Getting centered
Posted on October 7, 2018
Daybreak, Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra, California
Sony a7R III
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
Breakthrough 6-stop ND filter
1 second
F/18
ISO 200
What do you think would happen if I submitted this image a camera club photo competition? The sunstar and golden glow might elicit a few oohs and ahhs at first, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before the resident Rule enforcer dismisses it because the horizon and sunstar are centered. And while “never center your subject” is great advice for a beginner who automatically bullseyes every subject, reflexively reciting “Rules*” is a cop-out for faux experts who lack creative instincts. (Of course I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about that guy standing over there by the cookies.) Worse still, photographers who blindly follow Rules are leaning on a crutch that will only atrophy their creative muscles.
This is important
Rules are not inherently bad, but it should be the photographer controlling the Rules, not the other way around. In fact, if you’re following the Rules, you’re not being creative. One more time: If you’re following the Rules, you’re not being creative.
A couple of examples
Among the most frequently repeated Rules is the Rule of Thirds, which dictates that the primary subject be placed at the intersection points in an imaginary grid dividing the frame into horizontal and vertical thirds (think tic-tac-toe). Part of the ROT mandate is to never center the horizon, but to instead place it one third of the way up from the bottom or down from the top. Reasonable advice for people who like their images to look like everyone else’s, but it completely ignores the myriad reasons for doing otherwise.
Visual artists are often told to give their subjects more space in the frame in the direction they’re looking. In other words, if the subject is gazing rightward, place them left of the frame’s center so they’re looking across the frame and not directly into a virtual wall. But to cite just one cinema example among many, in a scene in the movie “12 Years a Slave” I noticed Solomon Northup longingly gazing directly into the left border of the frame, with a vast open sky behind him. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this framing subtly but effectively conveyed Northup’s physical and emotional confinement. But who doesn’t know someone who’d ding this framing at the photo club competition?
About this image
Rather than blindly following the ROT, my horizon placement is a function of the relative visual appeal of the sky vs. the foreground: Whichever is better between the foreground and sky gets the majority of the frame real estate.
Anticipating a sunstar to culminate last Friday’s Mono Lake sunrise, I scanned the muddy lakeshore until I found a foreground that would compliment what was happening in the sky. Given the color reflecting on the lake surface and the diagonal symmetry of the small tufa islands before me, my original thought this morning was to bias the composition to favor the foreground. But peering through my viewfinder it was impossible not to miss the way the clouds seemed to emanate from the point of the sun’s imminent arrival. I decided to emphasize the symmetry by splitting the scene with the horizon, and centering the sun.
This isn’t to say there was no other way to compose this scene—there are almost always many ways to compose a scene. For example, I could have moved to my right to get a little separation between the sun and the tufa islands, placing the tufa a little left of center and the sun right of center. And/or I could have angled the camera down to get more lake, putting the top of the frame just above the darker clouds near the sun. When things are happening slowly I usually give myself as many compositional variations as I can think of, but when the light is changing fast (as it does with a rising or setting sun), I find I’m much better off just sticking to one thing and making sure I have it right.
The other thing I did here was add my 6-stop Breakthrough neutral density filter. This allowed me, despite the extremely bright sunlight, to achieve a 1-second exposure that smoothed the water just enough. I captured this with a single click and without a graduated neutral density filter, relying entirely on the dynamic range of my Sony a7RIII to retain virtually all the scene’s extreme shadow to highlight range.
Shed the crutch and go forth
Rules serve a beginning photographer in much the way training wheels serve a child learning to ride a bike: They’re great for getting you started, but soon get in the way. As valuable as these support mechanisms are, you wouldn’t do Tour de France with training wheels, or the Boston Marathon on crutches.
In my workshops I’m frequently exposed to creative damage done to people rendered gun-shy by well-intended but misguided Rule enforcers. Camera clubs and photo competitions are great for many reasons, but I’d love to see them declared no-Rule zones. And if your group can’t no nuclear on Rules, I suggest at the very least adding a no-Rule (“best image that breaks a Rule”) competition or category to acknowledge that the Rules are not the final word.
My suggestion to everyone trying to improve their photography is to learn the Rules, but rather than simply memorizing them, do your best to understand their purpose, and how that purpose might conflict with your objective. Then, armed with that wisdom, each time you peer through your viewfinder, set the Rules aside and simply trust your creative instincts.
*”Rules” is capitalized throughout to mock the deference they’re given
Eastern Sierra Photo Workshop
Asking for trouble at the camera club
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Focus Magic
Posted on September 30, 2018
Autumn Aspen, Grand Tetons National Park
Sony a7RIII
Sony 100-400 GM
Sony 2x teleconverter
15mm extension tube
ISO 1600
f/11
1/60 second
As we enter the fall color photography season, I’m revisiting and revising previous articles. This is the third in the series.
In this day of ubiquitous cameras, automatic exposure, and free information, a creative photographer’s surest path to unique images is achieved by managing a scene’s depth. While anyone with a camera can compose the left/right/up/down aspect of a scene, the front/back plane, a scene’s depth (that we human’s take for granted) is missing from a two-dimensional image. Managing depth requires abstract vision and camera control beyond the skill of most casual photographers. But it’s not hard.
While skilled photographers frequently go to great lengths to maximize depth of field (DOF), many forget the ability of limited DOF to:
- Guide the viewer’s eye to a particular subject
- Provide the primary subject a complementary background
- Provide background context for a subject (such as its location or the time of day or season)
- Smooth a busy, potentially distracting background
- Create something nobody will ever be able to duplicate
They call it “bokeh”
We call an image’s out of focus area its “bokeh.” While it’s true that bokeh generally improves with the quality of the lens, as with most things in photography, more important than the lens is the photographer behind it. More than anything, achieving compelling bokeh starts with understanding how your camera sees the world, and how to translate that vision. The image’s focus point, its depth of field (a function of the f-stop, sensor size, focal length, and subject distance), and the characteristics of the blurred background (color, shapes, lines) are all under the photographer’s control.
No special equipment required
Compelling bokeh doesn’t require special or expensive equipment—chances are you have everything you need in your bag already. Most macro lenses are fast enough to limit DOF, have excellent optics (that provide pleasing bokeh), and allow for extremely close focus (which shrinks DOF). A telephoto lens near its longest focal length has a very shallow DOF when focused close.
Another great way to limit your DOF without breaking the bank is with an extension tube (or tubes). Extension tubes are hollow (no optics) cylinders that attach between your camera and lens. The best ones communicate with the camera so you can still meter and autofocus. Not only are extension tubes relatively inexpensive, with them I can focus just about as close as I could have with a macro. They can also be stacked—the more extension, the closer you can focus (and the shallower your DOF). And with no optics, there’s nothing compromise the quality of my lens (unlike a teleconverter or diopter). But there’s no such thing as a free lunch in photography—the downside of extension tubes is that they reduce the amount of amount light reaching the sensor—the more extension, the less light. On the other hand, since I’m using them to reduce my DOF, I’m always shooting wide open. And the high ISO capability of today’s cameras more than makes up for the loss of light.
Many of my selective focus images are accomplished without a macro or even a particularly fast lens. Instead, preferring the compositional flexibility of a zoom, I opt for my 70-200 f4 (especially) and 100-400 lenses. While my 100 macro is an amazingly sharp lens with beautiful bokeh, I often prefer the ability to isolate my subject, in a narrow focus range, without having to get right on top of it. On the other hand, if I have a subject I want to get incredibly close to, there’s no better way than my macro and an extension tube (or two, or three).
Managing depth of field
When using creative soft focus, it’s important that your background be soft enough that it doesn’t simply look like a focus error. In other words, you usually want your background really soft. On the other hand, the amount of softness you choose creates a continuum that starts with an indistinguishable blur of color, includes unrecognizable but complementary shapes, and ends with easily recognizable objects. Where your background falls on this continuum is up to you.
