I love it when things work out
Posted on October 29, 2012
Autumn Moon, El Capitan and Half Dome, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
190mm
.8 seconds
F/11
ISO 100
October 29, 2012
My Yosemite autumn workshop wrapped up last night with a spectacular moonrise above Half Dome at sunset. That my group was there to photograph it was both a source of pride, and great personal satisfaction—I doubt few things on Earth are more beautiful than a full moon rising above Half Dome at sunset, and I love being able to share it.
Some lunar perspective
Imagine a line connecting the sun and moon—the half of the moon skewered by that line is always fully lit. Because the moon orbits Earth, our position relative to that line changes daily. Once every 29 days Earth is on that line too, aligned with (and between) the sun and the moon, perfectly positioned to see all of the moon’s sunlit side during our night (in other words, the side of Earth facing the moon is the side facing away from the sun). Because this alignment is the only time the moon’s fully lit face is visible all night, a full moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise.
Why do we rarely see the moon rise exactly as the sun sets? There are a couple of reasons: First, local terrain usually gets in the way—if the moon has to rise above mountains, or the sun sets behind mountains, their rise and set times will be skewed. And second, the moon, sun, and Earth are only perfectly aligned for an instant—we see the moon as full on the day it’s most closely aligned with the sun and Earth, but we’ll only see the rising full moon precisely at sunset when sunset for our location coincides with the instant of perfect alignment, and no mountains are in the way. (There are other orbital and positioning factors, but sometimes technical minutia can clutter understanding, so I’ll just leave it here.)
Targeting Yosemite’s autumn moon
For most Yosemite visitors, viewing a glowing lunar disk above Yosemite Valley doesn’t require much more than being outside and looking up at the right time. But photographers have to be much more precise than that—the camera’s constrained view means anything but a tight composition reduces the moon to small accent (albeit a very beautiful one) to a very large scene. And the camera’s relatively limited ability to simultaneously capture shadows and highlights makes for an extremely narrow time window to photograph a full moon—too early and the moon is lost in still-bright sky (not enough contrast); too late and the dynamic range separating the rising (daylight bright) moon and (rapidly dimming) shadowed foreground terrain is to great for a camera to capture (too much contrast).
So what we want is a moon that rises in very close proximity to Half Dome, at just the right time. When I started planning my 2012 workshops more than a year in advance, I circled October 28 as the date for my favorite Yosemite full moon rise of the year. That was when the moon, 99 percent full, would rise above the steep granite walls of Yosemite Valley, in the general direction of Half Dome as viewed from the valley, at just the right time. I usually choose the famous Tunnel View vista, just east of the Wawona Tunnel, for the autumn moonrise, but my calculations told me that from Tunnel View the moon would rise a little farther to the right of Half Dome than I like, and just a little later than ideal (difficult to expose for anyone without rock-solid understanding of metering and exposure)—still a nice shot, and doable if you’re careful, but I thought there might be something better.
Wanting to be at a higher elevation than, and a little farther north of, my Tunnel View vantage point, I soon realized that the less heralded vista just west of the Wawona Tunnel would be just about right. Not only would this perspective better align the moon with Half Dome, it’s about a mile farther back and over 400 feet higher than Tunnel View (for a slightly earlier moonrise). And being farther back also meant we could use a longer focal length to maximize the distant moon’s size relative to the closer Half Dome. This vantage point doesn’t offer a view of Bridalveil Fall (it wouldn’t be in a telephoto image that includes Half Dome anyway), but that late in the afternoon in autumn Bridalveil is in full shade, and an extremely dry year had reduced it to a mere trickle anyway.
There are lots of apps and software that plot moonrise relative to terrain (Photographer’s Ephemeris being the most popular among photographers), but my moonrise (and set) workflow was in place long before they were available, so I still do it my “old fashioned” way. My technique involves getting the phase, rise/set time, altitude, and azimuth from a website or app (Focalware gives me everything I need), then plotting the moon’s direction with my (now obsolete) National Geographic Topo! software. Topo! gives me the horizontal and vertical distance separating my location and target feature (Half Dome). Plugging that info into my HP11C (scientific calculator) app, I compute the horizon’s altitude in degrees. I plot this altitude and the moon’s azimuth on my Topo! map to pinpoint when and where the moon will appear (or disappear) from any location I choose. I like my approach because I can do everything I need to without Internet or cell service, but for most people it’s probably just simpler to use Photographer’s Ephemeris or PhotoPills before leaving home.
