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
It isn’t easy, but it is simple
Posted on November 27, 2012
Spring Meadow, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
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Easy: Achieved without great effort
Simple: Plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design
Photography may not be easy, but it is simple. Huh? What I mean is that the difficult part of photography is the creative stuff that by definition defies quantification, rules, logic, and reason—to be truly creative, something can’t have been done before. But before you can graduate to creative photography, you need to master the logical stuff–fortunately, that is simple.
Grasping photography’s simplicity starts with understanding that you’re only dealing with three variables: light, depth, and motion. To control them with your camera, you have shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. That’s it. Your job is to decide the combination of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO that returns the desired combination of light, motion, and depth. You could leave it to your camera to decide, but all automatic metering understands is light—your camera has no idea of the motion or depth effects that are so essential to creative results.
For landscape photographers still trying to get handle on their exposure settings, I think it’s best to start simple. I’ll start with the assumption that you’re working in a static world (generally true, but far from absolute—I’ll bring motion in later). Static requires a tripod—without one, all bets are off, as you’re adding unnecessary motion by virtue of your own unsteady hands (sorry). Don’t talk to me about high ISO performance (a compromise—why not go with your best ISO whenever possible?), a wide open aperture (another compromise that could reduce sharpness), or image stabilization (good, but never better than a rock-solid tripod).
Manual exposure made simple
ISO: So, if you’re on a tripod and your scene is static (no subject motion), you can go with your camera’s best ISO (usually 100, but 200 on some Nikon cameras). That’s one of our three variables out of the way and we haven’t even thought about exposure.
Aperture (f-stop): Landscape photographers shouldn’t use their f-stop to control light. Rather, the f-stop you choose is first determined by the depth of field you need. And if everything in your frame is at infinity and DOF isn’t a factor, go with your lens’s sharpest f-stop—because most lenses tend to be less sharp at their extreme f-stops, you should default to the middle f-stop range, usually f8 to f11, unless the scene dictates otherwise. (And in addition to optical problems, going much smaller than f11 risks diffraction that reduces your lens’s ability to resolve fine detail.) Read my “Depth of field” tips page for more info. We now have two of three variables out of the way, and we still haven’t even thought about exposure.
Shutter speed: With ISO and f-stop out of the way, only camera variable remaining to manage the light in your scene is shutter speed. At this point I simply aim my spot meter at whatever I decide is most important and dial in the amount of light I want it to have.
ISO part deux: If there’s motion in the frame (wind-blown leaves or flowers, flowing water, etc.), I’ll compromise my ISO to achieve the shutter speed that will freeze the motion or return the desired effect.
Admittedly, what I’ve outline here is a simplification—there are definitely situations where you’d want to deviate from this approach. But for someone just getting up to speed with manual exposure, this will work at least 90 percent of the time, and the more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll become making exceptions. For more on exposure and metering, read my “Exposure basics” and “Manual exposure” tips pages.
For example
These blanketflowers (gaillardia aristata) in Rocky Mountain National Park were the star of the scene. To fill my frame with the flowers and shrink the mountains to the distant background (that’s the creative part), I went to 17mm, as wide as my lens permitted and dropped down to about six inches from the closest flower.
My tripod eliminated camera shake, so the only motion in the frame I needed to worry about was the flowers’ motion in a light breeze. The relatively narrow dynamic range (difference between the lightest and darkest parts of the scene) made exposure pretty straightforward, but the potential for motion in the flowers and the extreme depth of field I needed made the way I achieved my exposure extremely important: too long a shutter speed and the flowers would blur in the breeze; not enough depth of field and the flowers wouldn’t be sharp enough.
With the closest flower only six inches from my lens, I knew it would be impossible to keep all the flowers and the mountains sharp. But I wanted the flowers sharp and felt I could live with a little softness in the distant mountains, so I stopped down to f20 and focused a little behind the closest flower, about one foot into the frame. F20 at ISO at my native (ideal) ISO 100 gave me a 1/10 second shutter speed. While I might have been able to time my exposure for a lull in the breeze that would freeze the flower at 1/10 second, I bumped my ISO to 200 and shutter speed to 1/20, just to be safe.
