Grand Canyon Lightning 2024: Part 1
Posted on August 11, 2024
Fire in the Hole, Grand Canyon Lightning
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 50
f/18
1/6 second
Back at it—the chase is on
Every year I schedule one or two (and one time three) photo workshops for the peak weeks of the Southwest US monsoon. Despite the summer crowds (which I’ve become pretty good at avoiding), I’d argue that monsoon season is the best time to photograph Grand Canyon. Given the monsoon’s frequent mix of thunderstorms and sunlight, adding colorful sunrises/sunsets and rainbows to Grand Canyon’s splendor are always a real possibility. And photographing the Milky Way above Grand Canyon is a true highlight for everyone. But despite these undeniable visual treats, more than anything else, foremost in almost everyone’s mind is lightning.
Each time I start with a new workshop group (that is clearly brimming with lightning aspirations), I’m reminded of the first time I tried chasing lightning—both the extreme disappointment of failure, and (especially) the ultimate euphoria of success. So even with hundreds (thousands?) of lightning images to my name, reviving these memories help me live vicariously through the joy and disappointment of my workshop students.
Though (or maybe because) I’ve never lived anywhere that got much lightning, I’ve been fascinated by lightning since I was a child. (Lightning is so rare here, when Californians hear thunder, instead of sheltering safely like sane people, we run outside so we don’t miss anything.) So I guess it makes sense that ever since I picked up a camera, I’ve dreamed of photographing lightning.
In the beginning…
In 2012, Don Smith and I drove to Grand Canyon to try and make that happen. I mean, how hard could it be? Armed with our cameras and virgin Lightning Triggers, on that first trip we endured enough frustration—lots of lightning that for a variety of rookie reasons, we couldn’t seem to capture—our initial dreams of dozens of lightning images became prayers for just one.
Lightning Strike, Zoroaster Temple and Brahma Temple, Grand Canyon (2012)
Those prayers were answered many times over toward the end of the visit, when a surge in monsoon thunderstorms on and near the South Rim coincided with just enough of a bump in experience (and humility) to equal success. On our last day, so thrilled were we by our South Rim lightning experience, that instead of heading straight home as planned, we detoured four hours in the opposite direction to the North Rim. There, in just a few hours, we captured even more new lightning, more than enough to energize our long drive back to California. I was hooked.
After those beginner’s ups and downs, my lightning success has increased each year. Of course when no lightning happens, there isn’t much I can do about it, but learning to interpret the forecasts (including the fairly technical NWS forecast discussions), understanding the patterns of monsoon storm development and behavior in and around Grand Canyon, increased familiarity with my Lightning Trigger, and (finally) finding an app that reliably alerts me about lightning far outside my range of vision, has significantly increased my lightning success rate.
Lightning Trigger love
For daytime lightning, I can’t overstate the importance of a reliable lightning sensor with range. First, don’t even think about trying to photograph lightning in daylight without a device that detects the lightning and triggers your camera. I know people try the see-and-react technique, but success with this approach is mostly luck—if you do get a bolt, it was almost certainly not the one that made you press the shutter, it was a secondary or tertiary (or later) bolt that followed the initial one. And one of the most common mistakes I see aspiring daylight lightning shooters make is adding an extreme neutral density filter to achieve the long exposures that yield so much success at night. But night lightning shows up because of the extreme contrast between the brilliant lightning against black surroundings; that contrast disappears in daylight, so you end up with a many-second/minute exposure with lightning bolts that last a minuscule fraction of a second, rendering the lightning faint or (more likely) invisible.
Fortunately, the lightning sensor Don and I started with has turned out to be the best, saving us lots of frustration, research, and money. You’ll find many lightning sensor options, most of which I’ve encountered in a workshop, but the only one that I’ve seen work reliably is the Lightning Trigger (though people use the name as a generic, this is the only one that can use it legally). There are fancier sensors, and cheaper sensors, but I’ve found none that combine reliability and range as well as the Lightning Trigger. (I’m not saying that the others don’t work, I’m saying that I’ve never seen any that work as well as the Lightning Trigger, so even though I get no kickback or other benefit from pushing it, the Lightning Trigger is the only lightning sensor I recommend.)
Playing the odds
On a textbook monsoon day, the storms start firing south of the canyon (around Flagstaff and Williams) mid-/late-morning, and move northward as the sun ascends, usually arriving at the canyon late morning or early afternoon. While waiting for the storms to arrive, I rely on my Lightning Tracker Pro app to monitor the approaching activity and get ahead of it, especially when I’m on the South Rim, where my groups stay about 10 minutes from the rim. (It’s easier on the North Rim because our cabins are right at the rim.)
Chasing lightning means obsessive monitoring of weather forecasts. And counterintuitively, my workshop groups have the most success not when the forecast calls for lots of thunderstorms, but when the thunderstorm odds are in the 20 to 40 percent range. That’s because Grand Canyon has a multitude of the vistas with broad, distant views up, down, and across the canyon. These views, combined with the Lightning Trigger’s incredible range (I’ve used mine to capture daylight lightning more than 50 miles away), enables us to safely photograph distant storms—storms usually so far away that we don’t hear the thunder.
