Color, color everywhere
Posted on January 24, 2013
Magenta Sunrise, Zabriskie Point, Death Valley
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After three days of solid blue skies (Zzzzzzzzzzzz), yesterday morning my Death Valley workshop group was rewarded with a sunrise for the record books. I’ve seen color like this in Yosemite, Hawaii, and the Grand Canyon to name a few, but never at Death Valley.
As the group gathered at the hotel about an hour before sunrise, a deep ruby glow stained the eastern horizon. Hmmm. Second-guessing my tried and true policy of getting on location at least forty-five minutes before sunrise, I hustled everyone into the cars and we bolted for Zabriskie Point, just five (extremely long) minutes up the hill. At Zabriskie I gave a brief orientation with one eye on the expanding red that now stretched from the eastern horizon nearly to the zenith—in a matter of minutes it would reach all the way to the Panamint Mountains on the western horizon, filling the sky behind Death Valley’s most celebrated vista.
After explaining that the best place to photograph Zabriskie Point is on the dirt hilltop directly below the viewing platform, I set off with a “Follow me.” By the time I made it to the prescribed vantage point the red had indeed spilled all the way down to the Panamints. Thrilled with our good fortune I looked around—imagine my surprise to find that only two others had heeded my advice; the rest of the group had stopped well behind me to photograph in the opposite direction, lured by the electric show playing above the not-too-photogenic scene facing the sun.
Paradox alert: I spend a good deal of time teaching photographers that light trumps landscape—in other words, don’t get so locked in to the scene you came to photograph that you miss better light happening elsewhere. They had heeded my advice so well that they overlooked another truth I try to hammer home: See the world with your camera’s eye. In this case the most spectacular light was indeed behind the classic Zabriskie scene, where the eastern sky was infused with a magenta hue that was equal parts vivid and bright. On the other hand, the red sky to the west, above nearby Manly Beacon and the distant Panamints, was still quite dark to our human vision. What everyone had overlooked was that their camera’s ability to accumulate light would bring out color their eyes missed.
Fortunately, I was able to get everyone’s attention and to convince them where the real show was. We started with long exposures like the one here (30 seconds at f8 and ISO 400) that brightened the scene beyond what our eyes saw. Often sunrise color rises to a tantalizing level only to fade without warning. But this morning as the light increased, the color rose right along with it, faded briefly, then bounced back stronger than ever. At its peak the entire landscape glowed pink and the only sound was clicking shutters.
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A few words about color: I’m always amused when people question the credibility of sunrise and sunset color. I’ll grant that many people enhance their color in processing, but that doesn’t mean that every brilliant sunrise or sunset was manipulated. The truth is, there’s nothing subtle about color in nature, and when people question the color in a sunrise/sunset image, my first thought is to wonder how many sunrises/sunsets they’ve seen.
My group yesterday morning was chuckling about that problem as we packed up—we were all anticipating the inevitable doubts, some explicit, others implicit, but there was comfort in the knowledge that we all had witnesses. And for the record (I just checked), the only color work I did on this image was a slight desaturation of the blue in the sky and the magenta for the entire image.
How to photograph Comet PanSTARRS
Posted on January 16, 2013
Above: Illustration courtesy of Starry Night software; it shows Comet PanSTARRS 8 degrees above the horizon 25 minutes after sunset on March 12. The software has no idea of the comet’s brightness or the length of its tail (it just adds a generic comet tail)—it’s unlikely PanSTARRS will look this dramatic (but we can dream). That’s a thin (1%) crescent moon just to the right of the comet.
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PanSTARRS Update, February 6, 2013: Latest word on the street is that PanSTARRS isn’t brightening as fast as hoped. Current predictions put it in the magnitude 2-3 range, about the brightness of the stars in the Big Dipper. This is likely to change, either up or down (welcome to the world of comet watching), as PanSTARRS approaches and passes perihelion (March 10). ISON remains on track for something truly special late this fall. Stay tuned….
PanSTARRS Update, February 23, 2013: After enduring a few weeks of fading hope for PanSTARRS brightness (revised estimates were calling for best-case magnitudes ranging from 2 to 3, and some were in the magnitude 4 range), recent observations have the comet brightening at a faster rate that might put it at magnitude 2 or brighter. I still don’t think we’ll really know what to expect until PanSTARRS reaches perihelion on March 10, but suffice to say it continues to bear watching. Keep your fingers crossed.
PanSTARRS Update, March 4, 2013: Things just keep getting better. PanSTARRS is putting on a great show for the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s about ready to enter Northern Hemisphere skies. Current estimates have PanSTARRS brighter than magnitude 2 right now, and we’re still nearly a week out from perihelion. As it continues to approach the sun, look for PanSTARRS to brighten to magnitude 1 or maybe even brighter. That means it could be visible north of the equator as early as March 7, with improving chances for viewing for at least the next week as it separates from the sun a little each evening.
The year of the comet
There’s a lot of excitement in the astronomy community about a pair of comets heading our way in 2013. In late-November and December (and maybe into January), Comet ISON could put on a once-in-a-lifetime celestial display, but before ISON we may be treated to a pretty good warm-up when Comet PanSTARRS graces Northern Hemisphere skies in March. Media hyperbole notwithstanding, the unpredictability of comets is a source for great anxiety among those anticipating these celestial visitors. The safest bet is that PanSTARRS and ISON will either be brighter or fainter than predicted (comet history is rife with examples of both), but it’s just that kind of uncertainty that makes comets so special.