Your DOF will be shallower (and your background softer):
- The closer your focus point
- The longer your focal length
- The larger your aperture (small f-stop number)
A macro lens and/or extension tube is the best way to get extremely close to your subject for the absolute shallowest DOF. But sometimes you don’t want to be that close. Perhaps you can’t get to your subject, or maybe you want just enough DOF to reveal a little (but still soft) background detail. In this case, a telephoto zoom may be your best bet. And even at the closest focus distances, the f-stop you choose will make a difference in the range of sharpness and the quality of your background blur. All of these choices are somewhat interchangeable and overlapping—you’ll often need to try a variety of focus-point/focal-length/f-stop combinations to achieve your desired effect. Experiment!
Foreground/background
Composing a shallow DOF image usually starts with finding a foreground subject on which to focus, then positioning yourself in a way that places your subject against a complementary background. (You can do this in reverse too—if you see a background you think would look great out of focus, find a foreground subject that would look good against that background and go to work.)
Primary subjects are whatever moves you: a single flower, a group of flowers, colorful leaves, textured bark, a clinging water drop—the sky’s the limit. A backlit leaf or flower has a glow that appears to originate from within, creating the illusion it has its own source of illumination—even in shade or overcast, most of a scene’s light comes from the sky and your subject will indeed have a backlit side. And an extremely close focus on a water droplet will reveal a world that’s normally invisible to the unaided eye—both the world within the drop and a reflection of the surrounding world.
My favorite backgrounds include parallel tree trunks, splashes of lit leaves and flowers in a mostly shaded forest, pinpoint jewels of daylight shining through the trees, flowers that blur to color and soft shapes, sunlight sparkling on water. I also like including recognizable landscape features that reveal the location—nothing says Yosemite like a waterfall or Half Dome; nothing says the ocean like crashing surf.
The final piece of the composition puzzle is your focus point. This creative decision can make or break an image because the point of maximum sharpness is where your viewer’s eyes will land. In one case you might want to emphasize a leaf’s serrated edge; or maybe its the leaf’s intricate vein pattern you want to feature. Or maybe you’ll need to decide between the pollen clinging to a poppy’s stamen, or the sensual curve of the poppy’s petals. When I’m not sure, I take multiple frames with different focus points.
Exposure
Exposing selective focus scenes is primarily a matter of spot-metering on the brightest element, almost always your primary subject, and dialing in an exposure that ensures that it won’t be blown out. Often this approach turns shaded areas quite dark, making your primary subject stand out more if you can align the two. Sometimes I’ll underexpose my subject slightly to saturate its color and further darken the background.
Tripod
And let’s not overlook the importance of a good tripod. In general, the thinner the area of sharpness in an image, the more essential it is to nail the focus point. Even the unavoidable micro-millimeter shifts possible with hand-holding can make the difference between a brilliant success and an absolute failure.
Virtually all of my blurred background images are achieved in incremental steps. They start with a general concept that includes a subject and background, and evolve in repeating click, evaluate, refine, click, … cycles. In this approach, the only way to ensure consistent evolution from original concept to finished product is a tripod, which holds in place the scene I just clicked and am now evaluating—when I decide what my image needs, I have the scene sitting there atop my tripod, just waiting for my adjustments.
September 2018
Autumn Aspen, Grand Tetons National Park
Quivering, translucent leaves of yellow, orange, and (sometimes) red make aspen trees the perfect accent for any autumn mountain vista. But it’s the aspen’s knotted white trunks that really draw me, so when I get the opportunity to photograph aspen up close, I usually try to find ways to emphasize the trunks.
Last week I was in the Tetons helping my friend Don Smith with his workshop there. While Grand Tetons have some of the most spectacular grand vistas in America, I think I my favorite part of the week was the time we spent among the aspen.
One afternoon mid-workshop we stopped along Moose-Wilson Road. Moose-Wilson Road is a narrow, mostly paved track that winds through aspen groves broken by soggy meadows. Unfortunately, the preponderance of wildlife here makes Moose-Wilson a mecca for wildlife shooters hoping to catch a glimpse of some of the park’s numerous bear, elk, and moose. The mere act of exiting the care here draws wildlife shooters like mosquitos to bare skin, and I spent half of my time with this scene swatting them away.
For this shoot I’d taken the “go big or go home” approach, carrying only my tripod (RRS 24L and RRS BH-40 ball head) and Sony a7RIII with the Sony 100-400 GM attached. The longer the focal length, the shallower the depth of field, but I wasn’t satisfied with just 400mm, so I added my Sony 2X teleconverter to get out to 800mm. But I wasn’t finished—to focus even closer and further shrink my depth of field, I also added a 15mm extension tube. Because both the teleconverter and extension tube reduces the light reaching my sensor, I shot this scene at ISO 1600.
Between interruptions (“What do you see?”; “Is there a bear?”) I made my way to an isolated aspen, then circumnavigated the trunk until I could juxtapose it against a distant grouping of orange-red leaves. For the next 20 minutes I played with variations of the composition you see here, making small refinements after each click to get the right separation between the three aspen in the scene, the best arrangement of knots, and a depth of field that emphasized my foreground aspen with sufficient background blur. And because my depth of field was so shallow, after each adjustment I very carefully chose my focus point on the tree by magnifying it in my viewfinder, then focused manually.
More Examples
Bridalveil Dogwood, Yosemite
This raindrop-laden dogwood image uses Yosemite’s Bridalveil Fall as a soft background to establish the location. An extension tube allowed me to focus so close that the nearest petal brushed my lens.
Poppy With a View, Point Reyes National Seashore
My goal this gray spring afternoon was to juxtapose a poppy against the distant surf, a relationship made possible by Point Reyes’ Chimney Rock precipitous edge. Once I found the right poppy, I dropped to the ground to frame the flower with the arcing coastline, experimenting with several apertures before finding the ideal balance of foreground sharpness and background softness.
Champagne Glass Poppies, Merced River Canyon, California
The background color you see here is simply a hillside covered with poppies. To achieve this extremely limited DOF, I used an extension tube on my 100mm macro, lying flat on the ground as close as my lens would allow me to focus. Since my tripod (at the time) wouldn’t go that low, I detached my camera, rested the tripod on the ground in front of the poppy, propped my lens on a leg, composed, focused on the leading edge, and clicked my remote release.
Autumn Light, Yosemite
I had a lot of fun playing with the sunlight sneaking through the dense evergreen canopy here, experimenting with different f-stops to get the effect I liked best.
Sparkling Poppies, Merced River Canyon
The background jewels of light are sunlight reflecting on the rippling surface of a creek. I had a blast controlling their size by varying my f-stop.
Dogwood, Merced River, Yosemite
Looking down from the Pohono Bridge, finding the composition was the simple part. But as soon as I started clicking I realized that the sparkling surface of the rapidly Merced River was completely different with each frame. So I just clicked and clicked and clicked until I had over 30 frames to choose between.
Forest Dogwood, Tenaya Creek, Yosemite
Here, rather than background bokeh, I framed my dogwood flower with leaves in front of my focus point.
Bokeh Gallery
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Improve Your Fall Color Photography
Posted on September 27, 2018
Autumn Snow, El Capitan, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
24-105L
1/15 second
F/16
ISO 100
As we enter the fall color photography season, I’m revisiting and revising previous articles. This is the second in the series.
Improve Your Fall Color Photography
Vivid color and crisp reflections make autumn my favorite season for creative photography. While most landscape scenes require showing up at the right time and hoping for the sun and clouds to cooperate, photographing fall color is often a simple matter of circling the scene until the light’s right. For the photographers who understand this, and know how to control exposure, depth, and motion with their cameras, great fall color images are possible any time of day, in any light.