So a 20 percent chance of thunderstorms means that (very roughly) 20 percent of the forecast area will get lightning, so it’s usually not difficult to stand on the rim and find lightning happening somewhere within the Lightning Trigger’s range. On the other hand, when the forecast calls for a 50 percent or higher chance of thunderstorms, we do indeed get much more rain and lightning, but usually there’s too much to photograph safely because you never want to be photographing the storm you’re in.
Let’s go fishing
As thrilling as chasing lightning might sound, it’s really about 95 percent arms folded, toe-tapping, just-plain-standing-around-scanning-the-horizon, suddenly interrupted by random bursts of pandemonium. Often, (and despite years of experience) after all that anticipation-infused waiting, the response to the first lightning bolt is either: 1) Crap, the lightning is way over there; or 2) CRAP! The lightning is right here! What ensues is a Keystone Cops frenzy of camera bag flinging, tire screeching, gear tossing, tripod expanding, camera cursing, Lightning Trigger fumbling bedlam. Followed by more waiting. And waiting. And waiting….
I’ve always found the waiting part of lightning photography a lot like fishing—spiced up by the understanding that these fish have the ability to strike you dead without warning. Both fishing and lightning chasing are an intoxicating mix of serene communing with nature, with an undercurrent of giddy anticipation. And whether you’re fishing or trying to photograph lightning, a strike is far from a guarantee that you’ll reel anything in.
Just as fish somehow slip the hook, seeing a lightning bolt is no guarantee that my camera recorded it. Some of my lightning “the one that got away” stories, especially when I was just starting, turned out to be something I did wrong (and my list of stupid mistakes is too long, and embarrassing, to detail in public), but usually it’s simply because lightning can sometimes come and go before even the fastest camera can respond.
One frustration that I’ve learned to deal with is that when a Lightning Trigger is attached and turned on, the camera is in its shutter half-pressed mode (to allow the absolute fastest response), which disables many/most (varies with the camera) controls and the LCD image review—and I guarantee that the surest way to ensure another lightning strike is to turn off your Lightning Trigger to review the last frame, because the instant you do, a spectacular triple-strike will fire right in the middle of your frame. Guaranteed. (This is an extension of the axiom every photographer knows: The best way to make something you’ve been waiting for happen, is to put away your camera gear.) And though there’s no way to prove it, I think we all know that each time we pull the line out of the water to make sure the worm is still there, the “big one” swims right by.
Better late than never
This year I only did one Grand Canyon Monsoon workshop, and true to form, nearly got carpal tunnel scrolling through the weather forecasts in the weeks leading up to the trip. One week in advance, the conditions looked promising, but as the workshop approached, I was alarmed to see it trending drier with each forecast. By the time we started, the NWS was promising clear skies from start to finish.
I’ve seen forecasts like this before, and while they often do come true, I’ve also seen them change on a dime. I also found hope in the forecasts for Flagstaff and Williams to the south (that’s right, I don’t just obsessively scroll the Grand Canyon forecasts, but the nearby forecasts as well), which had thunderstorm chances in the 20-30 percent range all week. This told me that the moisture was nearby, and only a very slight change would send it the 70 or so miles north to Grand Canyon.
The evening of the workshop’s first day (Monday), a few clouds were added to the Thursday forecast—no rain, but at least the moisture was moving in the right direction. Then, in the forecast released Tuesday evening, we were “promised” a 20 percent chance of rain on Friday. With each subsequent forecast (they’re updated several times a day), it appeared things were trending in the right direction for the end of the week and beyond. Unfortunately, the workshop ended Friday morning. So I encouraged everyone with flexibility in their schedule to extend their stay at least through Friday afternoon, and about half the group was able to do it—including Curt (the photographer assisting me) and me.
This workshop enjoyed beautiful sunrises and sunsets, including a real jaw-dropper at Cape Royal on Thursday evening, plus a pretty great Milky Way shoot the night before. And a few in the group stayed up late on Thursday night and got some nice, though fairly distant, night lightning from the Grand Canyon Lodge deck. But those of us who opted to stay an extra day hung our lightning hopes on the Friday and Saturday forecasts.
Much to the consternation of those who added a night hoping for lightning, Friday morning dawned cloudless. But I reassured everyone that this is actually a good thing (it really is), because clear skies maximize the surface heating that fuels the convection thunderstorms require. Though the workshop officially ended after that morning’s sunrise shoot, I promised them I’d be around and happy to help. For starters, I created a text thread that enabled me keep them up to date on the thunderstorm development.
Then I camped out in the Grand Canyon Lodge Sun Room, keeping one (or more) eye on the spectacular view across the canyon to the South Rim and beyond. Late morning my lightning app started reporting strikes north of Williams, less than 60 miles due south. A little before 1:00 p.m. clusters of towering cumulus started blooming just south of the rim, and I knew the lightning wouldn’t be far behind—right on schedule. I texted the group that it’s go-time, then started setting up.
I captured my first lightning strike at 1:15, and between then and 4:00 p.m. captured a total of 59 frames with lightning. I know the others who stayed also captured many nice strikes. Though first bolts were relatively distant, things started to get really good a little before 2:00. I can’t express how much fun it is to be set up and ready, waiting for the next strike, and hearing the exclamations from the group when one hits.