First the facts (Comets 101)
(If all you’re interested in is the photography stuff, feel free to skip to the “PanSTARRS: When and where” section below.)
A comet is a ball of ice and dust a few miles across (more or less) orbiting the sun in an eccentric elliptical orbit: Imagine a circle stretched way out of shape by grabbing one end and pulling–that’s what a comet’s orbit looks like. Looking down on the entire orbit, you’d see the sun tucked just inside one extreme end of the ellipse.
The farther a comet is from the sun the slower it moves, so a comet spends the vast majority of its life in the frozen extremities of our solar system. Some comets take thousands or millions of years to complete a single orbit; others complete their trip in just a few years.
As a comet approaches the sun, stuff starts happening. It accelerates in response to the sun’s increased gravitational pull (though just like the planets, the moon, or the hour hand on a clock, a comet will never move so fast that we’re able to perceive its motion). And more significantly, as the comet approaches the sun, increased heat starts melting the frozen nucleus. Initially this just-released material expands to create a mini-atmosphere surrounding the nucleus; at this point the comet looks like a fuzzy ball when viewed from Earth. As the heat increases, some of the material set free is discarded to form a glowing tail (glowing by reflected sunlight—a comet doesn’t emit its own light) that points away from the sun. The composition and amount of material freed by the sun, combined with the comet’s proximity to Earth, determines the brilliance of the display we see.
With millions of comets in our Solar System, it would be easy to wonder why they’re not a regular part of our night sky. Actually, they are, though most comets are so small, and/or have made so many passes by the sun that their nucleus has been stripped of reflective material, that they just don’t have enough material left to put on much of a show. And many comets don’t get close enough to the sun to be profoundly affected by its heat, or close enough to Earth to stand out.
Most of the “periodic” comets—comets that make regular appearances—are well known to astronomers. These comets have usually lost so much of their material that they’re too faint to be seen without a telescope; a notable exception is Halley’s Comet, perhaps the most famous comet of all. Halley’s Comet returns every 75 years or so and usually puts on a memorable display. Unfortunately, Halley’s last visit, in 1986, was kind of a dud; not because it didn’t perform, but because it passed so far from Earth that we didn’t have a good view of its performance on that pass.
Then there are the “non-periodic” comets, which pivot the sun only once in thousands or millions of years. New non-periodic comets are discovered each year; every once in a while astronomers determine that one of these discoveries is large enough, with a favorable orbit that sends it close enough to the sun to ensure lots of reflective material will be shed, and close enough to Earth that we’ll have a good vantage point, that it just might put on a spectacular display. Enter Comets PanSTARRS and ISON.
What can go wrong
Every comet has a different physical make-up, so there’s no way we can tell how it will react during its encounter with the sun. Astronomers also suspect that on its first solar approach an incoming comet may shed a thin, highly reflective outer layer when it’s still a good distance out, giving us a false impression of its intrinsic albedo (reflectivity). Therefore we can’t be certain if a newly discovered comet that appears relatively bright at a great distance (but still much too dim to be seen without a telescope) is going to continue shedding reflective material, or peter out before it arrives.
An even bigger concern is whether the comet will survive its encounter with the sun at all. The closer a comet passes to the sun, the more it is likely to shed the ice and dust a spectacular display requires, but some sun-grazing comets have passed so close to the sun that they completely disintegrated.
In other words, we have no way of knowing whether PanSTARRS and ISON dazzle or fizzle—all we can do is wait. And prepare.
PanSTARRS: When and where
Fortunately, we do have one certainty to work with: the comet’s orbit. We know with great confidence where it will appear (or where it should have appeared had it survived its encounter with the sun) and when it will be there.
PanSTARRS makes its closest approach to the sun, “perihelion,” on March 10. If we’re lucky it will appear as a fuzzy ball low on the western horizon of Northern Hemisphere skies shortly after sunset in the second week of March (it’s done with the Southern Hemisphere). Each evening PanSTARRS will appear above the western horizon shortly after sunset, a little higher and (probably) a little dimmer than the night before. But as it rises each night, it moves farther from the sun into darker sky, so while PanSTARRS may be dimming slightly, the sky surrounding it may darken faster than the comet dims, perhaps and for a week or so (this is anybody’s guess). That would make PanSTARRS more visible as the first week after perihelion progresses. Since PanSTARRS’ tail material may have been stripped by its close encounter with the sun, it will need time to reform and may lengthen with each passing day, another variable that can’t be predicted.
PanSTARRS will eventually rise into the darker part of the sky; by the end of April it will be visible all night in the Northern Hemisphere. But by then it’s very unlikely to be bright enough to be viewed with the unaided eye.
But one of the great thrills of comet watching is the uncertainty. Just as some comets disappoint (Google Comet Kohoutek), others astonish. Hale-Bopp was much heralded before it arrived in late 1996, but nobody expected it to remain visible to the naked eye for eighteen months. And in January 2007 Comet McNaught caught everyone off guard by suddenly brightening to become a spectacular (albeit brief) sight trailing the sun to the horizon in the post sunset twilight.
