Cliché for a reason
Posted on October 29, 2013
Autumn Snow, Valley View, Yosemite
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
1/15 second
F/16
ISO 100
24 mm
It’s actually even a cliché just to say it, but some things really are “cliché for a reason.” And as much as I try to avoid the cliché shots in Yosemite, sometimes they just can’t be helped.
My Yosemite Fall Color workshop began yesterday, and even though I’d spent all day Saturday in the park, yesterday morning a storm filled Saturday’s blue skies with rain and I felt like I should go check on the conditions before we started. The wet weather had slowed me enough that I didn’t really have time to take pictures, but when I found not only the red and yellow leaves I’d seen on Saturday, and the swirling clouds I’d hoped for, but also Yosemite Valley’s colorful trees and meadows etched with snow, I was tempted at every turn to reach for my camera. Nevertheless, with the exception of a brief breakdown at Cook’s Meadow, I managed to resist temptation.
Unfortunately, the Cook’s Meadow stop had put me even more behind schedule, so I told myself while approaching Valley View that any stop here would be just reconnaissance. And anyway, Valley View images are a dime a dozen, clichés that I’d done more than my share to perpetuate over the years. Then I got there….
I mean seriously, cliché or not (deadline or not), how does a photographer pass up a scene like this? With my group meeting me in just an hour, I really, really didn’t have time for pictures, which is exactly what I kept reminding myself as I leaped from my car, snatched my camera and tripod, and sprinted down to the river. I only snapped four frames, two vertical and two horizontal, before racing back to the car and toward my impending rendezvous.
It’s images like this that remind me that nature’s beauty transcends any human judgement of “cliché.” Pro photographers, myself included, can get a little snobbish about frequently photographed scenes. And while I think it’s important to take the time to find a unique perspective, sometimes it’s best to let Mother Nature speak for herself.
Happy ending
I made it to my workshop with minutes to spare, conducted a lightning-fast orientation, and hustled everyone back outside as quickly as possible. We ended up circling Yosemite Valley several times, photographing without a break until dark. I heard no complaints.
A gallery of clichés
Shocking truths about lightning
Posted on October 23, 2013
Color and Light, Bright Angel Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
1/3 second
F/11
ISO 100
24-105 f4L lens
While working on an upcoming “Outdoor Photographer” magazine article on photographing lightning at the Grand Canyon, I’ve been revisiting the images from my August workshop with Don Smith. While I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with the trip’s lighting images, it’s clear that at least half of my captures came on that amazing final morning, when we witness two hours of virtually nonstop lightning punctuated by a vivid section of rainbow balanced atop Powell Point. The first image I posted from that morning included the rainbow sharing the rim a trio of simultaneous, parallel strikes. The difficulty I’m having now is choosing which of the other pretty spectacular images to feature (FYI, this is a great problem to have).
Fortunately, I varied my compositions enough that many of my favorite captures are different from each other. Here, a single strike lands just east of the rainbow, close enough that they somehow seem related. This image is an example of why I’m constantly preaching to my workshop participants to switch between horizontal and vertical, even (especially) when one orientation seems more obvious than the other. Fortunately, I practiced what I preached (not always a sure thing) throughout the morning—instead of having one great capture of lighting with that morning’s rainbow, I now have two (and counting) that are different enough from each other to share.
Another byproduct of my magazine article is the research I’ve been doing on lightning. I’ve always been something of a weather geek, but it seems each time I revisit a topic, I learn something new. So, while I doubt you’ll find this stuff quite as fascinating as I do, here are some cool lightning facts I just can’t resist sharing:
- Earth is struck by lightning eight million times each day.
- While lightning is still not completely understood, scientists know that the rapid upward and downward motion of raindrops in a thunderstorm creates extreme electrical polarity—a negative/positive imbalance within a cloud, between clouds, or between a cloud and the ground. Nature abhors any imbalance and will remedy the problem as efficiently as possible: Lightning.
- The visible portion of a lightning strike originates on the ground and travels up to the cloud.
- In a lifespan measured milliseconds, a lightning bolt can release 200 million volts and heat the surrounding air to 50,000 degrees. More than enough to fry a photographer.
