Photographic reality: The missing dimension
Posted on June 4, 2012
Nature’s Palette, Half Dome from Sentinel Dome, Yosemite
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The sixth and final installment of my series on photographic reality.)
So far I’ve written about focus, dynamic range, confining borders, motion, and time, but I think most obvious (and also I’m afraid most overlooked) difference separating the camera’s vision from our own is the missing dimension: depth.
Photography attempts to render a three dimensional world in a two dimensional medium—the most photographers can hope for is the illusion of depth. While anyone can put a camera to their eye and compose the lateral, left-to-right aspect of a scene, translating their own three-dimensional experience to their camera’s two-dimensional reality is a leap that many miss. This may explain why a sense of depth is often the most significant quality separating a merely good image from an outstanding image.
Achieving the illusion of depth starts with looking beyond your primary subject and finding a complementary foreground or background: If your primary subject is nearby, find a background object, shape, or color that frames, balances, and/or helps your subject stand out; conversely, if your primary subject is in the distance, look for foreground elements that can lead your viewers’ eyes through the frame without distracting or competing for attention.
Once you have your foreground/background elements worked out, your composition isn’t complete. In your three-dimensional view, size and distance are easily interpreted, something we stereographic humans take for granted. But your scene’s depth is lost to your camera. In a two-dimensional world aligned objects at varying distances loose the separation that makes them stand out—you need to visually separate these merged objects—put them on different lines of sight—to allow your viewer to imagine the depth you see at capture. I can’t emphasize how important this is.
In my many years of observing and assisting other photographers working to improve their images, I’ve decided that the single most significant factor holding them back is their ignorance of, or unwillingness to wield, their control over their images’ depth relationships. There seems to be an invisible force that binds tripods to their first landing place. Overcoming this force (to which I’m not immune) requires vigilant attention to each visual element in your frame and taking whatever steps necessary to ensure that each stands alone. If you can’t achieve separation from your current position, move! Simply repositioning a little left/right, up/down, forward/backward really can make a huge difference. In other words, in a static landscape, it’s your job to be dynamic.
For example
With the benefit of a 360 degree view, it was clear that all the elements were in place for a spectacular sunset atop Yosemite’s Sentinel Dome. An afternoon rain had scoured the air of color-robbing particles, and an opening on the west western horizon left a clear path for the setting sun to illuminate the clouds above Half Dome to the east. But as spectacular as I expected the color above Half Dome to be, I wasn’t going to be satisfied with just another pretty picture of Half Dome at sunset.
One of the things I like most about photographing from Sentinel Dome is the variety of foreground subjects: rocks, cracks, and of course the solitary jeffrey pine made famous by Ansel Adams and others, now dead and on its side. On this evening, guessing (hoping) that the earlier downpour had filled indentations I remembered on Sentinel’s southeast flank, I headed over there.
One thing I pride myself in is arriving at a location early, well before the best conditions, to allow time to anticipate the light and assemble the elements of my composition. Being such a deliberate shooter, this is really a necessity for me. So when I found these pools right where I’d hoped, I was able to take the time to figure out how to use them. I started by moving around quite a bit, first to find the angle that would best frame Half Dome with the pools, then forward and backward to get an idea of the best distance and focal length that would give Half Dome enough size while giving the pools enough room. A factor in these distance/focal-length considerations was finding the angle that would allow me to include a reflection of the clouds, which meant moving up and down as well. In this case I dropped quite low, probably no more than a foot off the ground, taking care not to get so low that the bottom of Half Dome merged with the edge of Sentinel Dome. With the composition worked out, I did some depth of field figuring and decided that I’d better stop all the way down to f20 to ensure a perfectly sharp foreground and acceptably sharp Half Dome.I focused on the granite about eight feet away and think I did a pretty good job achieving front-to-back sharpness. (Today I’d use the DOF app on my iPhone, but checking it now confirms that I did okay.)