Comet McNaught, January 2007
PanSTARRS approximate location 45 minutes after sunset at 38 degrees north latitude
March 8: Altitude 0º (right on the horizon) Azimuth 260º (due west is 270º)
March 9: Alt. 1º Az. 262º
March 10: Alt. 3º Az. 264º
March 11: Alt. 4º Az. 267º
March 12: Alt. 5º Az. 269º
March 13: Alt. 6º Az. 272º
March 14: Alt. 7º Az. 274º
March 15: Alt. 7º Az. 277º
Photographing PanSTARRS
Composition
Since we know when and where PanSTARRS will be visible, there’s no excuse for not preparing now (right?). Preparation starts with knowing where you’re going to shoot PanSTARRS beforehand. Look for unobstructed views to the west with no terrain for PanSTARRS to set behind before the sky is dark enough for it to appear—think beach, hilltop, mountaintop, or flat landscape. The best scenes are worthy of photographing regardless of what’s in the sky, scenes that can use the comet as an accent to take the image to the next level.
I’m guessing that PanSTARRS won’t have a tail anywhere near as dramatic as the tail in the Starry Night illustration above (though I could be, and hope I am, wrong), so unless it brightens far beyond predictions and the tail lengthens more than normal (it’s happened with comets before), you won’t want to go too wide with your composition if the comet is to be your primary subject. On the other hand, even with a relatively short tail, PanSTARRS could make a magnificent accent to an otherwise nice wide scene. I plan to prepare for both tight telephoto and wider landscape shots.
Because PanSTARRS will be in the relatively bright post-sunset sky, and any foreground subject will be in full shade (the sun’s down, but it isn’t completely dark yet), look for striking nearby shapes to silhouette against the sky with PanSTARRS glowing in the distance. For example, near my home in Sacramento the best candidates will be the oak trees dotting hillsides east of town. I’ll need to be on their east side, facing west.
Mountains that stand out against the horizon will work nicely too, though remember that PanSTARRS will already be quite low as the sky darkens, and it will be dropping toward the horizon with each minute (along with everything else in the sky)—if the mountains you choose are too high, or too close, PanSTARRS will disappear below your horizon before the sky is dark enough. For example, Mt. Whitney as viewed from the Alabama Hills might make a great foreground subject for PanSTARRS, but from the Alabama Hills Mt. Whitney juts about 10 degrees above the horizon—on March 15 PanSTARRS will set behind Whitney (drop below 10 degrees) about 30 minutes after sunset. So unless PanSTARRS is extremely bright, it might not be visible at all before it disappears below the mountains.
And before you ask about photographing PanSTARRS in Yosemite, let me strike preemptively and say that pretty much all of the views in Yosemite Valley face east, which means even if you’re lucky enough to glimpse PanSTARRS above Yosemite Valley’s steep walls, while you’re photographing it Half Dome and El Capitan will be behind you. (Wait for ISON, which could be a spectacular pre-sunrise object in the east.)
Exposure
(I’m assuming you understand the basics of exposure—if not, read this.)
First, it’s important to understand that, unlike ISON in December, photographing PanSTARRS at its brightest will not be night photography, it will be twilight photography. Because it will be in the same area of the sky as a crescent moon, regardless of your focal length choice the rules for photographing PanSTARRS will be similar to those for photographing a crescent moon. (You can read more about that on my Crescent Moon Photo Tips page.)
My general approach to capturing foreground detail in twilight scene like this is to meter on the brightest part of the sky, setting an exposure that’s as bright as possible without overexposing (a graduated neutral density filter helps). After you click, check your histogram to make sure you haven’t blown out the highlights. If at all possible (if your camera shows it and you understand how to read it), I strongly recommend checking each of the channels in the RGB histogram to make sure you haven’t lost any color. On the other hand, if it’s a silhouette I’m going for, I’ll underexpose slightly to hold the color in the sky and/or water. In this case a graduated neutral density filter is unnecessary.
By the time PanSTARRS drops below the horizon, the foreground will be so dark that my exposures will need to be quite long. But since PanSTARRS is in fact moving at the same speed (from our terrestrial perspective) as all the stars and planets, I’ll want to monitor my shutter speed to avoid motion blur (the longer my focal length, the more I’ll need to worry about long exposure motion blur). I’m guessing for my wider shots I’ll be okay at 15 seconds, but I’ll still magnify the image on my LCD to determine whether I need to bump my ISO further to allow an even faster shutter speed.
For wide shots a graduated neutral density filter will help hold down the brightness of the sky enough to enable you to save the twilight color while bringing out some foreground detail. For ocean scenes, where the horizon is flat, I prefer a hard-transition GND; my 3-stop reverse GND will probably get the most use.
Telephoto
You could go super-tight and fill the frame with nothing but comet and sky—I’ll probably try a few of these. But with no foreground, nothing about these compositions will set them apart from the thousands of similar compositions taken from anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of my tight shots will include some landscape feature silhouetted against the sky or water. In the telephoto shots that include a foreground subject, the farther from the silhouetted subject I can position myself, the longer the focal length I can use, and the larger the comet will appear in my frame. But don’t forget that the more you magnify with a long focal length, the greater the motion blur you’ll capture—a higher ISO to increase your shutter speed is usually a good idea.
Wide
Remember that we’re photographing PanSTARRS after the sun has gone down, but before the sky is completely dark. So for my wide shots I’m going to look for water because water reflects the twilight sky so nicely. I’ll be leading a workshop on Maui during what promises to be PanSTARRS prime-time (the week of March 8-15), so finding water won’t be a problem for me. But no matter where you are, you should be able to find a westward view of a river, lake, or beach.
A particular advantage of photographing PanSTARRS from the beach is the an unobstructed view of the horizon, giving me a very long and clear line of site to PanSTARRS (even better would be shooting downward at the horizon from a mountaintop, like Haleakala).