So anyway, I was able to determine that on October 28, from the vista west of the Wawona Tunnel, the moon would rise behind Half Dome’s Ahwiyah Point at around 5:45, and would be directly above (basically, appearing to sit on top of) Half Dome at around 5:50. With a 6:05 sunset, this was just about as perfect as could be.
The moon arrives
I got my group in position at around 5:30 and we just watched and waited. By the end of any workshop everybody has gotten to know each other quite well and idle time is an excuse for fun. This group was no exception. Though I’ve done this enough to be pretty confident the moon would deliver as promised, I couldn’t help feeling secretly anxious that a miscalculation would somehow render my promised workshop grand finale a flop (despite the fact that I’d checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and then checked some more). But a little after 5:40, just as the joviality peaked, a white arc started to glow behind Ahwiyah Point (below) and we were instantly down to business. With foreground for perspective you can really get a sense for how quickly the moon rises—fortunately, everyone was ready with their exposure and composition, so the clicking was pretty much instantaneous and I don’t think anyone missed anything.
As we shot, I encouraged the group to vary their compositions—while it was mostly a telephoto scene, there were wider and tighter versions, as well as horizontal and vertical orientations. I also frequently reminded everyone to monitor the moon’s highlights—as the moon rises, the foreground darkens but the moon remains daylight bright, making exposure increasingly difficult.
My favorite time of evening is the ten or fifteen minutes after sunset, when the shadows have left the landscape and the east horizon is layered with pink and blue pastels. As Earth’s shadow rises from the eastern horizon, the sky’s glow deepens to a rich magenta that and paints entire landscape. The image at the top of the post was one of the last of the evening, several minutes after sunset. If you look closely, you can see the sky’s pink glow bathing Half Dome’s reflective granite (my camera actually picked more of this color than you see here, but I desaturated it slightly in Photoshop).
(I’d love to say that this was the highlight of my day, but as beautiful as the moonrise was, it was trumped by listening to my Giants World Series victory on the drive home.)
This is the moon when it first appeared, about 20 minutes before sunset. As you can see, the contrast is pretty good, but the light isn’t nearly as nice as it was shortly after sunset.
A Yosemite Autumn Moon Gallery
Land before time
Posted on October 22, 2012
Deep Forest Cascade, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino Coast
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
28 mm
2.5 seconds
F/16
ISO 400
Near the top of the canyon, on late-spring mornings electric-pink rhododendrons bask in splashes of early sunlight. Follow the trail a short distance and it seems that you’re witnessing a competition for light, the rhododendrons spreading and stretching to get their share, but within a few hundred yards your route descends into old-growth redwoods benefiting from a multi-century head-start. The redwoods here tower over everything, intercepting all but a few of the sun’s rays, and the rhododendrons are gone.
At some point down the trail you stop. You hear nothing but a breeze-induced swish from the trees and maybe a bird warning the forest of your approach. Further down the trail there’s a new sound, at first subtle and difficult to disconnect from the wind in the branches—you’re dropping fast now; as the breeze subsides the new sound separates into rushing water. Soon the trail levels and a creek appears at your feet. With the creek comes ferns and few flying insects, and a smell that’s pleasantly, paradoxically musty and fresh.
Your path parallels the creek now, spongy beneath your feet. You know the sun is out, but the light is subdued, dusk-like. The water’s music builds with each step, the way a movie soundtrack prepares you for what’s in store. One more bend and there it is, a glistening cataract tumbling over mossy logs and rocks, framed with ferns.
You’ve found Russian Gulch Fall, deep in the perpetually damp redwoods east of Mendocino. For someone like me, who likes to imagine a world untouched by the hand of man, this is heaven. The trail down to the fall is carved into the hillside and almost invisible; the weathered redwood bridge crossing the creek just downstream makes a perfect platform from which observe and descend without conscious thought into a prehistoric reality. Even if you’re not so inclined, it’s difficult to be down here without lapsing into something akin to meditation.
About this image
I’ve been to Russian Gulch Fall a number of times now, alone and with other photographers. I try to make it to the fall by midmorning, before the sun rises high enough to penetrate the dense redwood canopy and create too much contrast for my camera to capture.