- Most of us know that lightning and thunder occur simultaneously. What many don’t know is that you can’t have one without the other—it’s the lightning that causes the thunder, and if you see lightning but hear no thunder, you’re just too far away. This even applies to what is often called “heat lightning,” which still generates thunder you’d hear if you were close enough.
- The fact that lightning and thunder occur simultaneously, but light travels much faster than sound, allows us to roughly establish the distance of the lightning. For all intents and purposes, we see the lightning the instant it happens, while the thunder pokes along at the speed of sound, a pedestrian 1,100 feet per second. That works out to about five seconds to travel one mile. So, if you start counting as soon as you see lightning (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, …), dividing by five the number you’re at when the thunder arrives gives you the approximate distance in miles.
- Let’s say you get all the way to fifty before the thunder arrives—that would be ten miles. You’re safe, right? Wrong. Lightning bolts exceeding one hundred miles in length have been documented, as have bolts with no rain and even with blue skies overhead. That’s why we’re warned to stay inside whenever you can see lightning or hear thunder. (It’s also why I say do as I say, not as I do.)
- A car is not a magic lightning sanctuary, and the safety a car does offer is because of its metal frame, not its rubber tires. (Don’t believe me? Go stand on a couple of rubber tires in the next lightning storm and have your next of kin report back to me.) Even when you’re inside a car, you need to keep the windows up and don’t touch anything metal. And stay away from convertibles.
Here are a couple of lightning safety websites:
Are you interested in risking your life to photograph lightning? Join me in a Grand Canyon photo workshop.
A Lightning Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
Favorite: Sunset Palette
Posted on October 17, 2013
Sunset Palette, Half Dome from Sentinel Dome, Yosemite
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
Canon 24-105
2 seconds
F/20.0
ISO 100
Usually an image comes together on the spot, an organic blend of location and light unique to the moment. But some images I carry around in my brain for years, fully aware of the elements and how I want them assembled, and hopeful to be present when that happens. I have a number of these “dream” images rattling around between my ears, and every once in a while the stars align and I actually get to capture one. For example, on every visit to Sentinel Dome I would eye the granite indentations on the southeast flank and picture them as pools of rainwater reflecting the sunset sky, framing Half Dome in the distance. Wouldn’t it be great if….
One showery October afternoon a few years ago I made the hike to Sentinel Dome with these indentations in mind. I knew that the recent rain would quite likely have filled them, allowing at least part of my dream to come true. After summiting the dome I beelined to the other side and found “my” pools exactly as I’d hoped. The sky was a promising mix of blue and gray, but the sun was still at least an hour above the horizon. Nevertheless, the air was clean and western horizon was clear, essential ingredients for the colorful sunset I so wanted. Dare I hope?
I walked around a bit and mentally refined my composition—rather than set up close and use an ultra wide-angle, I moved back as far as the terrain would permit. This allowed me to fit the pools in the frame at a longer a focal length, which would compress the distance separating Half Dome and the pools. To reduce the expanse of granite behind the pools, I flattened my tripod as far as it would go and framed my shot. With closest pool about six feet in front of me, stopping down to f20 and focusing on a point about twelve feet away gave me sharpness throughout the frame. With my composition set and waiting on my tripod, I readied my two-stop hard graduated neutral density filter and adjusted my polarizer, then sat down on the (hard) granite, and waited.
The sunset color that finally came was more than I dared hope for. The sun was at my back, but with clouds overhead and the western horizon wide open, the crimson glow stretched all the way to the eastern horizon. I clicked this frame when the color was at its most intense, so brilliant in fact that every exposed surface seemed to throb with its glow.
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A Few Images On or Including Sentinel Dome
Night and Day
Posted on October 9, 2013
Night and Day, Crescent Moon Rising Above Mono Lake
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
3.2 seconds
F/5.6
ISO 800
40 mm
October 2013
It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s early—so early that some would still consider it late. But you drag yourself out of bed anyway, for the promise of something most people never experience. And experience is the operative word here, because it’s much more than just the view. Or the photography. It’s the opportunity to witness the transition from night to day, to bask in a quiet that’s impossible in our metropolitan mayhem, to inhale clean, chilled air, and to watch the rising sun’s warm hues push back Earth’s indigo shadow to devour the twinkling vestiges of night. Of course you can watch this happen in reverse after sunset, but it’s just not the same in a world has been lived in for a dozen or so hours.