Fingers crossed
The night I’m targeting as potentially off-the-charts-special is March 12 (image at the top of the page). That evening PanSTARRS will be aligned with a sliver-thin slice of crescent moon, separated by less than 4 degrees. The next night the moon will be higher, about 10 degrees (the width of a fist held at arm’s length) directly above the moon, with PanSTARRS’ tail pointing directly at the moon. If the tail is long enough, it will appear to pass right through the moon.
On the other hand, I’m fully prepared for disappointment too—I’ve followed comets long enough to understand why astronomer David Levy said, “Comets are like cats: they have tails and do precisely what they want.”
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Read the history of my relationship with comets in my January 11 post.
A lifelong love affair with comets
Posted on January 11, 2013
Comet McNaught in the western twilight, January, 2007
When I was ten, my best friend Rob and I spent most of our daylight hours preparing for our spy careers—crafting and trading coded messages, surreptitiously monitoring classmates, and identifying “secret passages” that would allow us to navigate our neighborhood without being observed. But after dark our attention turned skyward. That’s when we’d set up my telescope (a castoff generously gifted by an astronomer friend of my dad) on Rob’s front lawn to scan the heavens in the hope that we might discover something—a supernova, comet, black hole, it didn’t really matter.
Our celestial discoveries, while not Earth-changing, were personally significant. Through that telescope we saw Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, and the changing phases of Venus. We also learned to appreciate the vastness of the universe with the observation that, despite their immense size, stars never appeared larger than a pinpoint no matter how much magnification we threw at them.
To better understand what we saw, Rob and I turned to illustrated astronomy books. Pictures of planets, galaxies, and nebula amazed us, but we were particularly drawn to the comets: Arend-Roland, Ikeya–Seki, and of course the patriarch of comets, Halley’s Comet (which we learned was scheduled to return in 1986, an impossible wait that might as well have been infinity). With their glowing comas and sweeping tails, it was difficult to imagine that anything that beautiful could be real. When it came time to choose a subject for the annual California Science Fair, comets were an easy choice. And while we didn’t set the world on fire with our project presentation, Rob and I were awarded a ribbon of some color (it wasn’t blue), good enough to land us a spot in the San Joaquin County Fair.
Here I am with the fifth grade science project that started it all. (This is only half of the creative team—somewhere there’s a picture that includes Rob.)
The next milestone in my comet obsession occurred a few years later, after my family had moved to Berkeley and baseball had taken over my life. One chilly winter morning my dad woke me and urged me outside to view what I now know was Comet Bennett. Mesmerized, my dormant comet interest flamed instantly, expanding to include all things astronomy. It stayed with me through high school (when I wasn’t playing baseball); I actually entered college with an astronomy major that I stuck with for several semesters, until the (unavoidable) quantification of concepts sapped the joy from me.
While I went on to pursue other things, my affinity for astronomy continued, and comets in particular remained special. Of course with affection comes disappointment: In 1973 Kohoutek broke my heart, a failure that somewhat prepared me for Halley’s anticlimax in 1986. By the time Halley’s arrived, word had come down that it was poorly positioned for its typical display (“the worst viewing conditions in 2,000 years”), that it would be barely visible this time around (but just wait until 2061!). Nevertheless, venturing far from the city lights one moonless January night, I found great pleasure locating (with much effort) Halley’s faint smudge in Aquarius.
After many years with no naked-eye comets of note, 1996 arrived with the promise of two great comets. While cautiously optimistic, Kohoutek’s scars prevented me from getting sucked in by the media frenzy. So imagine my excitement when, in early 1996, Comet Hyakutake briefly approached the brightness of Saturn, with a tail stretching more than twenty degrees (forty times the apparent width of a full moon). But as beautiful as it was, Hyakutake proved to be a mere warm-up for Comet Hale-Bopp, which became visible to the naked eye in mid-1996 and remained visible until December 1997—an unprecedented eighteen months. By spring of 1997 Hale-Bopp had become brighter than Sirius (the brightest star in the sky), its tail approaching 50 degrees. I was in comet heaven.
Things quieted considerably comet-wise after Hale-Bopp. Then, in 2007, Comet McNaught caught everyone off-guard, intensifying unexpectedly to briefly outshine Sirius, trailing a thirty-five degree, fan-shaped tail. But because of its proximity to the sun, Comet McNaught had a very small window of visibility and was easily lost in the bright twilight—it didn’t become anywhere near the media event Hale-Bopp did. I only found out about it by accident on the last day it would be easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere. With little time to prepare, I grabbed my camera and headed to the foothills east of Sacramento, where I managed to capture the image at the top of this post.
Following McNaught I vowed not to be caught off guard by a comet again. After enduring the frustration of seeing others’ images of spectacular Southern Hemisphere-only comets, my heart jumped last year when I came across a website proclaiming the approach of Comet PANSTARRS (a.k.a, C/2011 L4 in less glamorous astro-nerd parlance), discovered not by an individual, but by the Pan-STARRS automated telescope array atop Haleakala on Maui. Researching further, I learned that PANSTARRS could (fingers crossed) hang low in the western sky at magnitudes brighter than Saturn, for about a week beginning around March 10, 2013 (it will rise slowly each night, remaining visible as it fades for a few more weeks). Checking my calendar to see if I had any conflicts that week, I immediately remembered why those dates sounded so familiar—I’ll be on Maui for my workshop then! In fact, my first viewing of PANSTARRS could be almost literally in the shadow of the telescope that discovered it. It’s a sign*.