The first strikes started behind the South Rim, a little east (left) of straight across, more or less in the direction of (and beyond) Grandview Point. Gradually the activity moved to the right and closer, approaching the rim, with the strikes increasing in frequency, proximity, and size as they moved. The quantity and volume of the exclamations increased correspondingly. In the nearly two hours of peak activity, the best stuff happened south and southwest of our position.
The two things that I wish for most in a lightning image is a bolt that lands inside the canyon, and capturing a bolt’s actual point of impact. This image checks both boxes. You can clearly see the lightning strike several hundred feet below the rim, and while it might not be clear in this downsized jpeg, my full-size original clearly shows the red/orange point of impact, as well as a fainter branch landing even farther down.
Another thing I love about this image in particular (and one other very similar capture titled “Rim Shot” in the gallery below), is the distance it traveled, and the circuitous route it took. Those familiar with Grand Canyon might be interested to know that this bolt emerges from the clouds more or less above Pima Point on Hermit’s Rest Road, and after more random direction changes than a frightened squirrel, finally smacks the wall a few hundred feet below Yavapai Point, about 5 horizontal miles away. Pretty cool.
Epilogue
Given our successful Friday, Curt and I hit the road for home Saturday morning. But I did keep in contact with others, and the reports were that the Saturday lightning was at least as good as Friday.
In a few days I’ll post Part 2, with more images from this day, plus an updated explanation of the science of lightning.
Join me for next year’s Grand Canyon lightning chase
Lots of Lightning
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
The Joy of Sunrise
Posted on August 5, 2024
Grand View, Sunrise at Grandview Point, Grand Canyon
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 100
f/18
1/3 second
Most people who rise before the sun do it because they have to. And sadly, because we’ve been so conditioned by a lifetime of rising for school and work, rushing to “pressing” obligations, the joys of early mornings never seem to outweigh the pleasure of staying in bed.
While I won ‘t pretend that I truly relish a 4:30 a.m. alarm, not only have some of my favorite images come before the sun (or just after), some of my very best memories have as well. I mean, what’s not to love about witnessing twilight’s soft, cool light slowly warmed by the approaching sun, or breathing in the cleanest air of the day, and simply being alone with the purest sounds and smells of nature?
For those who haven’t learned to appreciate the joy of the pre-sunrise world, let me help you reset your bias with a few tips for making early mornings happen:
- For the full experience, plan to be at your spot at least 45 minutes before your chosen location’s “official” (flat horizon at that latitude and longitude) sunrise. The eastern horizon will already be brightening noticeably by then, but you’ll be early enough to see the brighter stars gradually snuffed out. (This is for mid-latitude locations—twilight starts early and lasts longer in the high latitudes, and starts later and ends sooner in the low latitudes.)
- Get organized before going to bed. Lay out your clothes, assemble your gear, make sure everything’s charged, and prime the coffee maker. You do all this so you can…
- Set your alarm for the absolute minimum time necessary to get ready. Trust me: Your commitment will be much stronger at bedtime than when the alarm blares—the less time you have to delay, the less the chance you’ll lose your resolve to the cozy warmth of your bed. A last-minute alarm also gives you the maximum amount of sleep possible. And don’t forget, one of the best things about being up when no one else is up and it’s dark is that it really doesn’t matter how you look.
- Under no circumstances use the snooze button on your alarm. Rising early is like ripping off a Band-Aid—the sooner you get it over with, the happier you’ll be; the longer you drag it out, the harder it is.
Of course the joy of sunrise isn’t limited to photography—in fact, the more you can consider any images a bonus, the more you’ll appreciate the experience itself. And ironically, in the long run, lowering your photography expectations will result in more great images. That’s because when your prime goal isn’t photography, you’ll go out even when the conditions don’t look good, and put yourself in position for Nature’s frequent surprises.
Three Strikes, Lightning and Rainbow from Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon
Some of my most memorable sunrises have happened on mornings I’d have skipped if I’d relied solely on weather reports, or on the way things looked at bedtime or when I peeked out the window after the alarm. I could cite many examples, but the perhaps the most memorable came the morning at Grand Canyon when I captured (among many, many images) three simultaneous lightning bolts and small rainbow fragment in a single, 1/3 second frame.
The weather report for this morning had called for clear skies, with no chance of rain. With photography expectations low, Don Smith and I headed out to meet our group for the workshop’s final shoot, simply looking forward the sensory pleasures of a Grand Canyon sunrise. So boring was the forecast, I’d considered just leaving my camera in the room, and several in the group opted to stay in bed. But on the walk to Bright Angel Point, we could see the lightning illuminating the darkness above the South Rim and quickened our pace. Turns out there was no reason to rush as for the next two hours we enjoyed a lightning show started in the east and slowly moved westward along the rim, and was still going when the storm ultimately crossed the canyon and moved out of our view.
Last Tuesday my alarm woke me 4:10 a.m., and with no clouds in the forecast, I won’t say that sunrise surprise wasn’t on my mind as my feet hit the floor. And while we didn’t get lightning, we did get enough clouds to catch sunrise color above Grandview Point. For most of the morning I was content to just enjoy the peaceful ambiance, but as the sun approached I returned to my car to get my camera bag.