Being on a tripod with no motion in the scene meant I was able to go with whatever shutter speed gave me the exposure I wanted, at my camera’s native ISO 100. I metered on the foreground and used a graduated neutral density filter to darken the bright sky, starting my exposures before the best color started (you never know when the color will peak—it’s best to have a few too many images than to realize after the fact that the color you’re waiting for isn’t coming), monitoring my histogram and adjusting down in 1/3 stop increments as the light dropped.
On this evening the color just kept getting better and better, until the air seemed to buzz with color and the entire landscape glowed red. Believe it or not, the red was even more vivid than what you see here, but I decided to tone down the saturation a bit because there comes a point where Mother Nature seems to defy credibility. This remains one of my favorite images.
Photographic reality: Expand time
Posted on May 30, 2012
Cascading Ferns, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
81 mm
.6 seconds
F/11
ISO 400
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce your reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The fifth installment of my series on photographic reality.)
There’s probably no better example of the difference between a camera’s reality and yours than the way we handle motion. In my previous post I compared the camera’s ability to accumulate light to the serial, real-time processing of seamless instants we humans do. In a static world, given the right exposure a photographic image can be rendered fairly literally (missing dimension notwithstanding). But photograph a world in motion and wonderful things start to happen.
A slow shutter speed allows a sensor to record the position of everything it “sees” during the exposure, expanding one frame into a recreation of every instant of its capture. When the capture includes objects in motion, the result a scene very different from the human experience: Rushing water smoothes to white, wind-whipped flowers blur to color, and Earth’s rotation renders stars as parallel streaks of light.
Blurred water
Labeled as cliché and unnatural by people who don’t understand photography, blurred water gets a bum rap. The cliché part ignores the fact that most rapidly moving water photographed in the best light (shade or overcast) is virtually impossible to not to blur. The “unnatural” label just cracks me up—when asked, detractors reply that freezing the motion (the only other option) would be more natural, to which I reply (usually to myself only, tongue firmly clamped between teeth), how many times have you seen water drops frozen in midair? The truth is, the camera and human eye handle motion differently, and photographers need to accept and appreciate it. Once you can accept that blurring water is often the best way to imply motion in a static medium, the fun begins.
First you need to understand that you can’t just blur every moving river, stream, or wave. Motion blur requires a slow shutter speed, impossible with water in full sunlight without a neutral density filter to cut the light. So you need to start by finding moving water darkened by overcast or shade (any sunlight in the frame at all will overexpose and likely ruin the image). Whitewater is best; if you find yourself photographing whitewater in shade or overcast, the question isn’t how to blur, it’s how much?
Unfortunately there’s no magic shutter speed for motion blur. The amount of blur you get depends on the speed of the water, how close you are to the water, how much you’re zoomed, and the angle of your capture relative to the direction of motion (and maybe some other things I’ve overlooked). And while there isn’t a ideal amount of blur, I find that there’s sweet spot (that changes with all the variables above) between very slight blur that’s not quite enough and just appears scratchy, and extreme blur that’s pure white. In some tight compositions of extremely fast water you get beautiful slight blur at 1/1o second; with wider compositions and/or slower water, the same amount of blur requires 3/4 second or longer. And achieving noticeable blur in a wide capture of a distant waterfall may require several seconds of exposure. My advice is to bracket your shutter speeds, varying your ISO and/or f-stop (take care that you don’t choose an f-stop that compromises your depth of field)—you’ll find the more you do it, the more you’ll get a sense for what works.
In the image of Russian Gulch Fall near Mendocino (at the top of the post), I arrived early enough to allow a full two hours to work the scene before sunlight blighted the forest floor. And work it I did, starting wide and trending tighter as I became more familiar with the scene. The dense forest dark didn’t allow a fast enough shutter speed for effective slight blur without severely compromising ISO and aperture (depth of field), so I just went with the extreme blur. Even though the air seemed perfectly still, I was a little concerned about slight wind motion in the ferns, so I bumped to ISO 400 and f11 (at 80 mm, f11 gave me about a 15 foot range of front-to-back sharpness–just enough). This resulted in a one second exposure that caused extreme blur (I call it extreme because I didn’t notice much difference between one second and five seconds) that, as it turned out, made the delicate strands of water quite lovely.