I’d scheduled this year’s Eastern Sierra workshop to conclude on the one day each month when a sliver of moon floats in the transition between night and day. To photograph the moon this small and close to the sun, I try to be in place an hour before “official” sunrise (the posted sunrise time, when the sun would crest a flat horizon), when darkness still predominates. With a five mile drive on a rugged, unpaved road, and a half mile (or so) trail-less walk through sand and mud, I got the group on the road at 5:15 for our 7:00 a.m. sunrise. Despite some blurry eyes, there was no grumbling; and by the time we were ready to trek to the lake, everyone was in great spirits.
On this morning Mother Nature rewarded us by chasing away the clouds that had dogged the horizon the last couple of days. These clouds had given us brilliant color, but had also preempted our night photography shoot just ten hours earlier; I was concerned that they’d obscure the moon I’d been so looking forward to. No problem—in the clouds’ place we found this two-percent slice of old moon, one day removed from new, just as I’d ordered. Phew.
Because this was the last day of the workshop, everyone had pretty much mastered the difficulty of exposing for a dark foreground beneath a bright horizon—some blended multiple exposures, others reached for their graduated neutral density filters—allowing them to concentrate on creativity. I tried a variety of compositions, horizontal and vertical orientations from wide to tight, and encouraged the rest of the group to do the same (though I suspect that by now they’d all learned to tune me out).
This is one of the first images I captured that morning. It was still dark enough that the amount of light required to bring out any detail in the foreground also revealed lots of lunar detail in the earth-shadow, and stars still pierced much of the sky. Nice. To ensure that I didn’t get motion blur in the moon, I made some compromises: I dropped to f5.6 (depth of field wasn’t a concern, but lenses are slightly slightly less sharp as the approach their extreme apertures) and bumped to ISO 800 (with my 5D Mark III and today’s noise reduction software, noise at ISO 800 is no longer much of a concern). For most of my images that morning I used a two-stop hard-transition graduated neutral density filter to subdue the bright horizon, but this was one of my earliest images, captured before that was necessary.
The group was pretty quiet for most of this sunrise, usually a sign that they’re pretty happy with what they see and the images they’re capturing. Every once in a while I’d answer a question, or offer suggestions, but it seemed like people were pretty much “in the zone.” Nevertheless, I did pause couple of times to remind everyone not to get so caught up in their photography that they forget to appreciate what we’re witnessing.
These ephemeral moments in nature change subtly but quickly—soon the stars disappeared and moon faded into the advancing daylight. By the time the sun crested the horizon, our attention had turned to the warmly lit peaks behind us. And then it was over.
Uhhh, I can explain…
Posted on October 4, 2013
Before Sunrise, South Tufa, Mono Lake
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
3.2 seconds
F/16
ISO 100
17 mm
October 4, 2013
On my just completed Eastern Sierra workshop, the fact that I was in possession of three (THREE!) iPhones was a frequent source of amusement (dismay?) to my group. I thought I did a pretty good job justifying (rationalizing?) my obsession, only to return to read my daughter’s recent blog rekindling my defensive instincts (as an extremely proud but unbiased dad, I hope you take the time to read Ashley’s short piece). But sometimes it takes our kids to shine the light of perspective, and Ashley is just the mix of Laura Ingalls pioneer and jailbroken Android super-geek, knitter/blogger (who makes her own soap and tweets from the cozy wifi comfort of her commute train) to do it.
The truth is, I’ve been drawn to my “toys” ever since my college roommate and I de-boxed, connected, and powered on my brand new component stereo system. I have no memory of the first album to wobble my woofers (though I’m certain it was a painstaking decision process), but I’ll never forget the receiver’s soft blue glow illuminating my otherwise dark dorm room—ahhhh.
