for your taste and situation.
- Composition: The extreme dynamic range of a sunstar image makes it essential to photograph the scene the way your camera sees it, not the way your eyes see it. I generally set up my composition before I meter, brightening the foreground enough to make it plainly visible in my mirrorless LCD (ideally I do this before the sunstar appears). If you’re new to sunstar photography, or don’t have a camera with lots of dynamic range, a silhouette or high key image are good options. Start with a foreground shape, or shapes, that standout against the sky—for silhouettes, meter on the sky and underexpose; for high key, meter on your foreground subject and overexpose slightly (to turn the sky white or nearly white—see poppy example in the gallery below).
- Manage the highlights: With the sun actually in your frame, you’re invariably dealing with a sky that’s much brighter than your foreground—overexposed highlights and underexposed shadows are virtually unavoidable. To maximize the usable data you capture, start with a raw—a jpeg file just doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle the extreme highlights and shadows of a sunstar image. Nevertheless, it’s likely the image will look like crap on your LCD—even in a properly exposed sunstar image, the highlights will probably look too bright and the shadows will look too dark. On the other hand, if the sky looks great, the shadows are probably hopelessly dark (unrecoverable); if the highlights look great, the sky is probably hopelessly bright. When I’m exposing for a sunstar, I watch the histogram (a benefit of mirrorless photography is the pre-capture histogram in my viewfinder) and try to find a balance between the extreme highlights near the sun, and the dark shadows of the surrounding scene. In most of my photography don’t bracket for exposure, but sunstars are one significant exception. Since the dynamic range is so extreme that the histogram shows both shadows and highlights completely clipped (blown), I try to start with an exposure where their both more-or-less equally clipped, then bracket over at least a 6-stop range (3 stops up and down from my midway starting point) in 2/3-stop increments, changing exposures as rapidly as possible to give me a good number of different exposures to choose between.
- Processing: I promise that you’ll need to do some processing to get the most out of the highlights and shadows, but take a look at my gallery below—each image was captured with one click (no HDR or any other multi-image blending), and most (all?) were captured without a GND filter. My usual processing approach is to start with one of the frames near the middle of the exposure range that I used, pull the Highlights slider all the way to the left (-100) and pull the Shadows slider all the way to the right (+100). Then I pull the exposure slider to the right until satisfactory detail appears in the shadows. If this brightens my highlights too much, I discard these changes and move to a darker image. Following this approach, I can usually find at least one frame with usable shadow/highlight balance.
- Practice: You can practice sunstars any time the sun’s out. Just go outside with your camera, dial in a small aperture, and hide the sun behind whatever object is convenient (a tree, your house, etc.).
About this image
I captured today’s image on the first sunset shoot of last month’s first Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshop. You can read all the details of that shoot in an earlier blog post: Where to Draw the Line. Because I was with my group that evening, and especially because this was our first evening, I stayed in one place so I could continue working with anyone who needed help. That kind of limited my composition options, but I was very happy to have this striking tree directly in front of me, so I just tried to find as many ways as possible to feature it.
The Grand Canyon’s expansive views make it especially easy to lock into horizontal compositions, a mistake I almost made. Fortunately, since we were using clouds rather than the horizon to block most of the sun, we had multiple sunstar opportunities as the sun and clouds shifted. And though I was set up for a sunstar, when the sun first appeared, it was the shafts of light that stood out most. For those I’m glad my camera was oriented horizontally. (And I still got a little sunstar.)
But when the shafts faded and the sunstar became more prominent, I’m pleased to have given myself some vertical options. I’m actually surprised how much I prefer the vertical version of this later scene (after the shafts) to the horizontal orientation I was stuck in. In the horizontal version (it’s in the gallery below), I don’t the think the tree stands out nearly as well. This vertical version really becomes all about the tree and the sunstar, connected by the canyon’s receding red ridges.
Join Me at the Grand Canyon
A Star is Born
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Feast or Famine at the Grand Canyon
Posted on August 29, 2023
Sunset Lightning, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 800
f/5.6
20 seconds
We had reached the final night of this year’s second and final Grand Canyon monsoon photo workshop. To say that I’d spent the weeks leading up to this year’s workshops monitoring the Grand Canyon weather forecast, praying for the monsoon storms that bring lightning, would be a gross understatement—but despite all this vigilance and no small amount of strategic scrambling during the workshop, we’d come down to the wire with little to show for our effort.