One other often overlook component of a forest water scene is a polarizer: I wouldn’t even attempt a scene like this without the glare reducing benefit of a polarizer. (And a polarizer has the added bonus of reducing the light by a couple of stops.)
Bristlecone Star Trails, White Mountains, California
Star trails
Star trails—parallel streaks of light caused by Earth’s rotation during a long exposure–are an extreme example of the same motion effect that blurs water. I find that moonless nights work best for star trails—a moonlit sky is usually too washed out for effective star trail photography, while the limited light of a moonless night maximizes the motion by allowing even the dimmest stars to shine through.
On a moonless night, a large aperture and high ISO can record enough light to allow a relatively fast 30-second shutter speed that records stars as near pinpoints of light, but doesn’t allow enough light to fully eliminate the foreground. On the other hand, a slower shutter speed that accumulates enough light to reveal the foreground also results in streaking stars—star trails. An added advantage of star trail photography is that the exposures are long enough to enable a smaller aperture (more DOF and better image quality) and lower ISO (less noise).
Some people have great success combining a series short-exposure frames to create a single star trail image, but all of my images are single-click capture (that’s just me, I have no problem with those who choose to blend multiple captures) using a trial and error approach I’ve worked out over the years. I start by taking a test (throw-away) exposure at my camera’s highest ISO and lens’s widest aperture, then tweaking the exposure and repeating until I get it right. I’ve also found that in the near total darkness of a moonless night, these test exposures are the best way to ensure my composition and focus are okay. Once I have my exposure, composition, and focus right (it usually takes two or three images), I figure out how many stops of light my desired shutter speed (usually around thirty minutes) adds to my successful test exposure, then subtract an equal amount of light through a combination of aperture and ISO reductions. (I’ll try to post a more thorough tutorial on my approach to star trails soon.)
I photographed the above bristlecone pine against backdrop of streaking stars with three friends who were light painting the tree—sweeping the beam of a bright flashlight across the trunk and branches for the first few seconds of exposure to illuminate the tree’s weathered wood enough for their cameras to capture the exquisite detail. But all my images use only natural light, so I opted for a silhouette, positioning myself as low as I could get to juxtapose as much of the tree against the sky as possible. I started my exposure as soon as the others’ light painting ended (no more than ten seconds), and for the next twenty-two minutes the four of us reclined there at nearly 11,000 feet, watching the sky and waiting for the exposure to complete. We talked and laughed some, but mostly we just appreciated a sky dense with stars and silence so complete (and foreign) that it almost hurt my ears. We were well down the road toward our hotel in Bishop before my camera finished its processing, and it wasn’t until I was able to view the image on my laptop that I knew I’d had a success.
Photographic reality: Accumulate light
Posted on May 27, 2012
Moonbow and Big Dipper, Yosemite Falls, Yosemite
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce your reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The fourth installment of my series on photographic reality.)
Before getting too frustrated with your camera’s limited dynamic range, remember that it can also do things with light that your eyes can’t. While we humans experience the world by serially processing an infinite number of discrete instants in real time, a camera accumulates each instant, storing and assembling them into a single additive frame. The result, among other things, is a view into human darkness that reveals “invisible,” albeit very real, detail and color.
Nothing illustrates this benefit better than a moonlight image, particularly one that reveals a “moonbow.” Several years ago I photographed Yosemite Falls by the light of a full moon a couple of hours after sunset. While there was enough light to see the fall and my immediate surroundings, the world was dark and colorless. Knowing the possibility of a moonbow existed, but unable to see it, I positioned myself with my shadow (cast by the moonlight) pointing more or less in the direction of the fall and dialed in an exposure long enough to make the scene nearly daylight bright. An extremely wide, vertical composition included the Big Dipper high overhead, as if it was the Yosemite Falls’ source.