But anyway…. A couple of years ago I was permanently scarred when I accidentally drowned my (only!) iPhone on a shoot in Hawaii. I travel a lot, often to locations with little or no connectivity, and suddenly having to live without my iPhone’s contact, e-mail, map, sunrise/sunset, hyperfocal, and other data necessary to execute my business on the road gave me some inkling of the suffering endured by the Donner Party. I immediately replaced that iPhone with a 4s (thank God for insurance), and when the iPhone 5 came out, rather than sell the 4s, I kept it as a backup—even though the cell service is turned off, I keep it fully synced via wifi, so it’s always ready to jump into action in the event of the untimely demise of my iPhone 5.
But three iPhones? Okay, this one’s a bit more of a stretch, but here goes. When I replaced the stereo on my (7-year old, 130,000 miles thank-you-very-much) Honda Pilot (somehow I didn’t get the fancy-new-car gene), the USB interface wasn’t fully compatible with my iPhone 5, so my backup iPhone took a full time position in the center console as the dedicated travel entertainment center.
Then the iPhone 5s came out. I tried to resist. I really did. But a fingerprint sensor? 64-bits? Improved camera? Dual flash? A dedicated motion detecting coprocessor? You had me at fingerprint sensor. My original plan was to sell the 5 (because who needs 3 iPhones?). But before I could do it, possibility started to conspire against reason: With my iPhone 5 I can again have a dedicated backup. Not only that, with the 5’s GPS and fully synced iTunes library, I won’t have to get my new 5s sweaty on my daily runs, nor will my they be interrupted by phone calls or e-mail. Plus…. Okay, I can see this isn’t working.
But seriously. As someone who remembers phones with cords and rotary dials, I sometimes shake my head at the technology in my pocket that allows me to communicate instantly with almost anyone from the most remote locations on Earth (sometimes with the help of an amazing two-way satellite receiver). But more than a communication device, this little block of aluminum and glass instantly puts information at my fingertips that once required multiple trips to the library and days of research. It entertains me on long trips with my entire music collection, reads to me, guides me, and allows me to record and report whatever activity or sight currently engaging me. Do I need three? Of course not. (Thanks, Ash.)
About this image
Believe it or not, despite the demands of managing three iPhones, I was able to find time for photography this week. My Eastern Sierra workshop started in Lone Pine, where we photographed Mt. Whitney and the Alabama Hills. From there we moved and hour north to Bishop, concentrating there on the bristlecone pine forest of 4,000 year-old trees, and the brilliant fall color decorating North Lake and Bishop Creek. While that part of the workshop was great, it was dogged by persistent blue skies that made being outside nice, but were less than ideal for photography.
That changed on the Lee Vining stage of the workshop. The clouds arrived just in time for our two days at Mono Lake, blessing with a South Tufa sunset that I can only describe as electric, reprised by an equally spectacular South Tufa sunrise the next morning. We also enjoyed a surprise sunset at Minaret Vista (a substitute location to replace suddenly inaccessible Olmsted Point in just-closed Yosemite), and wrapped up with crescent moon enhanced, sunrise at a remote, solitary Mono Lake beach that never disappoints.
At Mono Lake I aways cross my fingers for the still lake surface that delivers the mirror-like reflections that make photographs there particularly special. On this trip we were fortunate to get reflections at each of our three Mono Lake shoots, reflections ranging from gently abstract to utterly mirror-like. This image is from our South Tufa sunrise shoot on workshop day-four. The previous night’s sunset was more vivid than this, as was the subsequent sunrise a few minutes later (and I’ll no doubt share those images at some point). But I liked the softness of the subdued hues of this moment, when the morning was still under the influence of twilight. I snapped this when the light was still low, enabling an exposure long enough to smooth gentle, breeze-stirred ripples.
To best capture the exquisite detail of the tufa (calcium carbonate towers formed by submerged springs, exposed by receding lake levels), I focused toward the back of the long, low tufa at the bottom center; at 17mm I probably could have gotten away with f11, but I wanted a longer shutter speed to better smooth the water. I used a two-stop hard graduated neutral density filter to hold back the bright sky, hand-holding it at a 30-degree (or so) angle along the top-right edge of the frame. The 3+ second shutter speed allowed me to move the GND slightly during the exposure, all but eliminating the telltale GND transition line. What little transition remain was easily blended away with a few Photoshop dodge/burn brush strokes.