The sad fact is, this year’s monsoon rains came late—very, very late. So when the storms finally arrived about a week before the start of the first workshop, I was relieved. And when the National Weather Service actually started including a chance of thunderstorm in the forecasts for the first workshop’s earliest days, I became downright optimistic. Too optimistic, it turns out.
Such is the dilemma of storm chasing at Grand Canyon. The primary goal in these monsoon workshops, more important even than photographing lightning, has to be safety (believe it or not, some in my groups try to argue with me on this). Fortunately, Grand Canyon’s expansive views are tailor made for photographing lightning from a (relatively) safe distance—usually we’re targeting cells either far up- or down-canyon, or across the canyon. Our lightning is distant enough that more often than not we don’t even hear its thunder. But since we never want to be in the storm we’re photographing, it’s actually possible to have too much lightning.
One thing I’ve observed in the dozen or so years I’ve been chasing lightning at Grand Canyon is how to translate the weather forecast into our actual odds for photographing lightning. Believe it or not, my best lightning success happens when the forecast calls for a 20 to 50 percent chance of thunderstorms, with 40 percent the sweet spot; the odds start to shrink significantly once the forecast chance of thunderstorms exceeds 50 percent. In other words, while 0 percent sucks. so does 100 percent.
This year’s two Grand Canyon monsoon workshops delivered a double dose of lightning’s feast or famine fickleness. Both groups got a heaping helping of too much lightning on one end of the workshop, balanced by a starvation diet on the other.
The first workshop saw clouds with modest lightning potential on the first night, but had to settle instead for a spectacular sunset. No problem, the sunset was a great consolation prize and we were excited by the 50 percent thunderstorm chance forecast for day two. But when I woke the next morning to see that the chances had bumped to 70 percent, I was less than thrilled. I knew it could be great, but I also knew that it could turn out to be a very long, frustrating day.
After sunrise that second morning we returned to the hotel for a break followed by an image review. At about 11:30 my lightning app showed storms approaching the canyon, so we aborted the image review and bolted (pun unavoidable) for the rim. We parked near Mather Point and set up at a spot down the rim a short distance, setting our sights on a promising cell approaching from the west (down canyon). Unfortunately, we also heard thunder in the south and I knew there was another cell bearing down from behind that bore watching.
The rain hadn’t started and the conditions looked extremely promising for lightning over the canyon, so we stayed put until we became aware of the lightning sneaking up behind us—counting out 15-20 seconds between the lightning and its thunder, I knew it was about 4 miles away, maybe a little closer. When the wind picked up and the first large raindrops started splatting the pavement, I told the group it’s time to bolt (there’s that word again). But the parking lot was several hundred yards from our position, so most of that sprint happened in an intense downpour.
By the time we made it to the cars, the lightning was landing within 2 miles and everyone was thoroughly drenched. We were also quite invigorated because lightning will do that. For more than an hour we waited out the storm in the cars, taking in the action through fogged glass. When the rain finally slowed and it felt safe enough to return to the rim, the depleted storm had moved east—it was out of sight and we were out of luck.
We spent the rest of that afternoon chasing lightning up and down the South Rim. We saw lots of lightning in our travels, some frighteningly (thrillingly) close to the road, but never found a vantage point far enough from the action to safely set up for more than a few minutes at a time. By the time we migrated to the North Rim for the workshop’s final two days, we were in lightning famine mode. Long story short, despite all that early activity, only a few people in that first group finished the workshop with a lightning image, and most were completely shut out. Thanks to the rain-scoured air, the first group did enjoy a spectacular Milky Way shoot our final night on the North Rim. And between the opening sunset and the Milky Way shoot, plus several other nice opportunities, I know everyone got some fantastic images, but not the lightning they’d hoped for. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
In more than 2/3 of my Grand Canyon workshops, everyone in the group gets at least one nice lightning image. But the forecast entering the second workshop promised nothing but clear skies from beginning to end—full-on lightning famine mode. It was starting to look more and more like my recent streak of many (5? 6?) years of at least one group (and usually both) getting good lightning was about to come to a crashing end.