Backlight, backlight, backlight
The difference between the front-lit and backlit sides of fall foliage is the difference between dull and vivid color. When illuminated by direct sunlight, the side of a leaf opposite the sun throbs with color, as if it has its own source of illumination, while the same leaf’s lit side appears flat—if you ever find yourself thinking that the fall color seems washed out, check the other side of the tree.
While the backlight glow isn’t as pronounced in shade/overcast, when the leaves are illuminated by light that’s spread evenly across the sky, even diffuse sunlight is far more pronounced one side of the leaves than the other, giving the side of a leaf that’s opposite the sky (the side getting less light) a subtle but distinct glow when compared to its skyward side.
Forest Autumn, Yosemite
Isolate elements with a telephoto for a more intimate fall color image
Big fall color scenes are great, but a telephoto or macro enables you to highlight and emphasize elements and relationships. Train your eye to find leaves, groups of leaves, or branches that stand out from the rest of the scene. Zoom close, using the edges of the frame to eliminate distractions and frame subjects. And don’t concentrate so much on your primary subject that you miss complementary background or foreground elements to balance the frame and provide an appealing canvas for your subject.
Solitary Leaf, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Selective depth of field is a great way to emphasize/deemphasize elements in a scene
Limiting depth of field with a large aperture on a telephoto lens can soften a potentially distracting background into a complementary canvas of color and shape. Parallel tree trunks, other colorful leaves, and reflective water make particularly effective soft background subjects. For an extremely soft background, reduce your depth of field further by adding an extension tube to focus closer.
Autumn Bouquet, Zion National Park
Underexpose sunlit leaves to maximize color
Contrary to what many believe, fall foliage in bright sunlight is still photographable if you isolate backlit leaves against a darker background and slightly underexpose them. The key here is making sure the foliage is the brightest thing in the frame, and to avoid including any sky in the frame. Photographing sunlit leaves, especially with a large aperture to limit DOF, has the added advantage of an extremely fast shutter speed that will freeze wind-blown foliage.
Leaves and Reflection, Convict Lake, Eastern Sierra
Slightly underexposing brightly lit leaves not only emphasizes their color, it turns everything that’s in shade to a dark background. And if your depth of field is narrow enough, points of light sneaking between the leaves and branches to reach your camera will blur to glowing jewels.
Autumn Light, Yosemite
A sunstar is a great way to liven up an image in extreme light
If you’re going to be shooting backlit leaves, you’ll often find yourself fighting the sun. Rather than trying to overcome it, turn the sun into an ally by hiding it behind a tree. A small aperture (f16 or smaller is my general rule) with a small sliver of the sun’s disk visible creates a brilliant sunstar that becomes the focal-point of your scene. Unlike photographing a sunstar on the horizon, hiding the sun behind a terrestrial object like a tree or rock enables you to move with the sun.
When you get a composition you like, try several frames, varying the amount of sun visible in each. The smaller the sliver of sun, the more delicate the sunstar; the more sun you include, the more bold the sunstar. You’ll also find that different lenses render sunstars differently, so experiment to see which lenses and apertures work best for you.
Autumn Light, North Rim, Grand Canyon
Autumn Glow, Cook’s Meadow, Yosemite
Polarize away the foliage’s natural sheen
Fall foliage has a reflective sheen that dulls its natural color. A properly oriented polarizer can erase that sheen and bring the underlying natural color into prominence. To minimize the scene’s reflection, slowly turn the polarizer until the scene is darkest (the more you try this, the easier it will be to see). If you have a hard time seeing the difference, concentrate your gaze on a single leaf, rock, or wet surface.
Fallen Color, Rock Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
A polarizer isn’t an all-on or all-off proposition. Slowly dial the polarizer’s ring and watch the reflection change until you achieve the effect you desire. This is particularly effective when you want your reflection to share the frame with submerged feature such as rocks, leaves, and grass.
Morning Reflection, North Lake, Eastern Sierra
Blur water with a long exposure
When photographing in overcast or shade, it’s virtually impossible to freeze the motion of rapid water at any kind of reasonable ISO. Rather than fight it, use this opportunity to add silky water to your fall color scenes. There’s no magic shutter speed for blurring water—in addition to the shutter speed, the amount of blur will depend on the speed of the water, your distance from the water, your focal length, and your angle of view relative to the water’s motion. When you find a composition you like, don’t stop with one click. Experiment with different shutter speeds by varying the ISO (or aperture as long as you don’t compromise the desired depth of field).
Autumn Leaf, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Reflections make fantastic complements to any fall color scene
By autumn, rivers and streams that rushed over rocks in spring and summer, meander at a leisurely, reflective pace. Adding a reflection to your autumn scene can double the color, and also add a sense of tranquility. The recipe for a reflection is still water, sunlit reflection subjects, and shaded reflective surface.
When photographing leaves floating atop a reflection, it’s important to know that the focus point for the reflection is the focus point of the reflective subject, not the reflective surface. This is seems counterintuitive, but try it yourself—focus on the leaves with a wide aperture and watch the reflection go soft. Achieving sharpness in your floating leaves and the reflection requires an extremely small aperture and careful focus point selection. Often the necessary depth of field exceeds the lens’s ability to capture it—in this case, I almost always bias my focus toward the leaves and let the reflection go soft.
Autumn Reflection, El Capitan, Yosemite
Fallen Leaves, Valley View, Yosemite
Nothing communicates impending winter like fall color with snow
Don’t think the first snow means your fall photography is finished for the year. Hardy autumn leaves often cling to branches, and even retain their color on the ground through the first few storms of winter. An early snowfall is an opportunity to catch fall leaves etched in white, an opportunity not to be missed. And even after the snow has been falling for a while, it’s possible to find a colorful rogue leaf to accent an otherwise stark winter scene.
Fall into Winter, Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite
First Snow, El Capitan, Yosemite
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To better understand the science and timing of fall color, read
“A simple how and when of fall color“
A Gallery of Fall Color
:: More photography tips ::
A Fall Color Primer
Posted on September 23, 2018
Fallen Color, Rock Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Canon EOS-1D Mark II
1/3 second
F/9.0
ISO 100
85 mm
Autumn has arrived, my favorite season for creative photography. To kick off the festivities, I’m sharing an updated version of a post I wrote a few years ago explaining the often misunderstood process responsible for it all.
Few things get a photographer’s heart racing more than the vivid yellows, oranges, and reds of autumn. And the excitement isn’t limited to photographers—to appreciate that reality, just try navigating the Smoky Mountains backroads on a Sunday afternoon in October.
Innkeeper logic
But despite all the attention, the annual autumn extravaganza is fraught with mystery and misconception. Showing up at the spot that guy in your camera club told you was peaking at this time last year, you might find the very same trees displaying lime green mixed with just hints of yellow and orange, and hear the old guy behind the counter at the inn shake his head and tell you, “It hasn’t gotten cold enough yet—the color’s late this year.” Then, the next year, when you check into the same inn on the same weekend, you find just a handful of leaves clinging to exposed branches—this time as the old guy hands you the key he utters, “That freeze a few weeks ago got the color started early this year—you should have been here last week.”
While these explanations may sound reasonable, they’re not quite accurate. Because the why and when of fall color is complicated, observers resort to memory, anecdote, and lore to fill knowledge voids with partial truth and downright myth. Fortunately, science has given us a pretty good understanding of the fall color process.
It’s all about the sunlight
The leaves of deciduous trees contain a mix of green, yellow, and orange pigments. During the spring and summer growing season, the green chlorophyl pigment overpowers the orange and yellow pigments and the tree stays green. Even though this chlorophyl is quickly broken down by sunlight, it is continuously replaced in the process of photosynthesis that sustains the tree during the long days of summer.