Since its discovery in June of 2011, astronomers have been monitoring PANSTARRS and updating its orbit and brightness curve—so far everything remains on track (and my crossed fingers are cramping). And as I followed PANSTARRS’ progress, rumbling of another comet could be heard, a comet that may significantly outshine PANSTARRS to achieve historic proportions: In December of this year, Comet ISON (how I long for the days when comets were people and not acronyms) may rival or surpass Hale-Bopp, perhaps even becoming bright enough to be viewed in daylight. (I have to say that you must be careful about such reports—the media seem more interested in generating audience than in actually getting things right.)
Are these comets a sure thing? Of course not. So I make no promises, except that I’ll be checking for updates daily (can you say OCD?) and will keep you posted. Chances are, if they develop as promised (hoped), you won’t have any trouble keeping track on your own (just Google their names for more information than you’ll ever need). And of course if I get any images of PANSTARRS when I’m on Maui, I’ll post them here. Stay tuned….
June 7, 2013
Comet PanSTARRS turned out to be a huge thrill (click image for details):
Comet PanSTARRS and New Moon, Haleakala, Maui
Comet PanSTARRS and the Grand Canyon by Moonlight, Yavapai Point
Moonlight, Comet PanSTARRS above the Grand Canyon, Yavapai Point
* Speaking of signs, Rob and I recently reconnected after many years with no contact (sadly, he didn’t go on to become a spy or astronomer either). We’re already talking about going out to see one or both of these comets together.
Photography on the edge
Posted on January 4, 2013
Spring Reflection, Horseshoe Bend, Arizona
Renowned outdoor photographer Galen Rowell distinguished himself by photographing places nobody else could get to. A world-class climber with an insatiable appetite for adventure and a perpetual motor, Rowell pushed personal limits every time he went outside.
I won’t speak for anyone else, but my personal threshold is in fact somewhat lower than Rowell’s. When it comes to “getting the shot,” I have no problem with hard work and extreme discomfort. But for whatever reason, Horseshoe Bend’s 2,000 foot drop to the Colorado River has always stopped me about five feet from the rim (Galen Rowell I’m not), almost as if an invisible force field guarded the rim. Each visit would leave me lamenting the images left uncaptured, and vowing things would be different next time.
Well “next time” finally came last spring, when I somehow broke through the force field to inch my way to the edge. For the first time I was able to peer all the way down to the Colorado River at the bend’s midpoint to view the scene as I’d never seen it. I don’t believe I actually captured anything that hadn’t been captured at this frequently photographed location, but overcoming a personal limitation to get something new for me was a source of great personal satisfaction.
The value in this case is less in the image itself than it is in the reminder that we’re all constrained by our own (unique) self-imposed boundaries. Some of these boundaries are pretty obvious and easily addressed, like the impulse to forgo a sunrise shoot in favor of sleep and warmth. Other boundaries—like a fear of heights, or maybe financial constraints that prevent you from visiting coveted locations—are a bit more difficult to overcome, but probably not impossible.
And then there the most insidious boundaries, those imposed by our self-view and that become self-fulfilling: “I’m not artistic,” “Metering is too technical,” “I just don’t see things,” and so on. The good news is that these boundaries are an illusion: As someone who has taught photographers for nearly ten years (and technical professionals for fifteen years before that), I’ve never encountered anyone who couldn’t do more than they believed they were capable of by simply expanding their idea of what they’re capable of.
Galen Rowell died tragically about ten years ago, not climbing mountains but in a plane crash. Greater than Rowell’s legacy of memorable images is a legacy of spirit that can be an example to all of us. You don’t need to snow-camp in the Himalayas, pioneer a route up El Capitan, or befriend the Dalai Lama to achieve personal greatness—you just need to be better today than you were yesterday. So what are you waiting for?
A tale of two moons
Posted on December 24, 2012
Moonset, Badwater and Telescope Peak, Death Valley
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Going through images from earlier this year, I was struck by the difference the rendering of the moon makes in the overall effect of two images taken from different locations in Death Valley, a couple of days apart. In one, the moon is merely a garnish for a scene that’s all about the repeating patterns and harsh desolation of Death Valley’s Badwater playa; in the other, the moon is clearly the main course, enjoyed vicariously through the experience of six anonymous photographers atop a remote Death Valley ridge. In both cases, using my camera to control the moon’s size relative to the rest of the scene allowed me to emphasize the aspect of the scene I thought was most important.
Badwater moonset
Badwater is at the nadir of an expansive, paper-flat playa that spans Death Valley’s breadth between the looming Black Mountains to the immediate east and the distant Panamint Range in the distant west. At 282 feet below sea level, it’s the lowest point in North America. Centuries of flood-evaporate-repeat have spread a veneer of minerals and buckled them into a jigsaw of interlocking polygons. Some winters the playa is completely submerged beneath several inches of mountain runoff; as the shallow lake evaporates, the polygons’ protruding boundaries emerge to form interlocking reflective pools that shimmer like thousands of faceted jewels. But most of the year Badwater is a bone-dry plane that ranges from chalk white to dirty brown, depending on how long it has been exposed to Death Valley’s ubiquitous dust without a bath. To walk out onto the playa is to loose all sense of scale and distance.