The result (above) is nothing like what my eyes saw, but it really is what my camera saw. The processing to complete this image involved cooling the color temperature in the raw processor to a more night-like blue; noise reduction to clean up the relatively long, relatively high ISO capture; a little (mostly futile) attempt to moderate the vertical distortion caused by the wide focal length; a slight wiggle in Curves to darken the sky and pop the stars; mild dodging and burning to even tones; some desaturation of the sky (I swear); and selective detail sharpening, avoiding the clouds and darkest shadows.
Photographic Reality: See the light
Posted on May 21, 2012
Crescent and Oaks at Dusk, Sierra Foothills, California
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce your reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The third installment of my series on photographic reality.)
Dynamic range
One of photographers’ most frequent complaints is their camera’s limited “dynamic range,” it’s inability to capture the full range of light visible to the human eye. To understand photographic dynamic range, imagine light as water you’re trying to capture from a tap–if the human eye can handle a bucket-full of light, a camera will only capture a coffee cup. Any additional light reaching your sensor simply overflows, registering as pure white.
Limited dynamic range isn’t a problem when a scene is lit by omnidirectional, shadowless light. But while I can’t speak for other planets, here on Earth we’re illuminated by only one sun. Since most Earthlings prefer blue skies and brilliant, (unidirectional) sunshine that buries everything that’s not directly lit in dark shadows. Fortunately, human vision has evolved to the point where we can see detail in shadows and sunlight simultaneously.
Cameras haven’t evolved quite so far–on sunny days, photographers must choose between photographing what’s in the shade or what’s in direct sunlight. Exposing to capture detail in the shadows brings in so much light that everything in sunlight is overexposed; exposing to avoid overexposure of sunlit subjects doesn’t permit enough light to see what’s in the shadows.
Managing the light
Experienced photographers understand their camera’s limited dynamic range and take steps to mitigate it. For example, artificial light (such as a flash) can be used to fill shadows, or multiple exposures (covering a scene’s range of light) can be digitally blended into one image. But as a natural-light landscape photographer, I don’t even own a flash (really), and given that I only photograph scenes I can capture with a single exposure, I also never blend exposures.
The simplest solution for me is to avoid harsh, midday light. Full shade (absolutely no direct light) works, and a layer of clouds that spreads sunlight over the entire sky illuminates the landscape with even (low contrast), shadowless light that’s a joy to photograph. And the low, very early or very late light that occurs just after sunrise or before sunset has been subdued enough by its long journey through the thick atmosphere that the contrast falls into a camera’s manageable range. I’m also a huge advocate of graduated good old fashioned neutral density filters to reduce the difference between a bright sky and darker foreground.
Less is more
The best photography often results from subtraction. Photographers who merely take steps to make their camera’s world more like their own miss a great opportunity to show aspects of the world easily missed by the human experience. In the right hands, a camera’s limited light capturing ability can be used to emphasize special aspects of nature and eliminate distractions.
Exposing to hold the color in bright sky or water can eliminate unlit distractions and render shaded subjects in shape-emphasizing silhouette. And compositions that feature brightly backlit, translucent flowers and leaves explode with natural color that stands out against a shaded, black background.
Whether the image is a silhouetted mountain or translucent dogwood, the camera’s rendering is nothing like your experience of the scene. But it is a true rendering from the camera’s perspective, achieved without digital manipulation.
For example
Daybreak, El Capitan and Half Dome, Yosemite
Last week I rose at 4:00 a.m. to photograph a thin crescent moon rising above Half Dome almost an hour before sunrise. It was one of those, “I’m witnessing the most beautiful thing on Earth” moments, and I couldn’t believe no one else was there to enjoy it. I arrived about fifteen minutes before I expected the moon to rise, more than enough time to set up one tripod with my 1DS III 100-400 lens bulls-eyed on Half Dome at 400 mm. Another tripod had my 5D III and 24-105 composed to include El Capitan and Half Dome (above).
When the moon arrived I gave the scene just enough light to reveal the rich blue in the twilight sky. At that exposure the thin sliver of moon was completely overexposed (no lunar detail), a crescent of pure white that stands out boldly against the dark blue sky. A few stars pop through the darkness as well.