On my latest visit I stayed until the sun climbed into the treetops. Most of my time there was spent with my telephoto lens, isolating aspects of the scene (like this). But shortly before leaving I put on a wide lens and framed the entire scene. Rather than compose the sun out (as I usually would), I added it to the top of my frame, using the trees to block all but a small sliver of the brilliant disk and dialing in a small aperture (f16) to create a sunburst. A polarizer eliminated subtle but pervasive glare on the rocks, water, and foliage, allowing the rich green to stand out. There was absolutely no wind, so I was comfortable with a 2 1/2 second exposure (but still verified the sharpness by magnifying the image on my LCD).
Workshop Schedule || Purchase Prints || Instagram
Waterfalls
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Dark and early
Posted on October 16, 2012
Daybreak, South Tufa, Mono Lake
* * * *
The key to successful sunrise photography is arriving early. How early? My rule of thumb is, if you can navigate without a flashlight, you’re too late. I know, I know, you’re sleepy and it’s cold, but it shouldn’t take more than one or two mad sprints beneath crimson skies to get you to pull back those covers just a few minutes earlier. And guess what—when you arrive early enough to savor the sunrise rather than rush through it, you’ll soon recognize a purity of air, sound, and light that just can’t be found at any other time of day.
At popular spots like Mono Lake, arriving at least forty-five minutes before sunrise has the added advantage of beating most of the people with whom you’ll be competing for choice real estate. The air here is often graveyard-still this early, the lake a perfect mirror. While the landscape is dark to my eyes, a gold-blue band on the horizon hints at the approaching day, and I know it’s not too early for long exposures that will reveal color and detail my eyes can’t see yet.
The image here was captured about a week and a half ago, on the penultimate sunrise of this year’s Eastern Sierra photo workshop, over 40 minutes before sunrise. Experience has shown me that people don’t always realize how well today’s digital SLR cameras perform in low light; when it’s this dark I sometimes need to prod workshop students to start shooting. Often the best way to do that is to fire off a couple of frames of my own to show them what’s there.
It was dark enough that stars were visible overhead (take a look at the exposure settings to get an idea of how dark it was). I spot-metered the brightest part of the sky, dialing in an exposure that was two stops above a middle tone—just bright enough to bring out foreground detail without washing out the color in the sky.
My “rule” (I hate that word) for the horizon is to place it relative to the aesthetic appeal of the foreground versus the sky: If the sky is a lot better than the foreground, the sky gets most of the frame; if the foreground is a lot better than the sky, the majority of the frame goes to the foreground; when it’s a tossup, the horizon line goes in the middle.
This was just the beginning of what turned out to be an amazing sunrise, the kind a workshop leader prays he can give his group. By the time it was over everyone had shots facing east, north, and west. About fifteen minutes after I took this the sky turned an impossible crimson that reflected in the lake, making it appear to be on fire. I have images of that too, but there’s just something about the tranquility of these earliest images that really resonates with me.
* * * *
I’ll try to reprise this morning next year, in my 2013 Eastern Sierra Fall Color photo workshop. (As I write this, nearly a year out, it’s already half full.)
My favorite season
Posted on October 12, 2012
Reflection, Half Dome in the Merced River, Yosemite
* * * *
It’s been a while since I’ve posted something from Yosemite. The truth is, while I lose track of the number of times I visit Yosemite each year, Yosemite’s crowds and blue skies for the most part keep me away in summer. Not only that, by summer’s end (and sometimes much sooner), Yosemite’s waterfalls, which just a few months earlier appeared to explode from solid granite, have vanished. Even booming Yosemite Falls, the valley’s spring centerpiece and continuous soundtrack, by September has vanished, its demise reduced to a dark outline on the light granite, like the negative of a crime scene chalkline.
Enter October. The vacation crowds have returned to work and school, and California’s weather has started its trend toward winter, brushing Northern California with clouds that inject a little character into our skies. By the end of the month, the oak, cottonwood, maple, and dogwood trees have fired up, warming Yosemite Valley with shades of yellow and red. But my favorite part of autumn in Yosemite is the now relaxed Merced River, its once churning surface subdued to a meandering ribbon of glass.
Yosemite is never as spectacular as it is with a fresh coat of winter snow, or more dramatic than when it echoes with the roar of spring runoff, but for just plain creative photography, I don’t think I’m ever happier in Yosemite than I am in autumn.