On my visit last February I with a polygon that filled the immediate foreground. I went with a wide lens and dropped almost to the ground, taking care to include all of the polygon’s perimeter in my frame, a composition intended to create the sense of the endless expanse I feel when I’m out there. Including the complete polygon in the foreground (rather than cutting off a side), makes it easier to imagine the shape repeating into infinity.
A wide angle lens emphasizes the foreground and shrinks the background, in this case shrinking the moon so much that it all but disappears in the distance, just as it is about to literally disappear behind sun-kissed Telescope Peak. Making something as familiar as the moon this small enhances the illusion vastness.
A two-stop hard graduated neutral density filter kept the sky and mountain color in check at the exposure necessary to bring out Badwater’s radiant surface. And with important compositional elements near and far, I wanted lots of depth of field in this image. DOF at 28mm is pretty good, but I nevertheless stopped down to f16 and focused on a spot about six feet in front me, which gave me “acceptable” sharpness from three feet to infinity. My general rule is to bias my focus to the foreground because softness is more easily forgiven than foreground softness—on close scrutiny at 100 percent, I see that my foreground in this image is indeed perfectly sharp, while the mountains and moon are ever so slightly, but not unusably, soft (had it been the other way around, the image would have been a failure).
Moonrise silhouette
A telephoto lens compresses distance, making distant objects appear closer to the foreground than they really are. In my ridge-top moonrise, instead of shrinking the moon to emphasize the foreground as I did in the Badwater image, I stood as far back as possible and framed the photographers with an extreme telephoto, compressing the scene and magnifying the moon to make it appear closer to the silhouetted photographers (I magnified it even more later by cropping extraneous emptiness from the perimeter). And because it’s rising here, the moon’s extreme size works as a metaphor for its arrival above the landscape (contrast that with the small, departing moon in the Badwater image)—not a conscious decision, but I don’t believe it was an accident either. (Metaphor happens organically when you listen to your internal intuitive, creative muse.)
Moonrise Silhouette, Death Valley
While my right brain mused, my left brain chewed on the scene’s extreme dynamic range. The moon is always daylight bright, but here the foreground is in dark shadow—a difference between highlights and shadows far beyond a camera’s ability to capture. But my composition doesn’t require any foreground detail—in fact, foreground detail could have been a distraction. Instead I exposed for the moon, which brought out the twilight color and simplified the foreground into silhouettes that conveyed everything I needed.
“Trophy” shots
Posted on December 18, 2012
Flowers and Red Rocks, Horseshoe Bend, Colorado River, Arizona
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In my recently completed Hawaii Big Island workshop, the topic of “trophy shots” came up. (My definition of a trophy shot is a prominently displayed photograph of a scene captured previously by someone else.) Often these are “iconic” tourist scenes, places like Tunnel View in Yosemite, Old Faithful in Yellowstone, Delicate Arch in Arches, or Niagara Falls (I could go on). But with the digital-fueled photography renaissance, it seems that the number of trophy destinations has grown proportionally. For example, long an anonymous waterfall on El Capitan’s southeast flank, Horsetail Fall now draws thousands of photographers to Yosemite each February. And if you’ve ever jostled for position in front of Canyonlands’ Mesa Arch at sunrise, or at Antelope Canyon’s dazzling midday heavenly beam (below), you’ve been an active participant in a trophy hunt.
This isn’t an indictment of trophy photography—heaven knows I have my share of trophy-qualifying images. It’s more about me puzzling why so many photographers pursue them with such passion, and display them with such pride. To me the joy of photography isn’t duplicating what others have already done, it’s looking for something new, especially at frequently photographed locations. Of course these famous shots draw many photographers to my workshops, and I do my best to help them bag their trophy. Nevertheless, my challenge to workshop students is always, rather than make the trophy your goal, make it your starting point.
If the standard view is horizontal, look for something vertical; if it’s wide, try a telephoto. Chances are, if this shot is so special, there’s lots of other special views and subjects nearby. Challenge yourself to find a unique foreground, a different angle, or simply turn around and see what’s behind you.
Regrettably, some of my very favorite images, the images that give me the most satisfaction, are met with shrugs, while my trophy shots like Horsetail Fall and Antelope Canyon, compositions that are a dime a dozen, are among my most popular. Sigh. But when I decided to do landscape photography for a living, I started with a personal promise to only photograph what I want to photograph. And frankly, if someone else has done it, I just don’t get that much pleasure from re-doing it. Sometimes I’ll use the trophy compositions to warm up, but it seems the longer I do this, the more inclined I am to simply leave my lens cap on unless I see something I’ve never seen before.
Among the trophy destinations that I frequent each year is Horseshoe Bend near Page, Arizona. On my first visit I got my trophy shot, and on subsequent visits I’ve sometimes tried to upgrade that composition if I think conditions are better than I’ve had before, but with each visit I spend less time repeating previous efforts and more time looking for something new. Which is how I ended up with the image at the top of this post.
Spring Reflection, Horseshoe Bend, Arizona :: This is my Horseshoe Bend trophy shot. On this spring morning I did my best to use the broken clouds and sunlit cliffs reflecting in the Colorado River, and a solitary clump of wildflowers in the red rocks, to set my version apart from the thousands of similar compositions that preceded me.
Rather than limit myself to the “standard,” sweeping, (breathtaking) full horseshoe (Spring Reflection, above), I looked for something in the foreground to emphasize. I found a little clump of yellow flowers clinging to the cliff, 2,000 vertical feet above the Colorado River. Taking most of the bend out of the frame allowed me to use the foreground rocks to frame the flowers and guide your eye to the clouds building in the distance. Unfortunately (for sales), removing the horseshoe from Horseshoe Bend means this image won’t resonate with nearly as many people, but that’s okay.