Epilogue, September 2016
I’m back to one iPhone now.
Eastern Sierra Photo Workshops
An Eastern Sierra Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
We have met the enemy and he is us…
Posted on September 27, 2013
Autumn Light, North Rim, Grand Canyon
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
1/5 second
F/20
ISO 100
17 mm
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. The Grand Canyon North Rim, fall color, and maybe even a thunderstorm or two. What could possibly go wrong? Well, let me tell you….
I’ve wanted to do this trip in the fall since my first visit to the North Rim. On my visit in August I polled local experts for the best time to photograph fall color, and the consensus seemed to be around September 20. Perfect—I return from Hawaii on September 8, and don’t have to be in the Eastern Sierra for my fall color workshop until September 29. With the only thing between me and the North Rim a 13 hour drive, I made tentative plans to leave last Friday (September 20). Before locking in my final arrangements, I e-mailed my North Rim contacts to verify that the color was indeed on schedule and got a thumbs-up. With all systems “go,” I loaded the Pilot and headed out, on schedule, Friday morning.
Punching the Grand Canyon Lodge into my GPS reminded me that its mount had broken a couple of days earlier: Let’s just swing into Best Buy—it’ll make the drive so much easier…. Found what I needed, avoided temptation (stayed away from the home theater department), paid, and was out the door in less than 10 minutes. Okay, that was easy—but wait…. Isn’t that an AT&T Store there? Didn’t the iPhone 5s come out today? I know, I know, I just ordered one last night, but it would sure be cool to have it on my trip (because it’s sooooo radically different from my iPhone 5). Of course they’ll have been sold out for hours, but I’m here, so I may as well check. The nice young lady at the door, reading my mind, told me all they have left is the 64 GB version in black. Why, that just happens to be exactly what I ordered last night. Hmmm…. It’s a sign. How long could it take?
An hour later I was out the door, new iPhone synced and ready for business. Okay, now I’m really ready for the open road. What time is it? Hmmm. Maybe I’ll only go as far as St. George, Utah tonight. But wait. Where’s all my music? Oh crap, that’s right, when I restore my iCloud backup, my music doesn’t come with it—that I need to sync from my iCloud music library. Of course I need my music and podcasts, but 40+ gigabytes of data could take forever (or never) over AT&T’s network. Well, I’m only 15 minutes from home, let’s just pop back in, hook up to my lighting fast Internet, and I’ll be completely set in no time. And Las Vegas is only 4 1/2 hours from the North Rim.
Four hours and two lengthy Apple support calls later, everything’s perfect. Of course Vegas is certainly out of the question, so I make reservations at a Best Western in Barstow and (finally) hit the road for real. Okay, nothing can can stop me now—I mean how much traffic could there be at 6 p.m. on a Friday night? Hint: A lot. It takes me an hour-and-half to get through town (but my music sounds great), but I own that room in Barstow, so I guess it’s Barstow or bust. And somehow, with the help of two Starbucks stops, I finally do limp into the Barstow Best Western. At 2 a.m. To find that my reservation is listed as Jerry Hartman, with some unknown credit card. The guy at the desk must have sensed my desperation because he worked some magic. Phew. (It didn’t occur to me until later that my credit card probably paid for somebody else’s room, but that’s a battle for another day.) Nice room. I wonder what those ear plugs on the nightstand are for? Wonder no more. For some reason somebody at Best Western HQ decided it would be a good idea to wedge an entire hotel into a narrow strip separating I-15 from what must be the busiest railroad tracks west of Grand Central Station.
Fortunately, my Saturday drive went smoothly, all the way up the Jacob Lake turnoff on to Highway 67, the last 40 miles to the North Rim. That’s when I started scanning the forest for signs of autumn. Every once in a while I spied a token aspen wearing yellow, but there sure was a lot of green. A lot of green. Okay, I can still make this work—I won’t stress it now, I’ll just head out to one of the vistas on the Cape Royal road for sunset, then go exploring for color tomorrow morning. Approaching the entrance station I saw a sign that says something like, “Road work on Cape Royal Road—access limited.” Hmmm—that sounds inconvenient. Handing the ranger my National Parks, pass I ask if I’m going to have to deal with flagmen on the Cape Royal Road, and he tells me no. Okay, cool. No flagmen, he says, because the road’s closed. Oh. Inconvenient indeed.