About this image
I have many go-to autumn reflection locations in Yosemite Valley. A particular favorite is this bend in the Merced River near Yosemite Village, just east of Sentinel Bridge. I arrived this evening to find cottonwood upstream had already shed most of their leaves, their white skeletons reflecting in the slow water. In shadowless light only possible when the sun is several minutes below the horizon, I juxtaposed Half Dome’s reflection against the trees’ reflection. Concerned that patches of drifting white foam drifting would distract from the scene, I chose small aperture and low ISO settings that would require a multi-second shutter speed. The resulting thirty-second exposure revealed more detail in the low light than my eyes could register, and reduced the foam to faint white streaks on the river’s surface.
It’s not a click, it’s a process
Posted on October 3, 2012
Aspen in Autumn, Bishop Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
1/13 second
F/7.1
ISO 84
36 mm
A landscape image isn’t just a click, it’s a process that starts with an idea, a plan for the best way to organize and emphasize the scene’s significant elements, then improves with each subsequent click until the photographer is satisfied. The first click is like a writer’s draft, and subsequent clicks are the revisions. After each click, a photographer should stand back and evaluate the image on the LCD (I love the large LCDs on today’s DSLRs), refine (exposure, composition, depth of field, focus point), then click again. Repeat as necessary.
This approach is particularly valuable in macro and close-focus images, intimate scenes where even the slightest adjustment in composition, depth of field, and focus point can dramatically alter the result. It’s a prime reason I’m such a strong tripod advocate (evangelist)—when I’m done evaluating, the shot I just evaluated is sitting right there on my tripod, waiting for me to apply the adjustments I deem necessary.
When photographing fall color, I look for a leaf, or group of leaves, to isolate from the rest of the scene. In the above image, captured in an aspen stand just down the hill from North Lake, west of Bishop, I started with this collection of four vertically stacked leaves, positioning myself so leaves were suspended in front of a receding line of bleached aspen (they’d have been lost against the background foliage). I wanted the background soft but recognizable.
Using my 70-200 lens with a 25 mm extension tube, and a neutral polarizer to help the color come through the leaves’ waxy sheen, I settled on the general framing fairly quickly—vertical orientation, fairly tightly composed. Exposure was pretty straightforward in the soft overcast, though an intermittent breeze meant I had some decisions to make. Since the breeze ranged from light to completely still, I used ISO 400 to enable a faster shutter speed, and timed my click for the brief pauses.
Though I don’t always catch balance, relationship, and border problems through the viewfinder, after two or three click/evaluate/refine cycles, I had the composition nailed. But I was far from finished—in fact, I’d just started. I don’t trust critical DOF decisions made through my viewfinder or even on my LCD, so when a composition I like a lot makes significant use of DOF and focus point, I always take a series of frames, bracketing DOF (f-stop) around the DOF I think is best. Sometimes I’ll range all the way from f2.8 to f22. In this case I tried frames ranging from f4 (my 70-200’s fastest aperture) to f16 (at f16 I increased my ISO to 800), in (more or less) one-stop increments. Since I thought f8 would give me about the right combination of sharp foreground and soft background, I even took a couple of extra frames in 1/3 stop increments around f8. Back home on my large monitor I scrutinized each frame closely and ended up choosing this one at f7.1.
In Lightroom I warmed the image slightly to remove a blue cast on the white trunks. Because I intentionally underexposed the scene at capture (to ensure that I didn’t clip any of the red channel, where most of the yellow is), in Photoshop I dodged the trunks to remove the dinginess introduced by my underexposure. Otherwise my processing was pretty much standard stuff—a subtle wiggle in Curves to add contrast, Topaz noise reduction, and selective sharpening of everything in focus with Unsharp Mask.
Join me for the next Eastern Sierra photo workshop
A gallery of nature intimates
Click an image for a closer look, and a slide show. Refresh the screen to reorder the display.
Beneath the stars
Posted on October 1, 2012
Bristlecone Star Trails, Schulman Grove, White Mountains, California
Canon 1Ds Mark II
36mm
22 minutes
F/4
ISO 200
October 2012
I lead photo workshops in lots of beautiful, exotic places, but I particularly look forward to the Eastern Sierra workshop for the variety we get to photograph. Mt. Whitney and the Alabama Hills, Mono Lake and Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows, lots of fall color in the mountains west of Bishop and Lone Pine, and the ancient bristlecones in the White Mountains, east of Bishop.