Heavenly Beam, Antelope Canyon, Arizona :: Here’s my Antelope Canyon trophy shot. It really is an amazing scene that sells lots of prints, but there’s really nothing in it to set it apart from the thousands of others just like it.
Bathed in Light, Upper Antelope Canyon, Arizona :: While not dramatically different, at least this Antelope Canyon image is my own. I found it by looking up, over the heads of hundreds of other photographers lined up to get their trophy shot.
I’m not trying to portray myself as a creative genius (call me an aspirational creative genius)—I imagine that many of my “unique” images aren’t completely unique. But at least they’re my own (if others preceded me, they did so without my knowledge). We all take pictures for different reasons, and if the trophies give you the most pleasure, go for it. But honestly, does the world need another sunset from Tunnel View (guilty)? Or salmon-catching grizzly from Katmai National Park (not guilty)? If you’re trying to set yourself apart as a photographer (and maybe even make a few dollars doing it), look beyond the trophies to show the world something it hasn’t seen before. I may not be there yet, but that’s what keeps me shooting.
Just a dash of moon…
Posted on December 11, 2012
Tree and Crescent, Sierra Foothills, California
A new moon debuts this week, and with it some nice opportunities for photographers to accent favorite scenes with a delicate crescent. This morning the diminishing vestiges of the waning moon rose in the east, a couple of hours before sunrise (did you see it?); tomorrow morning, what remains of the “old” moon will be too thin and close to the sun to be seen at all. Thursday night’s sky will be moonless, as the Earth/Moon/Sun alignment puts the moon’s dark side facing us. On Friday the (rejuvenated) moon reappears, this time in the evening twilight, a three percent crescent trailing the sun to the western horizon.
Because it frustrates me no end to see a graceful slice of moon suspended above the landscape when I’m on my way to somewhere else, I now put these lunar milestones in my calendar. When my schedule permits, I’ll schedule a trip around the sunrise or sunset crescent moon, but often I’ll just head up to the foothills east of town.
It helps to know that the more of the moon that’s illuminated, the farther in the sky from the sun it appears (a full moon is exactly opposite the sun, rising at sunset and setting at sunrise). A crescent moon is always in close proximity to the sun, hanging in the brightest part of the post-sunset/pre-sunrise sky, above a (relatively) dark landscape. A camera’s limited dynamic range makes it impossible to photograph a crescent moon against twilight color and landscape detail in a single frame. In these scenes, subtle subjects and fine detail are lost in the dark foreground. Instead, look for strong shapes to silhouette against the colorful twilight sky, or bodies of water that reflect the sky.
For my foothill forays I’ve identified a number of hilltop oaks that stand out against the sky. The best ones for a moon are those that are far enough from my vantage point to allow me to magnify the moon with a telephoto. But even without a telephoto, the moon holds so much “emotional weight” (I’ll need to write about that sometime) that even the tiniest sliver can carry a large portion of the frame.
The tree in the image at the top of this post stands on a ridge south of El Dorado Hills. I come here often, and have a variety of images from this spot that please me (one appeared on the cover of Sierra Heritage magazine a few years ago). When I arrived that evening I feared that the clouds would shut me out, but they turned out to be thin enough to let the moon shine through as the sky darkened. Just a couple of minutes later the thicker clouds rose to obscure the moon, but as they did the pink deepened to a rich crimson and I just kept shooting.
Learn more on my Crescent moon page.
Red Sky, Oak at Sunset, Sierra Foothills :: This is one of my last captures that evening, about eight minutes later than the crescent at the top of the post. To emphasize the fiery red, I slightly underexposed this frame.
A perfect end to a perfect day
Posted on December 6, 2012
Winter Twilight, Yosemite Valley
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A few weeks ago I led a one day trip to Yosemite for a class I teach two or three times a year. This class usually fills, but this time I only had six students (about half the usual size), I suspect because many people saw a storm was forecast and decided to stay home. Sigh. As much as you hear me say that the best conditions for taking pictures are usually the worst conditions for being outside, I don’t think anything will express it more clearly than a picture (or four) from that day:
<< Click the image to view a larger version and read the blog post >>
Autumn Reflection, El Capitan and the Merced River, Yosemite
El Capitan and Fresh Snow, Yosemite
Snow on Autumn Leaves, El Capitan and the Merced River, Yosemite
About today’s image
I’m going to strike preemptively and say a few words about the image at the top of this post, mostly for those who don’t regularly read my blog. I say “preemptively” because I know I’ll get the skeptical “that doesn’t look real” comments. If you read me enough, you not only know that duplicating human reality with a camera is impossible, you know why it’s impossible. Therefore, photographers’ truth becomes their camera’s reality, a very different thing indeed.
For example, check out the exposure settings: Four seconds at f11 and ISO 400 should be a pretty good clue that it was quite dark when I captured this (about twenty minutes after sunset), much darker to my eyes than this image conveys. So while this wasn’t “real” to my experience, it was very much “real” to my camera.
The blue/pink sky is the result of a “twilight wedge,” Earth’s shadow descending on the landscape as the sun drops below the horizon behind me. The twilight wedge is missed by many casual sunset watchers because it’s opposite of the sun (at sunrise it ascends in the west, opposite the rising sun), and usually a few minutes separates the sunset color in the west and the wedges pink and blue pastels. Particularly pronounced on clear-sky evenings, a twilight wedge is never more vivid than when it follows a storm that has scoured the impurities from the air.