I’d set my sights on a solitary tree standing sentinel atop a limestone pedestal a hundred yards or so down the trail, and saw an opportunity use it as the third point in a visual triangle that would also include the Colorado River and the rising sun. And with an opening on the horizon, I figured I may as well turn the sun into a sunstar.
Because the sun rises surprisingly quickly and the ideal window for a sunstar is measured in seconds, not minutes, I wanted to be completely set up and ready before the sun arrived. After a little moving around and zooming through my viewfinder, I decided on a composition with my 24-105 lens that used a focal length of around 50mm. Unfortunately, while the 24-105 is my most frequently used lens, it’s not the best sunstar lens, especially zoomed out to 50mm.
For a good sunstar, I went with f/18, which was also was helpful for my composition’s challenging depth of field. I pulled out my hyperfocal app and determined that at f/18 and 50mm, the hyperfocal distance was about 15 feet. The tree was about 20 feet away, but since hyperfocal data uses old parameters (based on 8×10 print viewed from about a foot), when possible I try to factor in a buffer that increases my margin for error. In this case I knew focusing 30 feet away would still put the tree well within the zone of “acceptable sharpness,” while giving me more distant sharpness.
The problem was, there was nothing in my frame that was 30 feet away, so before the sun appeared, I popped my camera off the tripod and pointed at a tree outside my frame that I guessed was about 30 feet away. I then magnified the resulting image in my viewfinder to verify the front-to-back sharpness.
Join me at the Grand Canyon
Sunrise Joy
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New Zealand Rocks
Posted on July 22, 2024
New Zealand Rocks, Lake Pukaki
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 GM
13 second2
F/18
ISO 50
(Yes it does.)
This New Zealand winter morning dawned damp and gray, with a layer of low clouds hindering the light and obscuring the peaks. Not awful for photography, but far from the spectacular color and light photographers hope for. My workshop partner Don Smith was battling a nasty (non-Covid) virus, so I was solo with the group on the morning we visited an obscure beach on the south shore of Lake Pukaki. It wasn’t lost on me that last year I was the one who had to miss this Lake Pukaki sunrise shoot with some kind of food poisoning. I don’t know what it is about this spot, but I’m pretty sure that in all our years of doing New Zealand workshops, these are the only two times Don or I have had to call in sick to a shoot.
Our destination was a beach we’d found many years ago—we like it not only for the foreground rocks and view of snowy peaks across the lake, but also for the pristine water that is often calm enough for glassy reflections. Another appeal is that it’s one of our discoveries—not that we’re the only ones who visit here, but despite its obvious appeal, this spot hasn’t yet made anyone’s list of New Zealand’s must-photograph destinations.
Don and I always try to offer our workshop groups a mix of photo locations, from popular to unknown. We certainly need to take our groups to all the beautiful New Zealand scenes that inspired them to travel around the world in the first place (I’m looking at you, Wanaka Tree), but we want to balance those by providing opportunities to capture New Zealand scenes that feel more uniquely their own.
Driving out in the dark this morning, I remembered our visit here a couple of years ago, when we almost couldn’t find this unmarked location because (it turned out) a few landmark trees had been removed. And since I’d missed last year’s visit here, I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how to get there, but our driver Steve was pretty confident he knew where to go, and we did indeed find it without trouble.
Pulling up in the faint light of the approaching sunrise, I could see nearby shrubs swaying in a strong breeze, dashing my hope for a reflection that might compensate for the flat sky. After giving the group a brief orientation, I guided them down to the lake and encouraged everyone to take advantage of the plentiful boulders—both the few protruding from the water, and the many clearly visible just beneath the surface.
There’s no trail from the parking area to the lake—you just have to pick your way across dry lakebed covered with more boulders. Usually this walk is just a few yards from the unpaved road where we park, but with the lake lower than usual, the lakeshore was more than 100 yards away—still not far, but definitely farther than I’d seen before. As this realization sank in, I could also see that the lower water had exposed even more rocks than usual—a small bonus.
Having arrived at the water more than a half hour before sunrise, darkness still ruled. As everyone extracted gear and set up tripods, it seemed like a good time to remind them that they are under no obligation to expose their images as dark as their eyes see the scene, and that this is a perfect opportunity to soften the churn atop the lake with long exposures. Some in the group immediately chose their own foreground rock or rocks and went straight to work, while I spent a little time going over hyperfocal focus techniques with a few people concerned about front-to-back sharpness.
Most photographers understand that stopping down (small aperture) increases depth of field, and that the wider the focal length, the greater the depth of field as well. By far the trickiest factor in maximizing front-to-back sharpness is choosing the correct focus point—focus too far, and nearby subjects will be soft; focus too close, and distant subjects will be soft.
Some photographers use seat of the pants hacks that are (slightly) better than nothing, such as focusing 1/3 of the way into the frame or 1/3 of the way into the scene (these aren’t the same thing), but they provide a false sense of focus-security while too often being wrong. The most reliable way to maximize depth of field is to use a hyperfocal app or table (remember those?) that identifies the hyperfocal point: the closest you can focus and still be sharp all the way out to infinity. But that’s not always convenient.