It’s the opportunities to photograph the mountains surrounding Bishop that most stimulate my creative juices. Each fall the small lakes, sparkling streams, and steep canyons west of Bishop are lined with aspen decked out in their vivid autumn yellow. Contrast that with the arid White Mountains east of Bishop, where virtually nothing thrives except the amazing bristlecone pines. The bristlecones are among the oldest living things on Earth, and they look it. The character they’ve earned by enduring up to 5,000 years of cold, wind, thin air, and water deprivation makes them ideal photographic subjects. There’s wonderful texture in the bristlecone’s twisting trunk and branches, but sometimes I like to turn off the texture with a silhouette that emphasizes the gnarled shape.
The bristlecone here clung to a steep hillside in the Schulman Grove of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. I was there with three friends on a moonless, late September night in 2007. They wanted to light-paint the tree, but I wanted something that just emphasized the tree’s shape against the stars. With our shots set up, I delayed my exposure for a few seconds while they hit the tree with a bright flashlight, clicking as soon the world went dark. Then we just sat and waited in the chilly air, enjoying the sky, laughing quite a bit, but sometimes just appreciating a silence that’s impossible to duplicate anywhere in our “normal” (flatland) lives.
As we waited we scanned the sky, thick with stars, for a rogue airplane that might threaten to soil our frames. Only one appeared, and when it did I held my hat in front of my lens, holding it there for about fifteen seconds, until the plane moved on. (If you look closely you can actually see a small gap in the same place on the otherwise continuous star trails.)
We had long exposure noise reduction turned on, so we couldn’t see our results until our cameras finished their processing. The pictures didn’t pop up on to our LCDs until we were halfway back to Bishop, but I was driving and had to wait until we got back to town. We pulled into Bishop, tired and hungry, so late that we had a hard time finding anything open, but everyone was so pleased with their images that even Denny’s tasted good.
An Eastern Sierra Gallery
(Click an image for a closer look, and to enjoy the slide show)
Glow in the dark
Posted on September 25, 2012
Kilauea Caldera, Hawaii
* * * *
An unfortunate reality of photographing the things I photograph, at the times I photograph them, is the doubt the results foster—“Is that real?” Sigh. That skepticism is compounded by the (understandable) ignorance of people who expect cameras to duplicate human reality, a fallacy no doubt perpetuated by photographers who proclaim each image to be, “Exactly the way the way my eyes saw it.” And then there are those unscrupulous photographers who alter images for personal or financial gain by adding or moving objects (the moon seems to be a popular subject), cranking up the color, and embellishing the hardship the capture required. It’s no wonder people don’t know what to believe.
So let’s take a look at this night shot of the Kilauea Caldera, captured during my recent Hawaii Big Island photo workshop. Is this the way I saw it? Absolutely not. First, my experience was three dimensional. It included wind motion in the caldera’s vapor plume, a dome of sky saturated with thousands of stars, the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, and clouds wafting in and out, intermittently revealing and obscuring parts of the sky. The magic I experienced was far beyond my camera’s capability.
But my camera has reality of its own, and its own magic. By increasing my ISO (the sensor’s sensitivity to light), aperture (the size of the opening that allows light to reach the sensor), and exposure time, I was able to capture more light in one frame than my eyes could see at any instant. All this additional light on my sensor gave me a section of sky containing even more stars than my eyes saw, and clouds fully illuminated by the volcano’s glow.
This particular image was captured on the second of three nights on the rim. My first workshop group nailed it on the first attempt (see my September 9 post), but the second group’s first attempt was largely thwarted by the large cloud you see in this image. Nevertheless, as you can see, we had a small window of opportunity on this night as well, so while the group wrestled with their camera’s and tripods in the dark, I took a test exposure and gave everyone exposure values. As I moved around making sure they all had their settings dialed in and focus set, it was a blast listening to the gasps up and down the rim when the first image popped on each person’s LCD. But once that cloud settled in, the show was pretty much over. After waiting nearly two hours for more sky we packed it in, but by then everyone was hooked, so we returned a couple of nights later to smashing success.
The processing for this image was minimal. In fact, what you see here is pretty much we all saw on our LCDs, with mostly minor tweaks. In Lightroom I brushed a little color temperature reduction to cool the sky, made some slight exposure adjustments, and bumped the clarity to help the stars stand out. In Photoshop I did moderate noise reduction with Topaz DeNoise (love the high ISO performance of my new 5D III) and dodged the underside of the trailing vapor plume a little. And so intense was the color in the clouds that I desaturated the red channel somewhat. None of these adjustments were major, and in fact I was already mostly satisfied with the raw image and Adobe Standard processing (my Lightroom default) that I started with.