Click.
Uncharted territory
Posted on November 19, 2012
Fall Color, Elowah Fall, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
28 mm
1/3 second
F/16
ISO 400
A few months ago I accepted an invitation to speak to the Cascade Camera Club in Bend, Oregon. With my fall workshops behind me, I decided to take the opportunity to spend a few days exploring the Columbia River Gorge, a place long on my “must see” list. I wasn’t disappointed.
Undeterred by steady rain throughout most of my visit, I found more photo opportunities than I had time to photograph. I’d only been there a couple of hours before it become clear that I’d be coming back, which caused me to change my strategy a bit. Rather than try to squeeze as many photographs as possible into my three days there, I decided to make my priority reconnaissance that would help me be more efficient on future trips.
My emphasis was on waterfalls, something the Gorge has an ample selection of. I was also pleased to find vestiges of fall color, well past prime, but quite nice nevertheless. Though I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with the area, identifying locations and the best conditions for photographing them, I still managed to find plenty of photographs.
The first waterfall I visited was Elowah Fall (about a one mile hike in a steady rain), where I was rewarded with a plethora of yellow leaves (some of which were still falling as I shot) accenting a tumbling cascade just downstream from the fall. Rather than follow the trail all the way to the bridge at the base of the fall, I scrambled about 75 feet down to McCord Creek for a perspective that would allow me to feature the leaves and cascades up close, with Elowah Fall in the background.
When the hill turned out to be a little steeper than I’d anticipated, and the footing a bit slipperier, I had visions of myself reprising Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner’s wild ride through the Columbian jungle in “Romancing the Stone.“ But I made it to the bottom unscathed (Galen Rowell I’m not), and proceeded to work this scene to within an inch of its life. I don’t think I moved more than fifteen feet from this spot for the hour or more I was there, starting atop a rock directly above the creek and eventually working myself down closer and closer, until I finally ended up standing in the water.
Composing this was mostly a matter of organizing the leaves, rocks, and water into something coherent. By going wide and vertical, I chose to make the leaves the prime focus point, using the creek to guide your eye to the fall itself. F16 ensured depth throughout the frame, while ISO 400 gave me a 1/3 second shutter speed in the limited light, slow enough to blur the water, but fast enough that the water maintained some character. My polarizer was turned to minimize reflections, allowing the color to come through the significant sheen on the wet leaves, rock, and moss, and on the surface of the dark water.
Fall into winter
Posted on November 14, 2012
First Snow, El Capitan, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
.4 seconds
F/16
ISO 100
24 mm
Probably the number one question I’m asked about Yosemite is, “What’s the best season for photography?” My response always sounds like it was crafted by a waffling politician, but I swear I just don’t have the absolute answer everyone wants: Yosemite in spring is all about the water, a time when the vertical granite can’t seem to shed the winter snowpack fast enough; summer offers High Sierra splendor (Glacier Point, Tuolumne Meadows, the backcountry), with wildflowers, exposed granite, and gem-like lakes inaccessible most of the year; autumn is when trees of yellow and red mingle in mirror-reflections and carpet the forest floor with color; and winter is the sunset fire of Horsetail Fall and the possibility (fingers crossed) of a glistening winter cathedral of white.
But surpassing all of this is the rare opportunity to combine the best of two seasons. For example, a few years ago, while in Yosemite Valley to photograph the fall color, I survived twenty-four hours of nonstop downpour, six inches of rain that sent Yosemite Valley into spring flood mode, giving me an opportunity photograph the fall color with the waterfalls at their spring peak. And last year, extreme drought conditions kept the high country open into January, providing access to High Sierra terrain in ice and snow conditions usually the exclusive domain of hardy wildlife.
And then there was last Saturday, when I was in Yosemite Valley to photograph this year’s fall color “peak” (always a moving target), only to encounter an early winter storm that deposited six inches of fresh snow in Yosemite Valley. Seriously folks, there are simply no words to describe Yosemite Valley with fresh snow, and adding an explosion of yellow and red is just off the charts. But rather than sink further into hyperbole, I’ll just submit this image, one of many from this trip that will surely require many hours to wade through.