At this point I started to wax philosophical, reminding myself (and all who would listen) how beholden we nature photographers are to the capricious whims of Mother Nature. This isn’t a complaint so much as it is an observation, because Nature’s mercurial behavior, that seems to relish thwarting even the best conceived plans, can also turn on a dime to deliver absolute euphoria when we least expect it.
Though the second group did enjoy a nice Milky Way shoot, augmented by a surprise cameo by a most unnatural visitor, our two days on the North Rim turned into a complete lightning starvation diet. For a couple of reasons I won’t take the time to detail here, the North Rim is typically better than the South Rim for lightning success. But following our North Rim failure, and with the workshop scheduled to end Thursday morning on the South Rim, my hopes were dimming fast.
Group 2 started Sunday afternoon and I tried my best to give them realistic lightning expectations. But after waking to my alarm at 4:15 Monday morning, before getting out of bed I checked the NWS forecast and saw that they’d bumped Wednesday from a 0 percent to a 20 percent chance of thunderstorms. Of course Nature and its henchmen (the NWS) love messing with me because I’ve seen these forecasts disappear as suddenly as they appeared, but still… I held my breath checking the forecast again later that morning, but saw that Wednesday’s thunderstorm percentage was now 40—I was suddenly (cautiously) ecstatic. By bedtime it was up to 60%—hmmm… Going from zero-to-sixty in 12 hours might not be so great for my Subaru Outback, but for a thunderstorm forecast that’s a pretty significant change. It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on: Nature had enjoyed torturing my first group so much, it going for a reprise of that experience for the second group.
And that’s pretty much what happened. We spent Wednesday, the workshop’s last full day, truncating the image review to chase lightning all around the South Rim, waiting in the cars for the rain to stop while lightning danced all around us without ever getting a good shot at it (sound familiar?). As sunset approached, when it appeared that most of the weather had wrapped up, we stopped chasing and settled in for a nice (fingers crossed) Desert View sunset.
In the parking lot before walking out the rim I told everyone to stick their Lightning Triggers in their camera bags just in case, reminding them (with as much conviction as I could muster) that you never know what’s going to happen and that I’ve been surprised by an unexpected thunderstorm before. “You never know,” I said, with so much sincerity that I almost believed it myself. Almost.
Sunset was indeed nice (understatement)—different than the first group’s opening sunset, but every bit as good. And then something strange happened—we noticed a few marginally promising clouds depositing rain across the canyon. Just in case, we all pulled out our triggers and set up. Unlike the rest of the group, I pointed up Marble Canyon where the clouds looked decent, though slightly less promising, because I liked that composition better (a luxury I can afford because I already have 12 years worth of lightning images). But with my attention directed toward my chosen scene, I soon started hearing the others exclaim about actual lightning across the canyon—the first photographable lightning of the workshop.
I (stubbornly) stayed the course for a couple of minutes, but the excitement I heard from the group was impossible to ignore—when I actually saw a truly spectacular strike across the canyon, I quickly recomposed. We stayed out on the rim until it became too dark to capture canyon detail without blowing out the lightning—maybe until about 20 minutes after sunset. By then I was completely surrounded by ecstatic photographers. This was more of a quality over quantity lightning experience, with maybe a dozen or so truly beautiful strikes (far from a record haul)—each quite brilliant, with many tendrils, and many with multiple strokes—about as good as the quality gets.
Just when I think I have this nature photography thing figured out…
One more thing
The workshop wrapped up after an absolutely epic sunrise the next morning. The lightning forecast for that day was good enough that many of us hung around long enough to photograph more lightning. For Curt (the photographer assisting me) and I, this lightning was skewed more toward quantity than quality— before hitting the road we’d feasted at least 30 more lightning strikes, some quite nice (though not as nice as the prior night). So sated were we by the lightning of last two days, we didn’t even mind that our delayed departure meant spending the night in Barstow (look it up).
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Twelve Years of Grand Canyon Lightning
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 