On this evening, my group watched late afternoon light warm El Capitan and Half Dome and, right at sunset, nicely (but unspectacularly) color the clouds above Half Dome. As this color started to fade, when the dozens of photographers shoulder-to-shoulder at the Tunnel View vista started to pack up, I told my group if they stuck around they’d be in for a treat. As we waited for the show to begin, I reminded everyone to forget what their eyes saw and simply expose enough to make El Capitan a middle(ish) tone.
We were the only ones remaining, about five minutes later, when the sky above Half Dome took on a pink cast that deepened as the light faded. As the pink started to throb (I swear, that’s how it looks), the detail in the valley floor was reduced to dark shapes. No longer receiving direct light, the entire landscape was bathed in this shadow-free, omnidirectional skylight that our eyes struggled to keep up with. But our cameras, with their ability to accumulate light, returned images that revealed a world devoid of the troublesome contrast that usually plagues photographers here, and where the highly reflective clouds, snow, and even a nearby solitary deciduous tree seem to glow with their own light.
The missing dimension
Posted on December 3, 2012
El Capitan and Fresh Snow, Yosemite
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It seems too obvious to mention, but I’ll say it anyway: Photography is a futile attempt to render a three-dimensional world through a two-dimensional medium. Unfortunately, that reality doesn’t seem to keep people from putting their eye to their viewfinder and clicking without regard for their camera’s vision. But here’s a secret: While anyone with a camera can manage the lateral (left-to-right) aspect of a scene, the photographers who separate themselves are those able to convey the illusion of depth by translating a scene’s actual depth to their camera’s virtual depth.
Creating the illusion of depth isn’t rocket science. It starts with seeking a foreground for your beautiful background, or a background for your beautiful foreground. Once you’ve figured out your foreground/background, do your best to ensure that the elements at varying depths don’t merge with each other—the more elements in your frame stand alone, the more you invite your viewers to move incrementally through the frame, hopping (subconsciously), front to back, from one visual point to the next. Getting elements to stand apart often requires some physical effort on your part (sorry). Moving left/right, up/down, foreword/backward changes the relationship between objects at varying depths, sometimes quite significantly.
With your foreground and background identified, decide whether you want the entire image in focus, or selective focus that guides your viewer to a particular point in the frame. With all your pieces in place, you’re ready to choose your f-stop and focus point.
For example
The Merced River at Valley View is a minefield of jutting rocks and branches. The above image took at least five minutes before everything was lined up to my satisfaction. Relative to the distant El Capitan, the close foreground changed significantly as I shifted position. After surveying the possibilities from a distance, I decided I wanted to be as close to the river as possible, with my tripod at its maximum height, to capture as much reflection as possible. With my camera off the tripod, I moved around on the slippery rocks at the river’s edge (easier said than done), framing shots of varying focal lengths until I had something pretty close to what I wanted. Next I brought over my tripod, affixed my camera, and made micro refinements until I was satisfied with the composition.
In this scene I wanted maximum sharpness throughout the frame. The closest rocks were about eight feet away; with the help of the depth of field app on my iPhone, I determined that at 35mm and f11 (my lens’s sharpest f-stop), I could focus about twelve feet from my camera and be sharp from six feet to infinity. Selecting a rock about twelve feet away, I switched to live-view, selected the rock, magnified the view ten times, and manually focused.
I dialed my polarizer to a point that balanced the El Capitan reflection (which I wanted) with the foreground glare (which I didn’t want) as much as possible (always a subjective exercise in compromise). To determine my exposure, I spot-metered on a bright cloud (live-view is off now) and dialed my shutter speed until the meter indicated +2.
Click.
Double your pleasure
Posted on November 29, 2012
Autumn Reflection, El Capitan and the Merced River, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
21 mm
1/8 seconds
F/16
ISO 100
It seems that people stay away from Yosemite in autumn because that’s when the waterfalls are at their lowest. True story. But believe it or not, Yosemite isn’t all about waterfalls. El Capitan, Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks, Sentinel Rock (I could go on), are great subjects in their own right. Subtract the waterfalls but add the yellows, oranges, and reds of Yosemite Valley’s many deciduous trees and you have what I think is a pretty a fair trade. And when the water is low, the usually turbulent Merced River smooths to a reflecting ribbon of glass and suddenly, pretty much any scene can be doubled at your feet.
These reflections add layers of creative possibilities impossible the rest of the year. Sometimes I’ll split the scene in the middle for a 50/50 mirror effect; other times I’ll photograph only the reflection. In the image above I went with a more conventional composition, emphasizing El Capitan’s bulk against clouds that were spitting small, wet snowflakes.
Autumn Shroud, El Capitan, Yosemite
In this image I split the frame 50/50, but dialed down the reflection with my polarizer. Even polarized, the bright sky’s glare washed out much of the river surface, painting the outline of El Capitan like a negative that uses the trees with a jigsaw of submerged river rocks.
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Leaves and Reflection, El Capitan, Yosemite
Here I used El Capitan’s reflection as a background for the Merced’s brilliant autumn veneer.
Want to photograph this in person? My 2014 Yosemite fall workshop filled months ago, but there’s still room in the 2015 Yosemite Autumn Moon workshop.A gallery of Yosemite autumn reflections
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 