As the days shrink toward autumn, things begin to change. Cells at the abscission layer at the base of the leaves’ stem (the knot where the leaf connects to the branch) start to thicken, blocking the transfer of carbohydrates from the leaves to the branches, and the movement of minerals to the leaves, that had kept the tree thriving all summer. Without these minerals, the leaves’ production of chlorophyl dwindles and finally stops, leaving just the yellow and orange pigments. Voila—color!
Sunlight and weather
Contrary to popular belief, the timing of the onset of this fall color chain reaction is much more daylight-dependent than temperature- and weather-dependent—triggered by a genetically programmed day/night-duration threshold, and contrary to innkeeper-logic, the trees in any given region will commence their transition from green to color at about the same time each year (when the day length drops to a certain point).
Nevertheless, though it doesn’t trigger the process, weather does play a significant part in the intensity, duration, and demise of the color season. Because sunlight breaks down the green chlorophyl, cloudy days after the suspension of chlorophyl creation will slow the coloring process. And while the yellow and orange pigments are present and pretty much just hanging out, waiting all summer for the chlorophyl to relinquish control of the tree’s color, the red and purple pigments are manufactured from sugar stored in the leaves—the more sugar, the more vivid the red. Ample moisture, warm days, and cool (but not freezing) nights after the chlorophyl replacement has stopped are most conducive to the creation and retention of the sugars that form the red and purple pigments.
On the other hand, freezing temperatures destroy the color pigments, bringing a premature end to the color display. Drought can stress trees so much that they drop their leaves before the color has a chance to manifest. And wind and rain can wreak havoc with the fall display—go to bed one night beneath a canopy of red and gold, wake the next morning to find the trees bare and the ground blanketed with color. And of course all these weather factors come in an infinite number of variations, which makes each year’s color timing and intensity a little different from the last.
Despite our understanding of the fall color process, Mother Nature still holds some secrets pretty close to her vest—just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, she’ll surprise us. For example, last year’s Eastern Sierra fall color featured lots of black leaves that I attributed to California’s extreme drought conditions. With the drought persisting, and in fact intensifying, this year, I feared this fall would be even worse. So I was quite pleased to find everything going along right on schedule, with lots of yellow, more red than usual, and hardly a black leaf to be seen. Go figure.
About this image
Driving Rock Creek Canyon north and east of Bishop, I pulled my car over at a random spot and wandered over to the creek. I found trees beyond peak and the creek bank blanketed with yellow aspen leaves, by far the predominant color in the Eastern Sierra. As I turned to return to my car my eyes caught a rare flash of orange. Moving in that direction, I found matching red-orange leaf less than a foot away.
I’m sometimes accused of placing or arranging leaves in my scenes, something I never do, but I understand why people might think that. I very consciously look for leaves that stand out from their surroundings that I can isolate in my frame.
Circling this scene, I didn’t have to work to hard to decide that a symmetrical diagonal arrangement was the way to go. A thin overcast made exposure easy.
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A Fall Color Gallery
Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM Lens: First thoughts
Posted on September 20, 2018
Moonlight, Sierra Foothills, California
Sony a7R III
Sony 24 f/1.4 GM
10 seconds
F/1.4
ISO 1600
Today Sony announced the lens I’ve been waiting for: the Sony 24, f/1.4 GM. I got a sneak preview of this lens on Maui last week, and again once I got home home. Hurricane Olivia, my workshop (no one was supposed to see me using the lens), and food poisoning significantly limited my use of it, but I did get to play with it enough to share a few thoughts.
Night photography is all about capturing light, the more the better. We bump our ISO as high as the image quality permits, dial in our lens’s widest aperture, and open our shutter as long as we can without obvious star streaks, pushing each exposure variable as far as possible squeeze out every last photon. The shortcomings of each of these compromises is mitigated by an improvement in the others, which is why night photography with the fastest possible lens means I can get the same exposure with a little less star motion and/or noise. So f/1.4 is great, currently pretty much as good as it gets for a lens wide enough for night photography.
Of course fast and wide isn’t much good if the lens is lousy, or difficult to use. I haven’t used the 24 GM a lot, but I’ve used it enough to know that lousy and difficult won’t be a concern.
First Impression
My very first impression, and I suspect this will be everyone’s first impression, is how small this lens is. When I knew it was coming my way I started strategizing how I’d rearrange my bag to accommodate it, but it turns out all I needed to do was empty the slot with a couple of extension tubes and my 2X teleconverter. Contrast that with the Sigma 20mm f/1.4, which is an absolute beast of a lens, both in weight and volume, that could never just live in my bag. But I flew home with the Sony in my bag and was completely unaware of the extra weight. Well done, Sony!
Two Galaxies, West Maui
I only got one night to use the on Maui before I had to return to the real world, and my location options had been severely limited by the recent passage Tropical Storm Olivia (downgraded from a hurricane shortly before landfall), so I drove about half-hour from my condo in Napili to the ultra-dark skies on the northern-most tip of West Maui, where I stumbled in the dark down to the edge of a cliff above the Nakalele Blowhole and shot into a 30-MPH headwind. Not the most ideal conditions, but I made it work for my purposes.
The benefit of a fast lens like this is not just the amount of light it allows into an image, it starts with the simple ability to see enough to simply compose and focus. And as I expected, both composition and manual focus were a piece of cake with Sony 24 1.4. For the Maui night shoot I composed, then magnified the viewfinder of my Sony a7SII and twisted the focus ring until the stars were the finest possible points of light—it took all of about 3 seconds. After my first exposure I magnified the image to verify that it was indeed sharp, then didn’t worry about focus again.
The image on the right features the dimmest part of the Milky Way, opposite the brilliant galactic core we all love to photograph. As a bonus, I also captured M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy—its fuzzy glow in the upper right has traveled over 2 million lightyears and is the farthest we can see with the unaided eye.
About this image
I’d have liked to have done more starlight photography after getting home from Maui, but by the time I recovered enough from a most unwelcome bout of food poisoning that showed up the day I returned, the moon was too prominent in the night sky. Nevertheless, a couple of days ago I sucked it up and drove out to the foothills about an hour from my home and put the lens through its paces beneath a 70 percent gibbous moon.
With the moon high over my right shoulder I looked for scenes facing northeast, where the skies were the least polluted by city glow. I eventually settled on a nearby hillside dotted with oaks fortuitously punctuated by an organized formation of the only clouds in the sky. With so much moonlight present I went with the Sony a7RIII instead of the Sony a7SII. Shooting moonlight at f/1.4 enabled me to get away with a 10-second exposure at ISO 1600.
In the past I’ve usually auto-focused on the moon for my moonlight scenes, but for laughs this night I tried autofocusing on the trees and was shocked to hear my focus indicator beep. Wow, I’ve never been able to autofocus on anything by moonlight, even when the moon was completely full. Next I tried autofocusing on a random star and again heard the confirmation beep—another first. And finally I magnified the view and manually focused on the tree: 3-for-3. Admittedly, with the recent ability to do starlight photography (moonless nights), I don’t do as much moonlight photography as I once did, and I’ve never done it with an f/1.4 lens (because it really isn’t necessary). Nevertheless, I think night focus struggles will be a thing of the past with this lens.
Processing my night images, the first thing I checked was the stars in the corners. In many years of night photography I used three dedicated “night” lenses (lenses that I only use for night photography): Zeiss 28mm f/2, Rokinon 24mm f/1.4, and Sigma 20mm f/1.4. In quest of more light I’ve shot all of them wide open, but I’ve had to live with a fair amount of coma (comatic aberration). My first reaction is that is that this lens is cleaner wide open than any of them.