The one significant adjustment I did make in Photoshop was to fix the blown highlights at the caldera’s core, at the very center of the fire where it burned hottest, an area the width of the fire in length and about 2/3 of that width high (about 3/4 of the bright area you see beneath the smoke). That core area, while yellow to my eyes, was hopelessly blown (no color or detail) by the extreme exposure the rest of the scene required. To fix it I used Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool to select the yellow just beneath the cooler orange, and the Paint Bucket tool at about 20 percent opacity to replace the pure white with (very) pale yellow.
The objective of any art form is not to show us exactly what we can all see with our own eyes, but rather to expand our perception of reality and and help us see the world differently. While this is not they way my eyes saw it, it is the way my camera saw it (with the one exception noted above). As with a moonbow that’s not visible to the naked eye, streaking stars or blurred water recorded with a long exposure, and the enhanced contrast and shape of a black-and-white image, the camera gives us fresh insights into the natural world. That’s why I choose not to lament perceived “limitations” such as my camera’s inability to capture the range of light my eyes see, preferring instead to celebrate its ability to reveal things my eyes can’t see—in this case faint stars and the fiery, natural light illuminating the clouds and Kilauea’s plume. Nothing can compete with the experience of being there, but I’m thrilled to have images to remind me of that experience, and to show me what my eyes missed.
* * * *
Join me next September as I try to duplicate this shot in my Hawaii Big Island Volcanoes and Waterfalls photo workshop, September 2-6, 2013.
And now for something completely different…
Posted on September 17, 2012
Raindrops on Orchid, Lava Tree State Park, Hawaii
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
100 mm
1/50 second
F/16
ISO 800
I can’t photograph much farther from my subject than I did on the Milky Way image in my last post. And I can’t photograph much closer to my subject than I did these raindrops on an orchid in Lava Tree State Park on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Early in the week I took my workshop group to Lava Tree State Park after our sunrise shoot on the Puna coast. We didn’t have great light (too much sun), but everyone liked the location so much that I tried to figure out a way to get them back. When we finally made it on our final morning it was raining quite hard when we pulled into the parking lot. No problem: rain showers in Hawaii tend to fall straight down, so it’s simply a matter of keeping an umbrella over the camera to take advantage of the perfect light.
Lava Tree State Park is a lush, quiet 3/4 mile walk with a variety of exotic subjects along the entire loop. With a few other workshop participants I beelined past huge ferns, ghostlike lava-encrusted trees, and a host of colorful flowers to a field of wild orchids at the back of the park. By the time I arrived the rain had stopped, but not before decorating the entire landscape with sparkling jewels of water.
After two weeks on the Big Island, I had a great variety wide landscapes, so I was really looking forward to taking advantage of another of the Big Island’s great macro opportunities. I wandered a bit until I found this lone, bejeweled orchid, drooping beneath the raindrops’ weight. Positioning myself with the orchid juxtaposed against a wall of shaded ferns, I went to work.
Figuring if I’m going to go macro, I might as well go nuclear, I twisted on my 100 mm and all three extension tubes. My macro is a pretty fast 2.8, but adding 72 mm of extension really cut the light—I knew I’d need to bump my ISO. Nevertheless, the wind was light to non-existent, and I had no qualms about bumping the ISO on my 5DIII to whatever I felt was necessary.
For me the world looks a lot different through a macro lens, particularly when extension tubes shrink it even further. And every image is a process of capture, refine, capture, refine—this is particularly true of macro photography, when even the slightest shift of composition, focal length, or focus can completely change an image—so it was a few minutes before I landed on this little scene. But when I did, I knew I had what I wanted and worked it to within an inch of its life. For about forty-five minutes I clicked variations of this basic theme: a little wider, a little tighter, slightly different perspective, and a variety of f-stops and focus points. I usually limit my depth of field in my macro images to blur the subject’s inessential (less compelling) elements, but it this case I liked the way both the drops and the micro-reflection they contained were sharp at f16.
I’m still in Hawaii, and as with the Milky Way caldera image, working without a mouse on my thirteen inch laptop, so I have no idea whether I’ve chosen the best version of this shot. But since I’m pretty happy with it, and it required virtually no processing, here it is.