My eyes had adjusted to the predawn light enough for me to barely discern the trees and granite in Yosemite Valley below, and the rising sun had already started to wash out some of the sky’s color. But at the exposure I chose, my camera saw only Yosemite’s iconic skyline, El Capitan on the left and Half Dome on the right, as distinct black shapes against the cool blue sky. Rendering the image this way reduces erases the rocks and trees that add nothing to the scene, reducing this special Yosemite moment to its most compelling elements, color and shape.
Autumn Light, Yosemite: Here I metered on the brightest part of the backlit leaves, slightly underexposing to capture the leaves’ exquisite gold and turn the shaded background to complementary shades that range from dark green to nearly black. A small aperture softened dots of sky to small jewels of light.
Up next: Accumulate light
Photographic reality: Framing infinity
Posted on May 16, 2012
Snow and Autumn Leaves, Yosemite
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The second installment of my series on photographic reality.)
If you’ve ever tried to point out to someone a small detail in nature that pleases you, perhaps you’ve experienced a conversation like this:
You: “Look at that!”
Friend: “What?”
You: “Those leaves—look at the frost on those leaves.”
Friend: “What leaves?”
You: “There on the log—with the snow.”
Friend: “Those dead ones? Yeah, cool. Man, I can’t believe I ate all those fries at lunch.”
You: “Whatever.” Sigh.
It’s really great to enjoy nature, to take in all of its infinite, three dimensional, multi-sensory splendor: its smells, sounds, depth, and motion. But all this input is a lot to process, and because everybody interacts with the world a little differently, each person is drawn to different things—what moves you might be overlooked by others. If only there were some way to show others what you see. Hmmm….
Unlike us humans, a still camera experiences the world in single-sensory, discrete frames. Rather than being a disadvantage, a camera’s “limitations” provide an opportunity to isolate whatever aspects of a scene that moves you, and to remove extraneous elements that distract. In other words, the camera’s field of vision, determined by you, has finite boundaries that make a frame in which you can organize relationships and eliminate distractions through careful selection of your lens’s distance (or focal length) and direction.
The golden leaves in the above image were three among thousands dotting the forest floor on this November morning near Cathedral Beach in Yosemite. I wanted to juxtapose fall and winter, and reveal the leaves’ frosty fringe. A wide frame would have more closely represented the entirety of the scene as I experienced it, but without something to anchor the frame, I knew viewers’ eyes would wander and they’d be unsure of my intent.
So I put on my 100mm macro lens and moved closer, finding this trio of leaves on a log, surrounded by patches of snow. I started by positioning myself so none of the leaves merged—that each stood by itself, balanced in the frame. Framing the leaves tightly eliminated the rest of the world, giving you no choice but to only look at what I wanted you to see. F14 and careful focusing gave me enough depth of field to make the leaves and log sharp with the background distractions blurred to insignificance.
Up next: See the light
Photographic reality: Your camera’s vision
Posted on May 12, 2012
Floating Dogwood, Yosemite
1/160 second
F/4
ISO 400
176 mm
“Photography’s gift isn’t the ability to reproduce your reality, it’s the ability to expand it.”
(The first installment of my series on photographic reality.)
When I hear a photographer say “That’s exactly what I saw when I was there,” I cringe. Not only is capturing human reality in a photograph impossible (really), attempting to do so is so limiting. I’m a strong advocate of “honest” photography, photography that depicts a natural truth without digital deception, but photographic truth isn’t the same as human truth, a fact photographers should celebrate, not deny. Embracing your camera’s reality opens the door to revealing nature in ways humans can’t.
Leveraging your camera’s reality starts with understanding that “reality” is in fact a moving target defined by the medium experiencing it. The human eye’s version of reality is experienced within its narrow confines on the electromagnetic spectrum, limited to only those wavelengths between (about) 400 and 750 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter—i.e., really, really small). An x-ray machine’s reality is .01 to 10 nanometers. But if you’ve ever seen an infrared image, you saw another version of reality, this time in the 3,000-14,000 nanometer range. Even your smartphone and microwave oven stake out their own reality turf on the very same electromagnetic spectrum.