No doubt distracted by the fact that I seem to be a photographer with nothing to photograph, I somehow lose track of my speed (honestly, I’m usually really good about honoring the speed limit in the National Parks). No problem, here’s a nice ranger pulling me over to remind me….
Okay, so you might think things couldn’t get worse. You’d think. But rather than dwell on things like 50 mph winds; multiple, lengthy power outages; zero cell service (thank you very much, AT&T) and zero Internet for the duration of my stay; and utterly cloud-free skies (great for tourists, not so much for photographers), I was able to elevate my attitude enough to actually enjoy my surroundings. In fact, it turned out that despite being a little early for the fall color, just a little exploring uncovered many nice patches of autumn lining the unpaved Forest Service roads just outside the park boundary.
I found this tree on one of my exploration excursions. On my final afternoon I drove fourteen unpaved miles to Shoulder Mountain, where I hiked two vertical roundtrip miles (down, up, down, turn around, up, down, up) to a view that was nice, but far from photo-worthy. A couple of miles into the drive back, this grove of backlit aspen pulled me like a magnet. I spent two hours traipsing through the woods here, watching the color warm as the sun dropped. What drew me to this scene was the tiny aspen shrub that the sun lit up like a spotlight for just a few minutes. Since the composition I wanted was directly into the sun, I hid all but a sliver of the sun behind a tree and, using a small aperture, turned it into a sunburst.
Photographing here that afternoon, I felt like I’d finally hit my stride. I really had a blast, enjoying myself so much that I delayed my departure the next morning so I could go back and shoot leaves backlit by the rising sun. That little delay cost me another night in Barstow, but it was a trade I’d make again. Would I do the trip again? Absolutely (albeit with a little better decision-making on the front end).
* * *
The title of this post is a line from “Pogo,” a cartoon by Walt Kelly. It’s one of my favorite quotes because it so perfectly applies to so many disasters.
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Favorite: Sunrise Mirror
Posted on September 24, 2013
Sunrise Mirror, Mono Lake
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
1/60 second
F/10.0
ISO 200
32 mm
This is the second installment in my semi-regular “Favorites” series
* * *
Some things you just can’t plan. But if you have experienced the disappointment that comes when preparation, sacrifice, and extreme discomfort end in complete failure, yet have still gone back out the next time and the next time and the next time, Mother Nature will sometimes reward you with gifts of exquisite beauty. More than the successful shot that was planned and executed to perfection, it’s these gifts that keep me going back out with my camera when I’d so much rather be at the dinner table, curled in bed, or reading by the fire.
I’ve had a few of these unexpected blessings in my photographic career: Half Dome emerging from a churning caldron of clouds, barely visible in the very last light of day; a persistent double rainbow arcing above the full breadth of Yosemite Valley; the Milky Way, framed by glowing clouds, pouring into Kilauea Caldera; and most recently, a magic morning at the Grand Canyon, when the lightning wouldn’t stop and the first rays of sunrise balanced a vivid rainbow on the canyon’s rim. Another of those moments was this sunrise at Mono Lake. It was the final day of a trip with my brother to photograph fall color in the Eastern Sierra. Facing a long drive home, and despite a weather report promising clear skies, we rose in the dark and went out in the October chill anyway.
That I’ve been able photograph these moments with my camera is my great fortune. But with or without my camera, every detail of being there is permanently etched in my memory—not just the visual, but who I was with, where I might have been instead, and the joy of feeling like I’m witnessing the most beautiful thing happening on Earth at this moment. It’s these permanent, visceral memories that drive me from bed, warm my flesh, and calm my angry stomach when thoughts of comfort try to keep me home.
A star is born
Posted on September 17, 2013
New Day, Bright Angel Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
3.2 seconds
F/20
ISO 200
16 mm
Truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of sunstars (a.k.a. starbursts). Cool as they are, sunstars have become ubiquitous to the point of cliché. So why do I shoot them? Because sometimes there’s little else you can do when the sun intrudes on the scene you came to photograph. In other words, they’re often more of a lemonade-from-lemons kind of thing.