Lacking a hyperfocal app (or, more likely, too lazy to pull my phone out and check it), I usually start with a rough (experience based) idea of what the hyperfocal distance is for my chosen focal length and f-stop. (The more you check your hyperfocal app and apply its results, the more accurate your rough ideas will be.) Armed with that knowledge, I determine the closest thing that must be sharp (CTTMBS). If it’s clearly farther away than my estimated hyperfocal distance, my focus point doesn’t really matter (as long as it’s farther than the CTTMBS) and I just focus on the most convenient distant object.
When I think my CTTMBS is fairly close to my hyperfocal distance, but I still feel like there’s a comfortable amount of wiggle room, I just pick a spot behind CTTMBS and focus there. (Because focusing on the CTTMBS gives me worthless sharpness in front of it, at the cost of essential distant sharpness.) At that point the decision becomes, how far behind? I usually find something about 50% beyond my CTTMBS. In other words, if the CTTMBS is 10 feet away, I’ll focus about 15 feet distant; if it’s 4 feet away, I’ll pick a spot about 6 feet away.
Any time I’m not 100 percent confident with my focus point choice, I magnify the image preview in my (mirrorless) viewfinder (if you’re shooting with a DSLR, you’ll need to use the preview on your LCD, but I find that less than ideal for critical sharpness decisions), checking both my CTTMBS and a distant object.
When I’m not comfortable guessing the focus point, or when my review reveals an area of the image isn’t sharp, I suck it up and check my hyperfocal app. (And it’s possible that the CTTMBS is so close, I just can’t get there from here and the only way to achieve front-to-back sharpness is focus stacking—something my one-click paradigm doesn’t allow me to do, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it if you choose to focus stack.)
I was comfortable with my seat of the pants approach this morning. I started by identifying a group of exposed and submerged rocks that made a strong foreground for the lake and distant mountains, then positioned myself to emphasize a coherent and balanced pattern in the rocks’ relationships to one another.
By the time I was ready to start shooting, it was still dark enough to do multi-second exposures without a neutral density filter. I spent a lot of time with this group of rocks and my 16-35 lens, gradually moving closer and dropping lower as I became more familiar with the scene. Closer and wider allowed me to fill the foreground with the rocks; lower reduced the amount of open lake in the middle of my frame. When I felt like I’d exhausted the possibilities, I moved on to other nearby rock relationships.
As we all worked, the sky that had looked completely socked in when we started, began opening up, first revealing the peaks, and soon thereafter coloring the clouds with warm sunlight. With this, what had been a nice but unspectacular morning of photography took a more dramatic turn, and I rushed back to my original rock grouping that remained my favorite foreground subject.
Armed with prior knowledge, I went straight to the version of the composition I liked best on my initial pass. I dropped my camera (on my tripod, of course) down to about 18 inches above the water, and moved it to about 3 feet from the closest rock (tripod in about 4 inches of water). This close, the focal length that filled the frame left/right with rocks was around 24mm, which I knew at f/16 would give me a hyperfocal distance of around 4 feet. To increase my margin for error, I stopped down to f/18, then focused at the front of the second-closest rock (right of the nearest rock).
By this time the sky was bright enough that the only way to achieve a shutter speed long enough to smooth the choppy water was to replace my regular polarizer with my Breakthrough Filters 6-Stop Dark polarizer. This, combined with f/18 and ISO 50, enabled a more than adequate 13-second exposure—that, it turned out, also picked up slight motion blur in the clouds.
If you’ve made it this far (kudos to you), before leaving (and after checking out my gallery, of course), take the time to study this image and appreciate the color and clarity of the water. If you thought this was unique to Lake Pukaki, you’d be wrong—in this workshop our groups get to enjoy many large New Zealand South Island glacial lakes—Lake Wakatipu, Lake Te Anau, Lake Wanaka and its sister, Lake Hawea, Tasman Lake, Lake Tekapo, and Lake Pukaki—and they’re all some version of the color and clarity you see here.
Don and I return to New Zealand next year
Front to Back
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Channeling the Donner Party
Posted on July 18, 2024
Star Spangled Night, Milky Way and Tasman Lake, New Zealand
Sony a7R V
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 4000
f/1.8
20 seconds
Landscape photographers know suffering. With no control over the weather and light, we’re often forced to sacrifice comfort, sometimes even safety, in pursuit of our subjects. Cold, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, hunger—it all goes with the territory. But in the long run the successes, though never guaranteed, far outweigh the sacrifices.
So, when my wife and I scaled the short but steep trail (336 stairs—I counted) to the Tasman Lake overlook in New Zealand earlier this month, we knew it would be cold, and found out quickly that the route was treacherously icy as well. But we persevered and were rewarded with a lake view beneath the southern night sky that was almost beyond comprehension for our Northern Hemisphere brains.
Did I mention the cold? When I’m taking pictures, though I’m very much aware of the temperature, no matter how extreme, it never bothers me. For anyone with me who isn’t shooting? Not so much. But Sonya braved the frigid temps for 30 minutes—long enough to appreciate the majesty of the moment, and for me to get some nice pictures. Mission accomplished.