My point isn’t to overwhelm you with scientific minutia (this won’t be on the test), it’s to jar you from your human-centric view of the universe. While a camera records light (more or less) within the same range of the electromagnetic spectrum registered by your eyes, a camera’s sensor responds to those wavelength’s a little differently, and it doesn’t benefit from the stereoscopic vision and cerebral processor that conveys depth and motion and adjusts in real time as light and focus needs dictate. And a camera’s sensor can’t handle the same range of light our eyes can, In other words, it’s impossible for a camera to record the world exactly like being there. Thank goodness.
Understanding and controlling the way your camera “sees” allows you to tap its unique vision and emphasize overlooked, unappreciated aspects of the natural world. On the other hand, photographers who see the world only with their own eyes, who use Photoshop or other digital tools to bludgeon their images into something closer to their own reality (or worse, into a manufactured digital reality), rarely add to their viewers’ perception of nature.
Get focused
The camera’s vision differs from yours in many ways. In upcoming posts I’ll cover confining borders, dynamic range, motion, time, and depth. But because I need to start somewhere, I thought I’d begin with an often unappreciated difference: focus. Not only do your eyes have a very wide focus range, they adjust focus (virtually) instantly, responding to a command from your brain in ways your not even conscious of to give you the impression that your entire scene is in crisp focus throughout. The camera, on the other hand, captures the current focus in a static instant. And the reciprocity of shutter speed and aperture make for sometimes impossible choices when trying maximize depth of field in limited light.
Photographers jump through lots of hoops to overcome limited depth of field and more closely approximate their own experience of world. Tiny apertures, tilt-shift lenses, and blended images will do it, albeit with trade-offs. And when all else fails, we’ll bump our ISO into the noisy stratosphere. All that is well and good, but let’s not forget that there’s no rule that says your capture must mimic your experience. Sometimes we can use our camera’s ability to severely limit depth of field to our advantage by eliminating distractions and turning uninteresting backgrounds into a complementary canvas of color and shape.
For example
Floating Dogwood, Yosemite
Photographing near the Pohono Bridge in Yosemite, my eyes were treated to an overwhelming variety of input: countless dogwood blooms floating in dappled light; the swollen Merced River, deep and green or fast and frothing; oblivious cars and focused photographers; all this beneath a boring, pale blue sky. (Not to mention the sounds and smells of outdoors.) All of this input demanded attention, but I just wanted to convey the dogwood’s elegant grace in the context of its simple, verdant setting—everything else was superfluous.
While my human senses took in everything with razor sharpness, focusing close with a telephoto lens and large aperture allowed me isolate a single flower, reducing the rest of the visual world to a soft canvas of variegated green. Careful positioning and framing juxtaposed other blurred, complementary elements to provide location context. And using my camera’s inability to capture the range of light my eyes saw, I exposed for the brightly lit dogwood, turning everything in shade into a background ranging from dark green to nearly black.
This is image nothing like what my eyes saw, but it is what my camera saw (minimal Lightroom/Photoshop processing). Using my camera’s vision, I was able to eliminate distractions and isolate only the aspects of the scene I wanted to share. In my next few blog posts I’ll write more about leveraging your camera’s vision to reveal nature’s beauty in ways that are different, but no less real, than being there.
Up next, Framing infinity.
It’s personal
Posted on May 8, 2012
Top of the World, Glacier Point, Yosemite
Some of my oldest, fondest Yosemite memories involve Glacier Point: Craning my neck from Camp Curry, waiting for the orange glow perched on Glacier Point’s fringe to grow into a 3,000 foot ribbon of fire; stretching on tiptoes to peer over the railing to see the toy cars and buildings in miniature Yosemite Valley; standing on the deck of the old Glacier Point Hotel my father’s breathless excitement at the sudden shimmering rainbow arcing across Half Dome’s face.