Despite their ubiquity, sunstars work because there’s universal resonance to witnessing the sun kiss the horizon—I mean, who doesn’t have a warm memory of watching from a special location as the sun begins or completes its daily journey? These moments touch us on a literal, visual level (they’re beautiful), but I think more significantly they serve as a metaphor for the hope or closure we all long for.
Unfortunately, doing justice to these moments in a photograph is difficult: Including the sun in your frame introduces lens flare, extreme (often unmanageable) contrast, and an unattractive eye magnet that overpowers the rest of the scene. And while a sunstar doesn’t capture the literal experience, it does do a pretty good job of conveying the metaphor.
The good news is, despite the difficulties, creating a sunstar is relatively straightforward. Here’s a quick recipe:
- Start with a brilliant, fine point of light: The sun is the most logical candidate, but you can do it with the moon, stars, and pretty much any bright artificial light (lighthouse, headlights, and so on). The finer the light source the more precise the star effect will be, and the less lens flare and blown highlights you’ll have. If it’s the sun you’re using, virtually all of it needs to be hidden to get the delicate, symmetrical distribution of beams that generally work best. In this image the horizon hides most of the sun, but you can use a cloud, tree, rock, or whatever.
- The smaller your aperture, the finer your sunstar will appear: I generally use f16 or smaller (larger f-number).
- Do something to control the highlights: When the sun is entering your frame, you’re invariably dealing with a sky that’s much brighter than your foreground and will need to take steps to avoid the foreground of murky shadows. If you have a foreground shape or shapes against the sky, you could turn the foreground into a silhouette. But when I want to capture foreground detail, I use graduated neutral density filters to hold back the brilliant sky. My 3-stop reverse is my go-to GND in these situations; in particularly difficult light I’ll stack it with a 2-stop hard GND. Whenever I use a GND, I find Lightroom or Photoshop dodging/burning is a great way to disguise the telltale GND transition. HDR blending of multiple images is another way to mitigate extreme sky/foreground contrast (but I don’t do HDR, so you’ll need to Google this).
- Different lenses will yield different results: Experiment with your lenses to see which one gives the most pleasing sunstar effect. For example, I recently replaced my faithful 17-40L lens with a 16-35L Series II lens, and while I was satisfied with the sunstars from my 17-40, the 16-35 results are clearly better.
- 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.).
On the morning of this image from last month at the Grand Canyon, I had no plan to photograph. But I was working with a workshop student and we found this nice little scene off the trail to Bright Angel Point. The clouds had assembled into an organized formation that seemed to emanate from just beyond the horizon, and when they started to vibrate with sunrise color, I couldn’t resist. I quickly composed my scene, dialed down to f20, metered on the foreground, and stacked my 3-stop reverse and 2-stop hard graduated neutral density filters. The sun appeared a few seconds later and I fired off several frames before its brilliance overcame my filters’ ability to hold it back.
The calm above the storm
Posted on September 12, 2013
The Calm Above the Storm, Grand Canyon and Lightning by Moonlight, Mather Point
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
30 seconds
F/4
ISO 200
73 mm
If you’ve ever taken off in a violent storm, watched the exploding sky just beyond your window, felt the plane buck until you verged on panic, then suddenly broken through the clouds into utter peace, you might appreciate the dichotomy depicted in this scene.
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Overwhelmed by the euphoria the Grand Canyon workshop’s final sunrise was this moonlight experience on the South Rim a couple of nights earlier, the highlight of the workshop until that unforgettable morning. Don Smith and I had planned all along for this to be the group’s moonlight night, always a workshop highlight, but we got much more than we bargained for when we found the North Rim under a full scale assault from multiple electrical cells. The moonlit tranquility of our South Rim vantage point was a striking contrast to what was happening across the canyon. Several times per minute the clouds would strobe with lightning hidden by the clouds, and once or twice each minute a bolt would land near the rim for all to see. Above all this activity, the stars twinkled peacefully, clearly indifferent to the violence below.