One of the things about planning a photo shoot in difficult conditions is anticipation and planning—not just for the shoot itself, but for all the other factors supporting it. In addition to the knowledge that the Milky Way would indeed be shining above the lake, and the moon wouldn’t be present to wash out the essential darkness, we also anticipated the possibility of an icy trail and carried a pair of Yaktrax for improved footing, made sure our lights were in working order, and had all the appropriate cold weather gear. And knowing that afternoon that we’d be driving into Aoraki / Mt. Cook National Park and possibly staying well past dark, I had the foresight (patting myself on the back) to check into our hotel in Twizel and make arrangements for dinner before embarking on our adventure.
Calling Twizel a sleepy town would be an understatement. Because our hotel locks the registration area and sends the staff home at 8:00 p.m., and most restaurants in town also close their doors at 8:00, at hotel check-in I inquired about a place in town to eat after 8:00. The woman at the front desk sent us to (raved about, in fact) a restaurant nearby. But not wanting to take her word that it would be open after 8:00, we drove over to talk to someone at the restaurant in person. When I explained to Carol, the nice lady who greeted us at the restaurant, that I wasn’t sure what time we’d be there, she said she’d just put us down for between 8:00 and 9:00. Great!
We were already getting hungry by the time we drove into the park and started our hike, but sucked it up like good photographers (well one of us at least—the other just sucked it up like a good human with a crazy partner). After our successful ascent and stay at the top, our prime emphasis on the descent was not falling on our butts, but rattling around the back of our minds was our extreme cold and hunger, and (especially) the relief waiting for us back in Twizel.
Back in town we beelined to the restaurant. Having checked the menu in advance, our mouths already watered in anticipation. It was still relatively full, but everyone was in the bar area watching the All Blacks vs. England rugby game (rugby is a religion in New Zealand, and the All Blacks are the deity of choice). There was no sign of Carol, any hostess or server, so I approached the bar and told the bartender we have a dinner reservation. He just stared at me like I’d asked where I could park my camel, finally saying with an implicit duh, “We stopped serving dinner at 8:00.” Dropping Carol’s name was met with a blank stare and a shrug. When I asked where else we might find dinner after 8:00 p.m., he just chuckled and said, “This is Twizel.”
By now it was after 8:45 and very clear that pleading with the bartender would be a waste of time, so we zipped over to town centre hoping to find something open. The only place with any sign of life was the local pub, so we parked and rushed in. Everyone here was watching the rugby game too, and try as we might, we couldn’t get enough of anyone’s attention to ask about dinner. Fortunately (or so it seemed), about then the game ended (All Blacks 16 — England 15) and the rugby zombies snapped out of their trances.
At least this time when we asked about dinner we got a little sympathy, but still no dinner. Walking back out into the cold and suddenly desperate, we remembered a gas station as we entered town—maybe we could at least find snacks there? Then we noticed a liquor store next door to the pub, a potential snack oasis in a frozen desert? Not so much. As we approached the entrance, a woman came out the front door and told us they’d just closed.
Turns out the gas station was fully automated, with no minimart, unlike pretty much every gas station in the US. So we limped back to the hotel, hoping maybe to find vending machines that would sustain us until breakfast. But with the lobby area locked tight, we had to enter through a side door that only provided access to the rooms, but none of the hotel’s other (meager) amenities.
By then we were so hungry we’d temporarily forgotten how cold we were. That is, until we turned the key in our door and walked into what surely must be a cryogenic chamber with beds. We were already accustomed to the unheated hotel hallways with temperatures that rival the temps outside (you can see your breath in a New Zealand hotel hallway in winter), but this was an entirely new level of cold. Before doing anything else, I went searching for the heater and finally found mounted to the wall a box with vents and a couple of knobs, about the size of a toaster. Surely this couldn’t be the heater?
It was in fact the heater. A heater, it turns out, that also doubles as a white noise machine. Genius! So we cranked it, keeping our outdoor clothes on while unpacking and rummaging for scraps of food in our luggage. Eventually Sonya struck pay dirt, excavating two pieces of hard candy from the bottom of her purse—dinner!
By 10:00 p.m. it had become pretty clear that the heater, despite achieving impressive decibel levels, was never going to generate enough warmth to make the room comfortable, and decided our best defense would be bed. While this did nothing for the hunger, perhaps sleep would mitigate our discomfort.
It’s amazing what being awake in a dark room does to the mind. Freezing cold, starving (okay, perhaps a bit of hyperbole but you get the idea), my thoughts kept drifting to the Donner Party. I discovered new empathy in their plight, but only the knowledge that Sonya is mostly vegetarian and doesn’t eat red meat allowed me to eventually drift off to sleep with both eyes closed.
Somehow, we survived the night.
(I should add that this is the only bad hotel experience I’ve ever had in New Zealand. Despite the chilly hallways, and bafflingly flaccid bacon, I truly love the hotels there.)
A few words about this image
In my prior blog post I shared the details of this night above Tasman Lake. But before checking out, I’d like to add a thought or two.
Most of my Milky Way shoots skew heavily to a vertical orientation that maximizes the amount of Milky Way in my frame. Between the wall of peaks stretching northward, and the Magellanic Clouds high in the southern sky, if ever a scene were to break me of this habit, it’s this view of Tasman Lake.
New Zealand Night, Milky Way Over Tasman Lake
So this night I made a conscious effort to emphasize horizontal orientation, and the image I shared last week reflects that choice. But I’ve learned to never leave a beautiful scene, night or day, without giving myself both horizontal and vertical options.