The National Park Service doused the Firefall in 1968 and my father died almost eight years ago. While El Capitan’s Horsetail Fall delivers a no less spectacular (albeit less reliable) February show across the valley, and my father’s rainbow image is a vivid reminder on my mom’s living room wall, those Glacier Point memories are irreplaceable.
Glacier Point closes with the first significant snow each fall, and doesn’t open until the snow melts in late spring–avoiding summer’s crowds and interminable blue skies means I don’t make it to Glacier Point much anymore. So I was thrilled to learn that this year’s dry winter enabled the NPS to open Glacier Point on April 20, early enough for me to share it with last week’s workshop group.
Because I already had plans for Mirror Lake, moonrise, and moonlight photography later in the workshop, I decided that the workshop’s first sunset was the best time time for the Glacier Point trip. Stopping first at Washburn Point just a short distance up the hill, we were treated to a harbinger of what was to come later–a mix of wave clouds and alto-cumulus above the Sierra crest to the east, and wonderfully warm light on Half Dome. Not knowing how long the light would last, I hustled the group to Glacier Point, arriving soon enough to get a front row seat for what turned out to be the best sunset experience I’ve ever had at Glacier Point.
The light held out all the way to sunset, warming from amber to pink and finally red, painting the sky and saturating the granite landscape with shades of magenta. As it turned out we had many other photogenic moments (dogwood, a moonbow, and the rise of the “super” moon above Yosemite Valley) in the workshop’s remaining three days, but this sunset on Glacier Point will be my fondest memory.
That’s Half Dome front and center, Cloud’s Rest behind it to the right, and Nevada (top) and Vernal Falls in the lower right.
Returning to the scene of the crime
Posted on May 7, 2012
Bridalveil Dogwood, Yosemite
Canon EOS 10D
1/15 second
F22
ISO 100
48 mm
My Bridalveil Dogwood image is eight years old now. It remains one of my most popular images, and is still a personal favorite because it represents so many of my personal goals for each image:
- Use camera’s unique vision to reveal nature’s frequently overlooked details
- Manage the front-to-back plane to create the illusion of depth
- Guide the eye and create location context with selective focus
- Render the world in ways that allow others to imagine a world without human influence
My goal that morning, crystalized on the drive to Yosemite, was to juxtapose a sharply focused, foreground dogwood flower against a Yosemite icon softly focused in the background. I wandered Yosemite Valley in a light rain for a couple of hours before stumbling upon this blooming dogwood tree with Bridalveil Fall in the background. To frame Bridalveil with this pair of flowers I had to drag a log over to stand on, and extend my tripod’s center post much farther than I’m comfortable with (the center post is not terribly stable). An extension tube enabled a close focus that exaggerated the dogwood and softened Bridalveil Fall. Focused that close, getting Bridalveil sharp enough to be recognizable required me to stop down to f22. Fortunately there was no trace of wind.
Someone recently told me they overheard a couple of photographers stalking this tree, talking about my dogwood image, hoping they could duplicate it. While I was flattered, this need to replicate images makes me scratch my head. It’s what creates tripod traffic jams in Antelope Canyon on sunny days, at Mesa Arch every sunrise, and beneath Horsetail Fall each February, to name a few. I’m not saying I don’t have my share of derivative images, but they just don’t give me the satisfaction I get from creating something that I feel is uniquely my own. I tell my workshop students that images that move them to action are great, but they should be the starting point and never the goal. In other words, take an image that excites you and find put your own creative twist to it.
For example, while I have no desire to duplicate any image (my own or anyone else’s), I do return to “my” dogwood tree because I love the way it aligns so perfectly with Bridalveil Fall. A couple of years ago I was in Yosemite during an early snow storm. Many (shocked) colorful fall leaves remained on the trees, suddenly fringed with snow. Wanting to create something that showed the collision of fall and winter and still said Yosemite, I thought of this dogwood. Sure enough, I found a host of colorful leaves clinging like Christmas ornaments and composed something that achieved my goal.