The bottom line
I haven’t had tons of time to spend with my images, but my first impression is that I’m blown away by this lens. I’ve grown to accept that if I want quality in a lens I need to accept bulk along with it. Apparently that’s not the case, because this lens gave me crazy sharp images wide open, yet felt not much larger than a baseball in my hand.
A Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM Samples
A Maui Memory
Posted on September 14, 2018
West Maui Tide Pool Sunset, Hawaii
Sony a7R III
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
Breakthrough 6-stop ND filter
20 seconds
F/16
ISO 50
March 2018
Each year I do back-to-back workshops in Hawaii, one on the Big Island and one on Maui (it’s a tough job, but…, well, you know…). This year’s Big Island workshop was complicated first by the recent Kilauea eruption, and then by Hurricane Lane, which deposited 50 inches of rain on our host city Hilo just days before the workshop.
To get my eyes on the damage wrought by Mother Nature, and to scout more alternate locations, I flew to the Big Island five days early (see “tough job” reference above). Despite the complications, the workshop turned out great, with a fantastic group and a few new locations (including a beautiful sunset and Milky Way shoot atop Mauna Kea) added to my tried and true favorites, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
But my dreams of a stress-free Maui workshop were dashed when Hurricane Olivia took laser aim at Maui. Each day I’d check the forecast hoping to see that she had changed course, and each day I was disappointed. Finally, with just a couple days to go, I completely overhauled the workshop, switching lodging and itinerary to avoid the worst of the storm and get the most the island had to offer. I’m happy to say that despite Olivia, we only missed one morning of the workshop and managed to get our Haleakala sunrise in, plus spend a nice day on the Hana road.
My first location adjustment was switching one of my favorite Maui sunset locations, usually a second day destination, to the workshop’s first night because I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get out there the rest of the week. Between dense rainforest and steep, uneven lava, even the walk down here is a bit harrowing, so when I told the group that a few years ago I tried to drive down to this spot, they couldn’t quite believe it. Returning to this spot made me think that it might be time to share the story of my self-inflicted misadventure again. So I dusted off a blog post from five years ago (can’t believe it’s been that long!):
March 2013
On my September scouting trip for my upcoming Maui workshop I hiked cross-country down the rugged flank of West Maui, searching for lava-rock tide pools I’d read about. Scrambling down a steep hill and over sharp rocks, I found the beach I was looking for but decided it was too dangerous for a group. Rather than return the way I came, I continued picking my way along the shore and eventually found another spot I liked better. At first I thought this wouldn’t be suitable for a group either, but climbing out I found an overgrown dirt road/trail leading back to the highway (“highway” in this case is the one-and-a-half lane, mostly-paved, rental-agreement-voiding Highway 340 circling West Maui). But fearing I’d miss this obscure spur from the main road, I saved the trailhead on my GPS.
Last Sunday, the day before my Maui workshop started, I picked up Don Smith (Don assisted this workshop; I’ll return the favor in one of Don’s workshops) at the airport and was excited to share with him the spot I’d “discovered” (it’s not as if I’m the Lewis and Clark of landscape photography—there’s enough debris down there to indicate the spot is known to locals) and off we went. The steady rain that had been falling for most of the afternoon increased with the road’s remoteness and soon we were slaloming around boulders dislodged from the surrounding cliffs by the downpour—at one point we passed a car waylaid by a grapefruit-size rock embedded in its windshield.
Undeterred, we soldiered on through the intensifying rain. This was Don’s first Maui visit, so I narrated the tour with vigor, enthusiastically pointing out the island’s scenic highlights as we passed them, pausing only occasionally to reassure Don that the highway was navigable despite increasing evidence to the contrary, punctuating my confidence with, “And just wait until you see the scene at the end of this ‘secret’ road I discovered.”
Closely monitoring my GPS, at the prescribed location and without hesitation (for dramatic effect) I veered left into a barely distinguishable gap in the trees almost as if I had a brain. The narrow track unfolded between rapidly oscillating wipers, immediately plummeting the steep hill and twisting right. Dense foliage brushed both sides of the car, which by now was clearly losing purchase in the mud. Don hadn’t quite finished a sentence that started, “Are you sure…,” when it began to dawn on me that I’d never intended to actually drive this road, that my plan when I marked it six months earlier was to park at the top and walk down. Oops.
Propelled by momentum and without the benefit of traction put us completely at gravity’s mercy, careening downward (picture the jungle mudslide scene from “Romancing the Stone”). Steering seemed to have more influence on the direction the car faced than it did on its direction of travel and I quickly gave that up. Were it not for the deep ruts that occasionally nudged us back on course, I’m sure we’d have bounced into the jungle. I held my breath as we approached a boulder jutting from the roadbed and exhaled when the undercarriage passed above unscathed. Shortly thereafter the slope moderated somewhat and we slid to a stop, miraculously still on the “road” (more or less).
After a few seconds of cathartic expletives, I scanned our surroundings. Backing up the slippery road was out of the question, but a little farther down the slope we spotted a flat, clear space with a small Y-spur that might enable us to at least turn around. I scrutinized the dash for the switch that would engage the 4-wheel drive (I swear) the guy at rental agency promised my SUV had. When we didn’t find it Don dug the manual from the glovebox—apparently 4WD is an option the powers-that-be at Alamo deem unnecessary on Maui. Uh-oh.
With crossed fingers I gave the car some gas and felt the wheels spin with no effect. More expletives. Don and I exited into the rain to survey our predicament: the road was fast graduating to creek status, and where rubber tires were supposed to be, instead were four mud disks. Scraping the tires clean had little value because the next revolution simply reapplied a fresh layer.
Back in the car I found that cranking the steering wheel hard in both directions gained just enough traction to un-mire the tires and I gingerly rolled the car downhill, away from safety, but at least into a relatively flat, open space. Yay! Once on level ground, and with only a little bit of slip/slide drama, I gingerly pivoted the car into the adjacent spur and nudged back around to face the direction we’d just come. Progress!
Now for the hard part. Looking for the first time toward freedom, we came to grips with the chute that had deposited us: Not only was it steep, at the steepest (and muddiest) point it curved hard-left, but banked hard-right—not exactly an arrangement that would be embraced at Daytona.
I inhaled and goosed the gas and we shot upward, fishtailing like a hooked marlin before losing momentum before coming to a stop a mere fifty feet closer to freedom. This maneuver had also managed to skew the car at a 45-degree angle to the road, its left-front fender in the jungle on one side, its right-rear fender in the jungle on the other. When I gave the car gas the tires spun hopelessly.
Facing defeat we started strategizing Plan B: With an hour of daylight remaining and no cell service, we’d need to walk up to the highway and hope to flag down, in the rain, a good samaritan willing to drive two disheveled, mud-caked strangers back to civilization (about 45 minutes away), then hope to summon a tow truck that would extricate us.
While Don trudged through the rain up to the main road to get help, I stayed with the car, licking my wounds and feeling pretty foolish. It occurred to me that since the road was too narrow for a tow truck, and the distance and tight curve would make winching difficult, even a tow truck wouldn’t guarantee freedom.
Watching Don head back up the hill to seek help, I decided to give extraction one more shot. I shifted the car into reverse, gave it some gas, and cranked the steering wheel back and forth violently until the tires broke free and the car rolled out of the jungle and back onto the muddy trail and back down to the clearing below. So far so good. Once there, I gave the pedal a gentle nudge and reversed slowly all the way to the clearing’s back side (another 20 feet), where I hoped there might be a little more gravel and less mud—and most importantly, a little more room to gather momentum.
With a small prayer I slipped the transmission into in first and floored the accelerator, rocketing ahead with enough forward speed to avoid much of the fishtailing I’d experienced earlier. Peering through flailing wipers I aimed for the small opening that had deposited us, shooting past crumpled shrubs and protruding rocks until the road steepened. With the steepened incline the energy of my forward momentum was replaced by spinning wheels that spewed mud like a dirty firehose, but I just kept my foot to the floor.