Sometimes as soon as I reorient and put my eye to the viewfinder I’ll see something I missed; other times, it’s not until further scrutiny with the benefit of my large monitor at home, that I’m surprised to find I actually prefer the less obvious orientation.
So, despite my plan to emphasize horizontal frames this evening, I made sure I didn’t leave without some verticals as well. In this case, since I’ve photographed here before, I didn’t find anything especially surprising. But I did try something new, entirely ignoring the lakeshore and small pool on the rocks directly beneath me, including only enough lake to feature a couple of icebergs. This minimal foreground allowed the maximum Milky Way. (Which, at 14mm, turned out to be quite a bit of Milky Way.)
And as I’ve said before, the color of the lake in this image is real, though at night there isn’t enough light to see it. This ability to reveal realities lost to human vision is probably my favorite thing about photography.
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The Joy of Suffering
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A Slippery Slope
Posted on July 11, 2024
New Zealand Night, Milky Way Over Tasman Lake
Sony a7R V
Sony 14mm f/1.8 GM
ISO 4000
f/1.8
20 seconds
I’ve visited New Zealand each (non-Covid) winter since 2017. And every year, from the day I return my wife has to endure weeks of my raving about how beautiful (and clean, and friendly, and quiet, and pretty much perfect) New Zealand is. So this year we decided to add 10 days to my New Zealand stay, and Sonya flew down to meet me after the workshop so we could tour the South Island together.
Such an abrupt transition from fulltime photographer mode to vacation mode is not without its pitfalls. Years of personal experience, photo workshop observations, conversations with other photographers, and simply viewing the work of photographers who have attempted to combine vacation with serious photography, has convinced me that attempting to capture great images while maintaining domestic bliss on a vacation a perilous tightrope that rarely makes anyone happy (I’m sure there are exceptions, but you get the point). Which is why I now decide before every trip whether it will be a photography trip, or a vacation. Never both.
So, true to plan, as soon as Sonya arrived in New Zealand, I ceased being a photographer. This decision to transition from a New Zealand photography trip to a New Zealand vacation was as much for me as it was for Sonya. I love being in photography mode when I visit beautiful places by myself or with other serious photographers, but I enjoy vacation mode with Sonya and/or family just as much. Setting aside my camera frees me to relax, enjoy our time together, and appreciate the sights without stress about the clock, the light, or the next destination.
Sonya’s introduction to New Zealand came in Queenstown, probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. In our two days there, we strolled the town centre (New Zealand-ese for downtown), enjoying the shops, excellent food, and beautiful sights. On our first morning we made the beautiful drive along Lake Wakatipu to Glenorchy, then continued into the Lord of the Rings forests of Paradise. The next day we enjoyed a leisurely morning in town before hitting the road, stopping to visit the iconic Wanaka tree and enjoy lunch at my favorite Wanaka cafe, before heading over the (snow-covered!) Lindis Pass to Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park.
Gloriously un-bound by schedule, we spent extra time in Wanaka, and didn’t make it to our hotel in Twizel (near Aoraki) until shortly before sunset. This was a little later than I’d imagined we’d be, which thwarted my plan to enjoy a (camera-free) sunset at Tasman Lake. But there was still enough light that I thought it would be worthwhile to drive along Lake Pukaki for some views of Mt. Cook and the surrounding peaks in the colorful twilight. As we drove and marveled at evening’s sparkling clear air, up popped an idea that, try as I might, I couldn’t completely shake. My mental gymnastics went something like:
- Tonight’s clear sky would be a perfect opportunity for Sonya to see the New Zealand night sky.
- The Tasman Lake overlook is my favorite view in New Zealand, and also my favorite place in New Zealand to view the Milky Way.
- Maybe we could just continue into the park after dark and let Sonya check off both boxes—Tasman Lake and night sky!
- But, if I’m going to do that, why not just bring my camera and tripod and take a few pictures while we’re at it?
- Hmmm… (queue slippery slope alarm bells)
Before continuing, I want to make clear that this “vacation or photography” mandate is mine alone—Sonya has always been totally fine with me mixing the two when the right opportunity presents itself, and it’s never been a source of tension. Despite that, I knew if I wasn’t careful, adding photography goals to a vacation could make to easier to rationalize future exceptions, a slippery slope I was reluctant to tread—not just for this trip, but for all ensuing vacations.
But the Milky Way over Tasman Lake was too tempting to resist. And of course when I suggested the idea to Sonya, she was all for it.
That’s when a little practical reality set in. During last week’s workshop, I took some of the group to the Tasman Lake overlook, while my workshop partner Don Smith took the others to a spot that didn’t require scaling 336 stairs. To say those stairs were unexpectedly treacherous this year would be an understatement. On all previous visits we’ve just been able to ascend the stairs normally—anyone with the strength and stamina to do it had no problem. But this year, most of the trail was coated with ice, which only seemed to get worse as we climbed.
Stepping carefully, we all made it to the top without any problem. Coming down was another story. By the time we finished our beautiful sunset shoot and waited for the twilight glow above the peaks to fade, it was dark enough to require headlamps. But descending icy stairs is an entirely different endeavor than climbing them. Carefully considering each step, we all made it down without incident, but it took us nearly an hour to traverse .4 miles.