Fall in to Winter, Yosemite
The dogwood were blooming beautifully during my Yosemite workshop that ended Saturday, so one morning I took my group to the Bridalveil dogwood tree. Of course the conditions were entirely different, but from what I saw on several LCDs and during the workshop image review, lots of new images were created. I even tried my own hand at something different, breaking out my 100-400 lens and isolating a sunlit branch wide open at extreme telephoto. I haven’t had a chance to see whether I captured anything worthwhile, but I’ll let you know….
Making lemonade at the Grand Canyon
Posted on April 30, 2012
Last Light, Desert View, Grand Canyon
We’ve all heard Dale Carnegie’s trite maxim, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Of course these pithy statements become popular because they resonate with so many people, photographers included. And it seems that not only are the photographers who adopt this attitude more productive, they’re just plain happier. For example….
Few pursuits are more frustrating than trying to predict Mother Nature’s fickle whims. Last week I was in Northern Arizona co-leading Don Smith’s Northern Arizona workshop. On our first night we pulled in to Desert View to find everything in place for a vivid, colorful, cliché Grand Canyon sunset: billowing cumulus clouds, patches of blue sky, and a gaping hole for the setting sun on the western horizon.
The only problem was, for some inexplicable reason, the color never materialized–the sun dropped, the light faded, and we were teased with no more than a few whispers of pink. For anyone who had put all their eggs in the brilliant sunset basket, this would have been a major disappointment. But (in my opinion) what we did get was even better.
Anticipating a colorful sunset, I had set up my composition accordingly. I was patiently waiting when, just before reaching the horizon, the sun slipped beneath a cloud and for about 90 seconds painted the canyon’s rim with the brightest, warmest light imaginable. When the light popped I quickly jettisoned my colorful sky composition and scanned the rim for a subject painted by the sunlight. When my eyes fell on this tree I quickly evaluated the scene for the best way to emphasize the tree and foreground light.
While the tree and light were front and center, the storm clouds overhead and Colorado River below made excellent background complements I knew I needed to include. I started by aligning myself with the tree’s branches framing the Colorado. Moving as far back as the terrain permitted, I zoomed to fill the frame and compress the foreground/background distance. With a 67mm focal length, depth of field was tricky. My hyperfocal app told me that the hyperfocal distance at f16 was around 30 feet, meaning if I focus 30 feet away, I could be sharp from 15 feet to infinity. I refined my composition, removed my camera from the tripod, focused on a tree about 30 feet away, returned the camera to the tripod, and clicked.
I’m a big advocate of surveying a scene, anticipating the light and conditions, and finding compositions before the conditions occur. But the moral here is to not become so locked in to a plan that you fail to seize unexpected opportunities. In hindsight I realize I should have anticipated this light too–I had a clear view of the sun’s path to western horizon, but I was so giddy with excitement about the color that was “sure” to materialize that I almost missed this other opportunity.
As it turned out, at Hopi Point the next evening we had the opposite experience–clouds on the western horizon promised to block the color-generating sunlight, but those of us who waited 15 minutes after sunset were (somehow) treated to a neon sunset that had the whole shuttle bus buzzing all the way back to the village (more on this in a future post). Maybe if I were as familiar with the Grand Canyon as I am with Yosemite, I’d be better at predicting its conditions, but until that happens, I’ll just keep guzzling the lemonade.
Looking a little closer
Posted on April 20, 2012
Surf and Stone, Hana Highway beach, Maui
My print sales tell me that it’s the familiar, dramatic vistas that people are most interested in (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but what I most like photographing is the often overlooked details that make nature special. While I do my share of landscape retreads–because there are reasons these scenes are popular and I’m still a sucker for natural beauty–when left to my own devices, I could (and do) shoot stuff like this intimate Maui beach scene all day.
Because Maui and the Big Island have experienced the most recent volcanic activity (it’s ongoing on the Big Island), scenes like this are much more common than they are on the other major islands. I found these volcanic stones, polished smooth by sand and surf, on a small beach near Hana. I composed to capture the sea/land interaction that’s so easily overlooked in favor of the more dramatic surroundings. Once I found a composition I liked, I clicked twenty frames recording a variety of wave actions at different shutter speeds.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 