Approaching the curve I felt the car start to tilt right and slow almost to 0, but somehow the tires maintained just enough grip to avoid a complete stop. The fishtailing had returned, now exceeded the forward motion but I didn’t care as long as I still had forward motion. I rounded the curve and surprised Don, who dove into the jungle just up the road and turned to cheer me forward. Just as my forward motion was about to to hopelessly be completely transformed into spinning wheels the road leveled, my rear tires grabbed something solid, and I shot forward. Not wanting to slow until the tires kissed pavement I lowered my window and high-fived Don as I flew past and onto the highway. At the top we just couldn’t stop laughing, both at the foolish predicament I’d created, and our utter disbelief that we’d made it out.
March 2018
This year’s visit was far less eventful. We parked at the top and entire group made it down to the water on foot, without incident. After receiving a brief summary of the scene and a return time, the group quickly scattered in search of one of the seemingly infinite number of great photos here. I kept my camera in the bag as I moved around to work with everyone, eventually finding myself atop a jagged rock ridge about 20 feet above pounding surf.
When I saw the sunset color reflecting in the water, I pulled out my Sony a7RIII and added my Breakthrough 6-stop neutral density filter to my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens. Carefully monitoring my histogram, I dialed in a long exposure that smoothed the surf and blurred the streaking clouds. In my Canon days I’d have needed a graduated neutral density filter (or multiple images) to capture the entire dynamic range in this scene, but the a7RIII has about 3-stops more dynamic range (an entire GND worth!) than my Canon DSLRs did, enabling me to capture this scene’s entire range of light with one click.
A Hawaii Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
New Zealand Night
Posted on September 9, 2018
Mars Rising, Milky Way and Lake Hawea, New Zealand
Sony a7S II
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
15 seconds
F/2.8
ISO 12800
One of the questions I get the most about the New Zealand workshop Don Smith and I do is, “Why winter?” The simple answer is that it’s the best time to photograph there. This answer is usually followed with, “But isn’t it cold?” Not really—it’s more like a Northern California or Oregon winter, with highs in the 40s and 50s, and lows in the 20s and 30s. Also like Northern California and Oregon, New Zealand’s South Island gets some rain and fog in the lowlands, and snow in the mountains—so much better for photography than the persistent blue skies of the California summer I left behind.
While the conditions are certainly tolerable, and winter storms whiten the many peaks and fill the skies with interesting clouds, when pressed for more specifics on my preference for a New Zealand winter, it’s usually not long before I get to the night sky. With clean air and minimal light pollution, New Zealand is an astrophotographer’s paradise any season. But winter is when the Milky Way’s brilliant center shines prominently all night, rising much higher above the horizon than my Northern Hemisphere eyes are accustomed to.
One night in Wanaka Don and I took the group for short drive out to a vista overlooking Lake Hawea, one of many large glacial lakes decorating the South Island. I knew we’d get the Milky Way, but had forgotten about Mars, near opposition and shining brighter than it has in 15 years. We found it rising across the lake, so bright that it cast a sparkling reflection on the water. I started with vertical compositions, but soon switched to horizontal to include both Mars and the snow-capped peaks rising above the north shore.
Here are a couple of links to help with your night photography:
A New Zealand Winter Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
Better than a Pot of Gold
Posted on September 2, 2018
Summer Rainbow, Yosemite Valley
Sony a7R
Sony/Zeiss 16-35 f/4
1/250 second
F/9
ISO 100
My relationship with Yosemite rainbows goes all the way back to my childhood, when a rainbow arcing across the face of Half Dome made my father more excited than I believed possible for an adult. I look back on that experience as the foundation of my interest in photography, my relationship with Yosemite, and my love for rainbows. So, needless to say, photographing a rainbow in Yosemite is a pretty big deal for me.
A few years ago the promise (hope) of lightning drove me to Yosemite to wait in the rain on a warm July afternoon. But after sitting for hours on hard granite, all I got was wet. It became pretty clear that the storm wasn’t producing any lightning, but as the sky behind me started to brighten while the rain continued falling over Yosemite Valley, I realized that conditions were ripe for a rainbow. Sure enough, long after I would have packed up and headed home had I been focused solely on lightning, this rainbow was my reward.
The moral if my story is that despite all appearances to the contrary, rainbows are not random—when sunlight strikes raindrops, a rainbow occurs, every time. The reason we don’t always see the rainbow not because it isn’t happening, it’s because we’re not in the right place. And that place, geometrically speaking, is always the same. Of course sometimes seeing the rainbow requires superhero ability like levitation or teleportation, but when we’re armed with a little knowledge and anticipation, we can put ourselves in position for moments like this.
I can’t help with the anticipation part, but here’s a little knowledge infusion (excerpted from the Rainbow article in my Photo Tips section).
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Energy generated by the sun bathes Earth in continuous electromagnetic radiation, its wavelengths ranging from extremely short to extremely long (and every wavelength in between). Among the broad spectrum of electromagnetic solar energy we receive are ultra-violet rays that burn our skin and longer infrared waves that warm our atmosphere. These wavelengths bookend a very narrow range of wavelengths the human eye sees.
Visible wavelengths are captured by our eyes and interpreted by our brain. When the our eyes take in light consisting of the full range of visible wavelengths, we perceive it as white (colorless) light. We perceive color when some wavelengths are more prevalent than others. For example, when light strikes an opaque (solid) object such as a tree or rock, some of its wavelengths are absorbed; the wavelengths not absorbed are scattered. Our eyes capture this scattered light, send the information to our brains, which interprets it as a color. When light strikes water, some is absorbed and scattered by the surface, enabling us to see the water; some light passes through the water’s surface, enabling us to see what’s in the water; and some light is reflected by the surface, enabling us to see reflections.
(From this point on, for simplicity’s sake, it might help to visualize what happens when water strikes a single drop.)
Light traveling from one medium to another (e.g., from air into water) refracts (bends). Different wavelengths refract different amounts, causing the light to split into its component colors. Light that passes through a water refracts (bends). Different wavelengths are refracted different amounts by water; this separates the originally homogeneous white light into the multiple colors of the spectrum.
But simply separating the light into its component colors isn’t enough to create a rainbow–if it were, we’d see a rainbow whenever light strikes water. Seeing the rainbow spectrum caused by refracted light requires that the refracted light be returned to our eyes somehow.
A raindrop isn’t flat like a sheet of paper, it’s spherical, like a ball. Light that was refracted (and separated into multiple colors) as it entered the front of the raindrop, continues through to the back of the raindrop, where some is reflected. Red light reflects back at about 42 degrees, violet light reflects back at about 40 degrees, and the other spectral colors reflect back between 42 and 40 degrees. What we perceive as a rainbow is this reflection of the refracted light–notice how the top color of the primary rainbow is always red, and the bottom color is always violet.
FOLLOW YOUR SHADOW
Every raindrop struck by sunlight creates a rainbow. But just as the reflection of a mountain peak on the surface of a lake is visible only when viewed from the angle the reflection bounces off the lake’s surface, a rainbow is visible only when you’re aligned with the 40-42 degree angle at which the raindrop reflects the spectrum of rainbow colors.
Fortunately, viewing a rainbow requires no knowledge of advanced geometry. To locate or anticipate a rainbow, picture an imaginary straight line originating at the sun, entering the back of your head, exiting between your eyes, and continuing down into the landscape in front of you–this line points to the “anti-solar point,” an imaginary point exactly opposite the sun. With no interference, a rainbow would form a complete circle, skewed 42 degrees from the line connecting the sun and the anti-solar point–with you at the center. (We don’t see the entire circle because the horizon gets in the way.)