Unlike the moonless experience at Kilauea a couple of weeks later, photographing with a full moon is pretty straightforward. Not only does the moon make a great focus point (just don’t forget to turn off autofocus before clicking your shutter), you can actually see your camera, its controls, the scene itself, and all potential obstacles (photographers, tripods, camera bags). And because exposures are generally short, do-overs are easy. So my job was easy, pretty much reduced to wandering around reminding everyone to vary their compositions, and making sure they’d all had a success.
Everybody got something that excited them that night, and the variety of images was amazing. I saw vertical and horizontal frames, wide and tight, most aimed north like this one, but there were also some great lightning captures to the east, up the canyon. My own favorite was this one that captured a bolt’s origin through a window high in the clouds, and its forked impact with the rim. While a wide composition would have increased the likelihood of capturing a strike somewhere in my frame, it would have also further shrunk the already distant lightning. My 73mm focal length in this case reflects my desire to make the lightning more prominent, and my confidence in the frequency of strikes in this direction (the more disperse the strikes, the wider I compose). Usually my night exposure decisions are designed to minimize star motion, but in this case I opted for 30 seconds to maximize the chance for capturing a strike (or more) during the exposure—a close look at the stars here clearly shows the onset of motion blur despite the fact that I was aimed north, where star motion is minimal.
This image reminds me why video is no substitute for still photography. Video’s benefits are undeniable, but the ability spend forever in a single instant like this is priceless.
Heaven and Hell
Posted on September 8, 2013
Gates of Hell, Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, Kilauea, Hawaii
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
4 seconds
F/2.8
ISO 3200
27 mm
Caving to demand, I took my Hawaii workshop group back up to Kilauea last Thursday night. While we didn’t get stars this time (not even close), we found something that was equal parts different and cool. If the first night’s display was Heavenly, the reprise was Hellish. We finished Tuesday with a new appreciation for our small place in this magnificent Universe; Thursday we were left awestruck by the power of nature’s creative force churning beneath us.
Everyone was thrilled to have the dark, clear skies we saw Tuesday night, but given that this was the first time doing night photography for most of the group, everyone wanted another opportunity apply their new-found skill. Before departing, I reminded them of Mother Nature’s fickle inclinations, and warned them that repeating Tuesday’s clear skies was far from a sure thing. However, I told them, clouds can be pretty cool too. They were dubious, and somewhat disappointed upon arrival—until the first images popped up on their LCDs.
Believe it or not, these images from our two volcano nights are pretty much what we all saw on our camera LCDs (very little processing necessary). They’re a good reminder of our camera’s ability to show aspects of the natural world that are missed in the human experience. A frequent photographer’s lament is the camera’s limited dynamic range (the range of tones between the darkest shadows and brightest highlights), but one advantage a camera does have over human vision is its ability to accumulate light over time. On Tuesday night, our sensors pulled from the darkness stars that were invisible to the naked eye (and also nicely brightened the Milky Way); on Thursday night, a long exposure revealed unseen cloud detail illuminated by Halemaʻumaʻu’s orange glow. Also, on Tuesday night so much of Kilauea’s glow escaped into space that the caldera floor (beyond the inner crater) remained nearly black despite a lengthy, high ISO, large aperture exposure. But on Thursday night the clouds reflected the volcano’s light back to Earth, bathing the caldera floor in an orange glow that our cameras captured beautifully.
Our cameras also allowed us to infer one more difference between the two nights: The crater glowed significantly brighter on Thursday night. I learned from a rim-side chat with a naturalist on Tuesday that Halemaʻumaʻu’s luminosity varies with the composition of its output—the higher the ratio of sulfur gas to water vapor, the brighter it glows. While this difference is sometimes difficult to detect with the naked eye from one night to the next, it became obvious when I realized that in Tuesday’s images the highlights in the crater’s burning core were recoverable in Lightroom, while the same bright region in Thursday’s images was hopelessly blown at the same exposure. Fortunately, on Thursday night I opted for a shorter shutter speed to better “freeze” Halemaʻumaʻu’s gas plume—this left the caldera a little dark (but still brighter than Tuesday), but really reveals the plume’s character.
Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, Kilauea, Hawaii
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
15 seconds
F/2.8
ISO 3200
16 mm
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 