Join me for a Hawaii photo workshop
A close-up gallery
Wow, wow, wow…
Posted on September 7, 2012
Fire on High, Kilauea and Milky Way, Hawaii
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
15 seconds
F/2.0
ISO 3200
28 mm
In a life filled with special moments, a few in particular stand out for me. Near the top of that list would be my annual trip to Hawaii and more specifically, the opportunity to photograph the Milky Way above an active volcano. I do this enough that it’s no longer novel for me, but it’s always special, and each time I get vicarious joy seeing my group’s reaction. And no Kilauea shoot was more joyful than this night.
After photographing a nice sunset at the caldera, my workshop group hightailed it to the Kilauea Lodge in nearby Volcano for dinner and to wait for total darkness. The sky was mostly cloudy when we went inside, but I’ve done this enough now to know that the clouds surrounding Kilauea often clear once the sun goes down. Stepping outside after dinner, we were thrilled to see that the clouds had indeed departed, exposing a sky that some in the group said was filled with more stars than they’d ever seen. (Camera or not, I encourage each of you to get away from town late on a moonless night and spend some quality time with the sky.)
We started our night shoot at the Jaggar Museum overlook, which offers the closest view of the caldera. I got the group set up with their exposures and focus and we stayed until I knew everyone had at least one successful image. Its proximity to the caldera makes the Jaggar overlook the most crowded place to view Kilauea, so I quickly hustled the group to another spot a little farther back along the rim where I knew we could align the Milky Way with the glowing caldera. By that time a few clouds had started to move back in, but I reassured everyone that some clouds would add some character to the sky and reflect the color from the volcano. Little did we know….
Our second vantage point was completely empty, and the clouds couldn’t have been more perfect if I’d have commissioned them myself. For at least thirty minutes we photographed a jigsaw of cloud fragments drifting over the volcano, glowing like embers with the light of the churning lava but parting just enough to reveal the stars behind and frame the Milky Way.
Waiting fifteen to thirty seconds for an exposure to complete leaves lots of vacant time, which we managed to fill quite easily with laughter. Despite the hilarity, everyone managed to keep shooting until the cloud pieces assembled and the Milky Way rotated away from the volcano’s glow. But not before everyone in the group had an assortment of images like this (and memories to match). Besides the amazing images, I think my greatest pleasure came from the spontaneous exclamations of joy (“Oh my God!”, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”) I heard from each workshop student when the first image popped up on their LCD.
And for those dubious minds who don’t believe this image is “real,” I can assure you that this is pretty much the way the scene appeared on everyone’s LCD (and I have a dozen witnesses with their own images to prove it). To our eyes the scene was darker, not nearly bright enough for our eyes to discern this much color in the clouds (but no less beautiful). But boosting exposure to bring out more stars in the Milky Way had the added benefit of enhancing the caldera’s glow reflected by the clouds.
Join me on the Big Island each September as I help my workshop group duplicate this amazing shot
A Big Island Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
Heaven on Earth
Posted on September 4, 2012
Heaven on Earth, Lipan Point, Grand Canyon
* * * *
Let’s see, this day included an eight hour drive, a torrential downpour, lightning, and a rainbow, all sandwiched between breakfast in Barstow and this sunset. Just another day at the office….
Top to bottom landscapes
Many people spend a tremendous about of time pursuing beautiful images with little or no regard for the half of the scene. They end up with a beautiful scene beneath a bland sky, or a tremendous sky above whatever happens to be in front of them. Combining foreground and sky takes a little bit of preparation, a little bit of good fortune, and a fair degree of sacrifice.
But when sky and foreground do come together, your ability to share the beauty starts with appreciating it personally. Don’t get so caught up in photography that you neglect to take a deep breath and take in what you’re witnessing. Now, with the proper sense of awe in place, it’s time to figure out how to do the moment justice.
Did you Photoshop that?
I find that images from the most special moments are those that engender the most skepticism, that generate the looks, comments, and queries that really all ask the same question: “Did you Photoshop that?” Of course the obvious answer is, “Of course I Photoshopped it.” Photoshop is to digital photography as thunder is to lightning. But since the people asking this question have identified themselves as the people most likely not to understand that there hasn’t been an image captured in the history of photography that wasn’t subjected to processing of one form or another (many actually believe that a jpeg is an unprocessed image), acknowledging any processing at all usually just evokes a condescending (albeit ignorant) nod that says, “I knew it.” These skeptics’ real concern is that I’ve somehow deceived them, and to that I can plead emphatically, with a clear conscience, not guilty.