(In addition to the snow and color, I also witnessed classic Yosemite clearing storm conditions, but that’s a story for another day.)
A few words about this image
I’ve been doing this photography thing long enough to have learned how to separate my experience from my camera’s, to appreciate what I’m seeing without forgetting that my camera “sees” it differently. On this autumn morning I wanted capture the best of everything going on—fresh snow (duh), fall color, and reflection—easy for stereoscopic eyes embedded in a swiveling head, but not so easy to capture in a single, two-dimensional frame. With some ideas of how I might accomplish this, I beelined to this hidden spot along the Merced River, a little downstream from Bridalveil Meadow.
Once there I had to move around until all the elements—snow-covered rocks, floating leaves, reflection, and El Capitan—fell into a coherent relationship: Too far to the right and I’d lose El Capitan’s reflection behind the rocks; too far to the left and I’d be in the frigid river (not that there’s anything wrong with that). As it was, I was balanced on an icy rock with my tripod in two feet of water (and thanking the photography gods for live-view).
All of the “action” in the scene was along a line starting at my feet and terminating at El Capitan, so the decision to go vertical was easy—including everything on my line in a horizontal composition would have introduced all kinds of superfluous real estate on the left and right, and required me to compose so wide that El Capitan would have shrunk to virtual insignificance. I really liked the large, submerged leaf right in front of me and used it to anchor the bottom of my frame. And since the sky above El Capitan was mostly gray clouds, I composed as tightly as possible above El Capitan.
Top and bottom decided, I moved back as far as I could to increase my focal length and maximize El Capitan’s size as much as possible. Wanting sharpness throughout my frame, I stopped down to f16 and focused on the leaf frozen to the rock in the lower center, about five feet away. (An experience-based guess—my iPhone, with its hyperfocal app, was buried in a pocket several layers deep, and I was reluctant to disturb my precarious balance on the slippery rocks.) I was extremely careful orienting my polarizer, turning it slowly, multiple times, until I was confident I’d found the ideal balance between removing sheen on the leaves without erasing the reflection in the river. A three-stop soft graduated neutral density filter held down the brightness in the sky. Click.
In Lightroom I warmed the image a little to remove a blue cast in the snow, and applied standard exposure adjustments to subdue highlights and open shadows. In Photoshop I dodged and burned to hide (minimal) unwanted shading introduced by my GND, to further darken the clouds, and to bring out the reflection somewhat. And I gave all but the scene’s brightest and darkest areas a slight wiggle in curves for contrast.
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Encore!
Posted on November 11, 2012
Twilight Fog, Tunnel View, Yosemite
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
1.6 seconds
F/7.1
ISO 200
48 mm
Yesterday I spent an incredible day in Yosemite, guiding a group of photographers from the Sacramento area. When I schedule these trips, I do my best to time them for nice conditions, but of course there’s no guarantee things will work out. Yesterday they worked out. Big time. Not only did we catch Yosemite Valley at its fall color peak (it’s late this year), we found everything blanketed with fresh snow that continued to fall lightly, and intermittently, throughout the day. I have lots of images I can’t wait to get to, but until then I offer this one from a few years ago, chosen because it’s quite similar to the scene with which we wrapped up the day yesterday.
Much like last night, the view on this 2005 evening was a classic Yosemite clearing storm. My brother Jay and I arrived at Tunnel View to find El Capitan and Half Dome, partially obscured by swirling clouds, teasing the audience like exotic fan dancers; a carpet of plush fog cushioned the valley floor. With sunlit clouds and granite above a shaded valley, the light was tricky, but as the sun dropped, so did the contrast, making metering simpler. Eventually the direct sunlight left Half Dome entirely, but small, shifting patches spotlighted El Capitan right up until sunset. While the clouds never achieved brilliant sunset pinks and reds, they radiated an ethereal gold that intensified over several minutes before fading.
When the sunlight left entirely, as if on cue, the fog hugging the valley floor expanded, slowly obscuring the scene like a curtain signaling the show’s end. With the view gone, the crowd packed up and headed to wherever they needed to be; suddenly we were alone. But I’ve photographed Yosemite enough to know that it’s a mistake to try to predict the conditions in five minutes based on the conditions now, so I stayed, hoping for an encore.