Because the anti-solar point is always at the center of the rainbow’s arc, a rainbow will always appear exactly opposite the sun (the sun will always be at your back). It’s sometimes helpful to remember that your shadow always points toward the anti-solar point. So when you find yourself in direct sunlight and rain, locating a rainbow is as simple as following your shadow and looking skyward–if there’s no rainbow, the sun’s probably too high.
HIGH OR LOW
Sometimes a rainbow appears as a majestic half-circle, arcing high above the distant terrain; other times it’s merely a small circle segment hugging the horizon. As with the direction of the rainbow, there’s nothing mysterious about its varying height. Remember, every rainbow would form a full circle if the horizon didn’t get in the way, so the amount of the rainbow’s circle you see (and therefore its height) depends on where the rainbow’s arc intersects the horizon.
While the center of the rainbow is always in the direction of the anti-solar point, the height of the rainbow is determined by the height of the anti-solar point, which will always be exactly the same number of degrees below the horizon as the sun is above the horizon. It helps to imagine the line connecting the sun and the anti-solar point as a fulcrum, with you as the pivot–picture yourself in the center of a teeter-totter: as one seat rises above you, the other drops below you. That means the lower the sun, the more of its circle you see and the higher it appears above the horizon; conversely, the higher the sun, the less of its circle is above the horizon and the flatter (and lower) the rainbow will appear.
Assuming a flat, unobstructed scene (such as the ocean), when the sun is on the horizon, so is the anti-solar point (in the opposite direction), and half of the rainbow’s 360 degree circumference will be visible. But as the sun rises, the anti-solar point drops–when the sun is more than 42 degrees above the horizon, the anti-solar point is more than 42 degrees belowthe horizon, and the only way you’ll see a rainbow is from a perspective above the surrounding landscape (such as on a mountaintop or on a canyon rim).
Of course landscapes are rarely flat. Viewing a scene from above, such as from atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii or from the rim of the Grand Canyon, can reveal more than half of the rainbow’s circle. From an airplane, with the sun directly overhead, all of the rainbow’s circle can be seen, with the plane’s shadow in the middle.
DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE
Not all of the light careening about a raindrop goes into forming the primary rainbow. Some of the light slips out the back of the raindrop to illuminate the sky, and some is reflected inside the raindrop a second time. The refracted light that reflects a second time before exiting creates a secondary, fainter rainbow skewed 50 degrees from the anti-solar point. Since this is a reflection, the order of the colors is the secondary rainbow is reversed.
And if the sky between the primary and secondary rainbows appears darker than the surrounding sky, you’ve found “Alexander’s band.” It’s caused by all the light machinations I just described–instead of all the sunlight simply passing through the raindrops to illuminate the sky, some of the light was intercepted, refracted, and reflected by the raindrops to form our two rainbows, leaving less light for the sky between the rainbows.
Rainbows
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Addition by Subraction
Posted on August 28, 2018
Big Sun, Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon
Sony a6300
Sony 100-400 GM
Sony 2x teleconverter
ISO 200
f/11
1/160 second
Sometimes making a good photo is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you put in. The downfall of many images, both mine and others’, is the inclusion of too much visual activity—sometimes that activity is simply unappealing visual busyness, but often it’s elements that are visually appealing in their own right, but nevertheless distract from the main point of the image, that need to be removed.
Distraction subtraction starts with proper cropping—simply knowing what to put in and what to leave out. But because nature rarely cooperates, we usually end up having to include stuff we really don’t want. Whether it’s smoothing choppy water, softening a busy background, or banishing distracting terrain to blackened shadows, subtracting unwanted detail usually requires managing the exposure variables (shutter speed, ISO, and aperture) that control photography’s “creativity triad” (motion, light, and depth).
For example
Each summer, Don Smith and I do back-to-back Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshops. One of the small perks of two workshops is do-overs—the opportunity to re-shoot something that didn’t work out the first time. This year for me that was the sunrise shoot from Bright Angel Point. We do this shoot on each group’s final morning on the North Rim and it’s a workshop highlight. Because the sun rises hot and white above the flat and bland (compared to its surroundings) Kaibab Plateau in the east, the better shot from Bright Angel Point is usually the low angled light brushing the canyon walls opposite the sun.
This year, smoke from nearby fires dulled the “good” light in the canyon, but transformed the sun into a mesmerizing orange ball. Instead of something to be avoided, the sun became a feature I wanted to highlight in the best way possible. But how? I wasn’t crazy about the hillside above which the sun would appear, but simply attaching a telephoto and photographing a big sun by itself would have been boring. Instead, I planned to eliminate all foreground detail with a silhouette of the ridge-top evergreens whose shape and contrast would provide the sun the very emphasis I was looking for. To further ramp-up the drama, I decided to shoot the scene as long as possible, adding the Sony 2X teleconverter to my Sony 100-400 GM lens—on my full frame Sony a7RIII, that gave me 800mm.
Sun and Smoke, Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon
But…. In photography, plans can be much better in theory than they are in execution, which was exactly what happened on my first Bright Angel Point sunrise attempt. The low-hanging smoke was so dense that morning that we didn’t see the sun until it was too far above the trees for the silhouette I wanted, forcing me to quickly improvise Plan B: forego the silhouette and give the scene enough light to bring out detail in the hillside. And since the hillside was now an actual subject, I also went with a wider composition.
Largely because of the smoke, I like the image I shot that morning. But it wasn’t what I had in mind and I was thankful for a second chance a few days later. Guiding the second workshop group out to Bright Angel Point in the dark, I kept checking the east horizon to get a read on the smoke. As the sky brightened it looked like the smoke would be just right—dense enough to redden the sun without completely obscuring it. I was in business.
This morning’s silhouette composition was going to be even tighter than the failed first one because a day or two earlier while rummaging through my suitcase and I discovered that at the last minute I must have tossed in my 1.5-crop Sony a6300 body (I don’t remember doing this, but there it was)—that meant I could shoot a 1200mm (full frame) equivalent focal length.
A successful silhouette, especially an ultra-long silhouette, requires careful selection of the silhouette subject—you can’t just plop down the tripod and accept whatever you end up with. So I did my best to figure out where the sun would appear, identified the best silhouette subjects in that direction, then riveted my eyes on the horizon for the first sign of the sun. While waiting I took meticulous care to focus—1200mm is extremely unforgiving, so even something that looks sharp on the LCD can be soft when viewed at 100%. I clicked several test frames, both using autofocus and manual focus, magnifying each in my viewfinder (I love mirrorless) and studying it closely until I was satisfied that I had the focus as sharp as it could be.
The instant the sun’s first glow peeked up behind the trees I grabbed my tripod and ran about 100 feet up the trail to align the sun with my chosen foreground. I used the zebra highlight alert to determine my exposure, pushing my shutter speed a couple of clicks longer once the zebras appeared. This exposure gave me enough contrast between the sun and the trees for the trees to stand out, but without losing color in the sun or including detail in the foreground.
As with many situations nature photographers encounter, this one presented difficult conditions that became a creative opportunity with the application of simple exposure technique to subtract unwanted detail. The next time you’re out in nature with your camera, challenge yourself to use your exposure variables to do something creative with your scene’s motion, light, or depth—not only will your photography improve, I think you’ll have a lot of fun.
Grand Canyon Photo Workshops
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Managing Motion, Light, and Depth
Some Advice for Nikon Shooters (from a Sony Shooter)
Posted on August 24, 2018
Spring Reflection, El Capitan and Three Brothers, Yosemite
Sony a7R II
Canon 11-24 f/4L with Metabones IV adapter @11mm
1/60 second
F/8
ISO 100
Yesterday Nikon finally jumped into the mirrorless game with its Z6 and Z7 announcement, a welcome development that can only keep pushing everyone’s mirrorless technology forward.