We all have our own rules for what is and isn’t an appropriate way to handle an image. And regrettably, there are photographers who have no qualms about deceptive processing. But there are many less justified reasons for skeptical scrutiny of dramatic images. One is that that many people simply forget how vivid color is in nature. Also, because the best conditions for photography are usually the worst conditions for being outside, relatively few people actually see the world at its most beautiful. And finally, many people (photographers included) hold a photograph to an impossible standard: to reproduce the world exactly as they experience it. Dynamic range, range of focus, motion, a scene’s depth and boundaries are all different to a camera than they are to you and me. Understanding and using these differences is the key to transcendent photography.
My personal standard is to remain true to my camera’s reality and to apply my creativity in my camera and not my computer. While I refuse to add things that weren’t present at capture (this doesn’t make me unique), I nevertheless love the control Photoshop gives me, control that I never had in my 25+ years of shooting color transparencies. Much as black and white photographers have done for years, I can now photograph a difficult scene, one that would have been impossible in my film days), in a way that anticipates the processing necessary to reproduce it. And even though I can’t see it in the small jpeg reproduction on my LCD, I know when my raw file contains everything I need to complete my vision, just waiting for Photoshop to finesse it out. Ansel Adams labeled this capture-to-print approach “visualization”; it was the cornerstone of his success.
For example: capture
When the setting sun fanned crepuscular rays that bathed the Grand Canyon in golden light, my first thought was that nobody will believe this. Sigh. But my more immediate concern was how to deal with the extreme difference between the brilliant sky and shadowed canyon (dynamic range). I knew that without assistance I’d have to choose between capturing the canyon’s layered detail beneath a white sky, or the sky’s rich color above a black canyon. Since I (stubbornly) refuse to use HDR (high dynamic range blending of multiple images), that left my graduated neutral density filters as the best option for neutralizing the scene’s extreme dynamic range.
The biggest problem with a GND is hiding the transition between the dark and light halves of the filter, but locations like the Grand Canyon, with its straight horizon lines, are ideal for GNDs. In this case I started with my 3-stop reverse GND and checked the exposure. Not enough. I added a 2-stop hard-transition GND and checked again, confirming that 5 stops of ND did indeed subdue the brilliant sunlight enough to capture its warm color while allowing a foreground exposure that revealed canyon detail. Unfortunately, this recipe rendered the clouds from dark gray to nearly black. Nevertheless, the histogram showed enough shadow detail that I was confident I’d be able to rescue the clouds in processing.
For example: processing
The difficult light and use of 5-stops of neutral density required far more processing than typical for me. I started with basic Lightroom processing of the raw file, tweaking the color temperature (warming slightly), adding a light touch of vibrance and clarity, and applying a little noise reduction and the standard lens correction. Then it was on to Photoshop, where I found the processing for the foreground remarkably simple—pretty much adding a little contrast and slightly dodging some of the darker shadows.
The sky was a different story, demanding probably 90 percent of this image’s processing. While I was able to bring up the exposure in the clouds, this introduced lots of noise. In general clouds lack fine detail and can stand quite a bit of noise reduction, and that was (fortunately) the case here. Not wanting to touch the canyon half of the frame, I created a layer for the clouds and applied a heavy dose of Topaz Denoise. This left the clouds a little more homogenized that I like, but it’s nothing I can’t live with.
With the noise out of the way, I went to work with my dodge/burn brush, working carefully (painstakingly?) to smooth out any evidence of GND use, and also to fine tune the clouds. I referred to the original, unprocessed raw file with the exposure cranked way up (to make the differences more obvious), doing my best to brush in the actual relative lightness/darkness of the numerous cloud layers.
Finally I went after the color, which, while not enhanced, was to me was too intense in its unprocessed state to make a credible image. (Sadly, I’m rarely present to defend nature’s color to dubious viewers). So I created several layers to desaturate and lighten the blue sky and gold sunlight. I also removed a slight blue cast from the canyon’s shadows.
The finished product is an image that pleases me greatly. While it lacks the depth and dynamic range of being there, it does convey to me the majesty of this moment that ended a memorable day, when the sky opened and heaven poured through.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 