As quickly as the scene had closed, the foggy curtain pulled back, unveiling Yosemite Valley once more, this time illuminated by the magnificent pink and blue pastels of the Earth’s shadow and belt of Venus. By now the sky was fairly dark, but the remaining faint, shadowless light was enough to reveal the most beautiful view on Earth.
Though this image adds to the seemingly infinite number of Yosemite Tunnel View pictures in my portfolio it remains one of my personal favorites. It’s one of the images I think about every time I consider leaving a scene, and it’s what I showed the group last night when some suggested leaving. So we stayed and were among the very few rewarded with memories of Yosemite Valley’s sweet encore for the drive home.
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An unexpected treat (and a good lesson)
Posted on November 7, 2012
Sunrise, ‘Ohe’o Gulch, Maui
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The drive to Hana is an adventure of crowded, winding, narrow roads. The drive to the Seven Sacred Pools of ‘Ohe’o Gulch, Maui, about twelve miles beyond Hana, is even more unnerving—the road narrows further and the crowds are replaced by miles of empty road interrupted infrequently and abruptly by careening locals in vehicles just slightly too large for the blacktop.
On my latest Maui visit I rose in the Hana darkness and headed to the Seven Sacred Pools for sunrise. Doing this drive in the pre-dawn dark only adds to the tension, but I arrived unscathed to find the parking lot empty. Perfect! Following my headlamp along the quarter-mile trail, I continued mulling compositions I’d been plotting since my last visit (when light and crowds didn’t permit anything particularly creative). So imagine my surprise to find a padlocked gate blocking the stairs down to the pools. Hmmm. After a few minutes of reconnaissance, I decided they really, really didn’t want me down there and set out in search of other opportunities.
‘Ohe’o Gulch empties into the Pacific, draining rain that falls on the slopes of Haleakala high above. In addition to the main trail along the gulch are a number of smaller, less defined trails that trend out toward the surf. I followed one of these and soon found myself making my own path along broken lava toward the waves. The sky had brightened just enough to render my headlamp unnecessary, but footing was treacherous and I had to step carefully—a fall likely wouldn’t have resulted in death or even severe injury, but the rocks would have sliced me pretty good, not to mention what it would have done to my camera, so my focus was more on the ground at my feet than the larger scene.
When I made it out to where the surf met the rocks (I can’t call it a beach), I was quite pleased to find several reflective pools nestled in the lava, guarded by a prominent lava outcrop. The rising sun had already started to color the sky, so I set up quickly, finding various compositions that balanced the largest pool with the rising sun and outcrop. Working the scene, I was treated to a sunrise palette of magenta, red, and gold punctuated by an explosion of crepuscular rays as the sun crested the horizon. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d probably have missed it all had I concentrated on the shots I’d planned for that morning—a gentle reminder not to get so locked into my agenda that I lose sight of the larger world around me.
On the drive out of the parking lot I encountered the park ranger opening the entrance station. I asked her about the locked gate at the pools and she explained the flash flood risk forces them to restrict access when the weather forecast calls for heavy rain on Haleakala.
Missing the tree for the forest
Posted on November 2, 2012
Fall Color, Yosemite Valley
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One of my favorite Yosemite autumn destinations is Fern Spring. It’s usually my first stop after entering Yosemite Valley because the leaves here give me a pretty good handle on the status of the fall color: If I can still see lots of water on the spring’s pond, I know I’m a little early; lots of brown leaves and I’m late.
I haven’t actually photographed the spring itself in years; instead I cross the road and explore the half-mile stretch of trail that parallels the river, downstream to the Pohono Bridge, upstream to Bridalveil Meadow. When I brought my fall workshop group here last week, we found so much to photograph that we had to come back. Some of the group stayed at the spring and crafted compositions featuring the stairstep cascade descending from the small reflecting pool. Others followed me to the river and quickly scattered in search of larger scenes.