I made the switch to mirrorless about four years ago and haven’t looked back. At the beginning mirrorless was touted for its compactness, and while mirrorless bodies (and to a lesser extent, lenses) are more compact, it turns out that, for me at least, it’s the mirrorless viewfinder that has hooked me: with real-time exposure simulation, focus assist (peaking), highlight alert (zebras), and a pre-capture histogram, I don’t think I could go back to a DSLR.
While I shoot with the Sony a7RIII and am very much committed to the Sony mirrorless universe, I’m not going to get into the “my camera can beat up your camera” debate—Nikon makes great cameras and I’m sure their mirrorless bodies will be no exception. In fact, the Z7 looks like it compares very closely to the Sony a7RII, which is a fantastic camera that I still carry as a backup and don’t hesitate to use when the situation calls for it.
As happy as I am with my mirrorless conversion, I do have some insights that might spare Nikon shooters of some of the transition pains I went through when I switched from Canon DSLRs (1DSIII and 5DIII) to the Sony a7R series of mirrorless bodies.
- The mirrorless viewfinder is different than a DSLR viewfinder and it will take some getting used to. I don’t know what the Nikon viewfinder will be like, but I’m sure it will be quite good—large, bright, and everything you’d want in an electronic viewfinder (EVF). Even so, you might be surprised at how long it takes you to get used to it (but you will). It just feels different to view a video of the world. The cool thing is, EVF technology is relatively new and will only continue to improve, while there’s not a lot more that can be done for a conventional DSLR viewfinder.
- Beware of lens adapter hype. My original conversion plan was to use the Sony mirrorless body to supplement my Canon system, to continue using my Canon glass on the Sony body with a Metabones adapter, and gradually convert my lenses as my budget allowed. And while my adapted Canon lenses did indeed do the job, the experience was far from painless (not all that was advertised) and I wasn’t really satisfied until I was using 100% native Sony glass. Some of the problems are a function of the lens—generally the better (and newer) the lens, the closer to native performance it delivers. But as a landscape shooter, autofocus speed isn’t as big a deal to me as it is to anyone whose subjects are in motion, so sluggishness might even be a bigger problem for others. On the other hand, I suspect that since it’s Nikon making an adapter for their lenses to work with their bodies, it will be pretty good from the get-go—but I wouldn’t bet my house on it. And adapter performance likely won’t be as good as using native glass—best case scenario will be that some won’t notice a difference, but those for whom focus responsiveness and autofocus speed is essential should prepare for some frustration. (And I won’t begin to speculate about worst-case.)
- You’ll miss that second card slot more than you might imagine. Making my living from my images, having two memory card slots for instant image backups saved me a couple of times, and gave me tremendous peace of mind all the time. If your DSLR doesn’t have a second slot, the missing slot might not be a big deal to you, but if you’re as failsafe-obsessed as I am, you might be surprised by how much you’ll long for that second slot. All it takes is one corrupted, damaged, or lost card to make you a convert to the second card slot paradigm.
- The battery life will drive you crazy. Looking at the specs, the Z7 battery life is about the same as the a7R and a7RII, and nowhere near the Nikon full frame and Sony a7RIII (or the a7III or a9) battery life. I was willing to live with burning through multiple batteries in a single day because of all the other mirrorless benefits, and because the Sony batteries were small enough that carrying four or five at all times (I mean on my person, not just in the car or hotel) wasn’t a big deal. But it looks like the Nikon batteries are twice the size of the original Sony batteries, so there goes your size/weight benefit. I predict this will be the biggest complaint we hear about these cameras (as it was with the early a7 bodies)—that is, assuming the adapter is good.
- Learn how to clean your sensor. Without a mirror to protect it, your naked mirrorless sensor will be exposed to the elements each time you change a lens. Fortunately, sensor cleaning is simple and not nearly as dangerous is many try to make you believe.
None of these points is a reason to not get a Nikon Z6 or Z7, but for me it would be a reason not to pre-order. Instead, if it were me, I’d wait and let others discover the frustrations so I could go into the non-trivial transition from DSLR to mirrorless with realistic expectations.
I’m guessing that current Nikon shooters will probably endure fewer frustrations than I had with my first mirrorless body, the Sony a7R—Sony was still trying to figure out the whole interface thing that Nikon has nailed (I’ve never been a fan of Nikon’s interface, but Nikon shooters like it and that’s what matters). On the other hand, I was probably more forgiving than Nikon shooters might be because the a7R image quality was so much better for my needs than the Canon 5DIII it replaced. Dynamic range is king in the landscape world, and the a7R gave me 2-3 stops more dynamic range than my 5DIII—slow transition plan notwithstanding, I literally didn’t click another frame after my first a7R shoot.
While I expect the Z6/Z7 bodies will be ergonomically more mature than my original a7R, Nikon’s full frame bodies already deliver exceptional image quality, so most Nikon full-frame DSLR shooters transitioning from the D800/810/850 won’t have the euphoria of much better image quality that sustained me until the release of Sony’s a7RII and (especially) a7RIII.
On the other hand…
(Full disclosure: I’m a Sony Artisan of Imagery)
These Nikon mirrorless cameras are great for committed Nikon shooters who are completely invested in the Nikon ecosystem and have no plans to completely replace their lens lineup. But for any photographer planning to make the full jump to mirrorless that includes all native lenses, I think Sony is (at least) several years ahead of Nikon, and given their resources and commitment, will remain at least that far ahead for many years.
One of the early complaints about the Sony mirrorless system was its lack of lenses compared to Nikon and Canon, but valid as that criticism was, that disadvantage has shrunk to virtually the point of irrelevance, and Sony is already very far along on many more native Sony FE-mount lenses. Sony is several laps ahead of everyone else in the mirrorless world—with deep pockets and its foot hard on the mirrorless pedal, I don’t see that lead shrinking muchsoon.
As good as it is for a first generation offering, the Nikon Z7 is much closer to the 3-year old Sony a7RII than it is to the (already 1-year old) a7RIII, and for sports and wildlife (and anything else that moves), it isn’t even in the same league as the (more than 1-year old) Sony a9.
I have no idea how or when Sony will respond to the mirrorless offerings from Nikon and (soon) Canon, but I’m guessing it won’t be long, and am pretty confident that will be a great day to be a Sony shooter. Competition is great for all of us, and Nikon just gave the mirrorless wave a huge boost that I’m looking forward to riding as far as it takes me.
A few words about this image
I can’t tell you that this is my favorite Sony mirrorless image, but it would definitely be on the list. I chose it for this post because it’s one of the few Sony images I have that used a Canon lens with the Metabones adapter.
Leading a workshop in Yosemite a few years ago, I guided the group to a meadow flooded by the Merced River during a particularly extreme spring runoff year. My widest lens at the time was my Sony/Zeiss 16-35 f/4 (which I love, BTW), but the scene called for something wider. When he photographer assisting me offered to let me use his Canon 11-24 f/4 with my Metabones adapter, I snatched it before he could change his mind. Given that everything in the scene was stationary, I was able to bypass any adapter-induced autofocus frustration and take the time to manually focus (it didn’t hurt that depth of field at 11mm is extremely forgiving).
I’d never used a lens that wide and was so excited by the extra field of view that I returned from Yosemite fully prepared to purchase the Canon lens, adapter or not. Fortunate for my budget (and my back), I let the lens sit in my shopping cart long enough for sanity to prevail. Not only was the Canon lens quite expensive, it weighed a ton, and I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before Sony offered something similar. Those instincts were rewarded a year later when Sony released a 12-24 f/4 G lens that is just as sharp and half the size (and much less money).
A Sony Mirrorless Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 