When I’m leading a group my priority isn’t my own photography, so that afternoon I stayed in the vicinity of the spring to help people with exposures and compositions. But this was fairly far into the workshop, and as is usually the case, everyone had become pretty comfortable with what they were doing—suddenly I felt pretty inessential.
(Rather than pout) I set my sights on the nearby possibilities. My goal is always to find something new, pretty easy when photographing small scenes featuring ephemeral leaves (in contrast to the relative permanence of Yosemite’s granite). But uniqueness is just the start: To set themselves apart, most scenes, large and small, need (among other things) photography’s often overlooked third dimension, depth. So I’m never content with simply finding a photogenic primary subject—regardless of my subject, if it’s distant I want a complementary foreground; close and I want a complementary background.
I’d been to Fern Spring so much, I was pretty sure I’d pretty thoroughly mined the possibilities here. So imagine my surprise to spy a heretofore overlooked tree with a sturdy trunk and arcing branch, a wealth of untapped compositional possibilities, right across the road from Fern Spring. How could I have missed this in my hundreds of visits here? I can only imagine the number of times I’d rushed past this beautiful specimen in my haste to probe the forest’s more private depths. Shame on me.
But anyway, no time for self-flagellation…. I studied the tree and its surroundings, looking for leaves to isolate. My eyes quickly landed on a solitary branch sporting several leaves in varying stages of fall transition—in a perfect world the leaves would have been backlit (for that fall color glow I so love), but that would have put me on the wrong side of the scene, and the world is rarely perfect anyway.
My lens of choice in these autumn leaves scenes is a telephoto, most often my 70-200 f4 because I almost always prefer its sharpness, speed, and ease of use over the extra reach of the 100-400. So, with 70-200 in place, I circled the leaves until I thought they aligned properly with the tree in the background. Removing my camera from my tripod, I framed the scene through the viewfinder, searching for the best relationship between the yellow leaves and brooding tree. I found that by dropping to the ground I could eliminate the less interesting foreground and frame my leaves with the curved branch.
And on the ground I stayed, for I don’t know how long. I tweaked the composition until I had it “just right,” then (with the composition locked in on my tripod) went to work on the exposure, depth, and focus point. Dense shade makes the area around Fern Spring dark on even the brightest day, but this was late afternoon in autumn, so the sun’s fading light had been further extinguished by Yosemite Valley’s steep walls. As if that wasn’t enough, a bright sheen on the leaves made a polarizer an absolute necessity, subtracting two more stops of precious light. And while it wasn’t windy, neither was the air perfectly still, a problem compounded by my proximity to a road teaming with rushing vehicles.
Fortunately my goal was a soft background, which required a large aperture—had I needed to go to f16 I probably would have been out of luck. Nevertheless, even at f4 I had to go to ISO 800 to expose at 1/12 second, a pretty marginal shutter speed in these conditions. I used live view magnified ten times to ensure precise focus, targeting the veins on the closest leaf, and carefully timing exposures for lulls in the wind.
As I usually do when I have a composition so heavily dependent on depth of field, I bracketed my f-stops, stopping down to f8 in one-stop increments, bumping my ISO even further to ensure a reasonable shutter speed. But at home on my large monitor I wasn’t crazy about the busyness in the leaves introduced as the depth of field increased, and decided f4 was best.
Also on my large screen I was thrilled to see how perfectly sharp the images were (I love that lens), and how noise free they are at ISO 800 (I love my new camera). It’s one of those images that stands up to even the closest scrutiny—the more I examine it, the more I see: small holes, dirt smudges and mote, and even miniscule particles of debris suspended by a delicate spider web, the “imperfections” that underscore nature’s perfection.
I have no illusions that this image will make me rich—most people are drawn to far more dramatic captures. But when I decided to photograph nature for a living, I promised myself to only photograph what I want to photograph, and never to base my choices on what will sell. I can’t even begin to express how much I enjoyed photographing this scene, and how much pleasure this image (and others like it) bring me. It’s a reminder of why I do what I do, and why success should never be measured in dollars alone.
Fern Spring, Yosemite: Each spring I gauge the progress of the fall color in Yosemite Valley by the leaves around Fern Spring.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 