For the hike up with Sonya, I’d hoped the ice would be gone (since I’d never experienced it there before this year), but just in case, I’d also be armed with the pair of Yactrax (kind of a poor man’s crampons) I’d (foolishly) left behind on the prior week’s visit. Sonya would wear the Yaktrax, while I’d be armed with the lessons of last week’s experience.
We quickly learned that ice was in fact not gone, and going up we each took a (minor) spill. Near the top, I could tell Sonya was having second thoughts and we considered bailing, but by then we were so close we just decided to power through. About 25 stairs later we summited.
Words (and pictures) can’t express how glorious this view is any time. Add snow draping the peaks, icebergs floating on the lake, a bowl of stars overhead, absolute silence, and it feels downright spiritual. We just stood and gaped for a few minutes while our eyes adjusted, watching the Milky Way intensify. The sky was dark enough to reveal the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, from the brilliant galactic center before us, to the faint outer band at our backs. When I pointed out the Southern Cross directly overhead, and both Magellanic Clouds, Sonya commented that the stars seem much closer here than she’s ever seen them.
When I said pictures can’t do this view justice, I mean it. This image is 14mm, full frame and uncropped, and it only covers about 1/3 of the lake and surrounding peaks. I chose this composition because of the rare (for this Northern Hemisphere guy) opportunity to capture the Small Magellanic Cloud. We stayed for about 30 minute, driven down by frigid cold and intense hunger.
We made it back to the car, without incident, in a blistering 30 minutes, shattering the icy descent record set by last week’s workshop group. And I’m happy to say that the Tasman hike wasn’t the only slippery slope I successfully navigated. Once down the hill, I instantly returned to fulltime vacation mode, taking the sights as they come and letting the pace define itself as the trip continues. (But the rest of that night wasn’t without its bumps—I’ll share that story soon.)
The Aoraki/Cook experience, and the next morning in nearby Tekapo, marked the end of my zone of familiarity for the next few days. From there we explored Christchurch (which I haven’t been to since long before the earthquakes) and Dunedin. Today we returned to Te Anau—familiar territory (for me)—where we cruised Doubtful Sound. Tomorrow we’ll visit Mirror Lakes and Milford Sound. Then it’s back to Christchurch where the Shotover Jets and Skyline Gondola await. (I’m pretty sure we’ll need to purchase another suitcase for all the NZ stuff we’ve bought.)
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Night Sky Around the World
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Breaking the Rules
Posted on July 3, 2024
Sky on Fire, Lake Wakatipu, New Zealand
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 50
f/18
25 seconds
Let’s have a show of hands: Who feels like their photography has stagnated? Let me suggest to all with your hands up that what’s holding you back may be the very rules that helped elevate you to your current level of proficiency. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that rules are important—the glue of civilization in fact. Bedtimes, homework, and curfews got us through childhood and taught us to self-police as adults. Now we get enough sleep (right?), meet deadlines at work and home, and with very little supervision toe the line well enough to have become productive members of society—give yourself a gold star! But let me suggest that many of us have become so conditioned to follow rules that we honor them simply because they’ve been labeled “rule.”
As important as this conditioning is to the preservation of society, our reluctance to question rules sometimes impacts areas of our lives that might not be so cut-and-dried. One example would be photographers’ blind adherence to the (usually) well-intended “experts” proliferating online, in print, and at the local camera club. These self-proclaimed authorities spew absolutes for their disciples to embrace: Expose to the right!; Never center your subject!; Tack-sharp front-to-back!; Blurred water is cliché! Blah, blah, blah…. (My standard advice to anyone seeking photographic guidance is to beware of absolutes, and when you hear/read one, beeline to the nearest exit because the truth is, there are very, very few absolutes in photography.)
Rules serve a beginning photographer the way training wheels serve a five-year-old on a bike: They’re great for getting started, but soon get in the way. At first, following expert guidance, beginners’ photography improves noticeably and it’s easy to attribute this success to the rules. But by the time that improvement slows or even ceases altogether, those rules have become so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult to realize they now hold us back. You wouldn’t do Tour de France with training wheels, would you?
If photography were entirely rule-bound, engineers could write algorithms and design robots to do our photography for us. But the very definition of creativity is venturing beyond the comfortable confines of our preconceptions to create something new: if you’re not breaking the rules, you’re not being creative.
The camera club paradox
Camera clubs are great for many reasons: they connect people with a common interest, facilitate the exchange of information and ideas, and provide a forum for sharing our photographic creations. Camera clubs spur us to get out and shoot when we otherwise might stay home, and offer beginners rules that provide a stable foundation upon which to build their craft.
But camera clubs can also be a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts, a status often not conferred to the person most qualified, but to the person who spouts photographic dogma with the most authority. The result is well-intended but too often misinformed knowledge that infects a camera club like a virus.
I’m especially troubled when I hear of images shared in a camera club photo competition that were dismissed, without consideration, because they violated the designated “expert’s” idea of an unbreakable photographic rule. Here are a few of the most popular camera club “violations” (by no means a comprehensive list):
- Blown highlights
- No detail in the shadows
- Not sharp from front to back
- Centered subject or horizon
Each of these things can be a problem, but they can be a refreshing expression of creativity as well. I can show you multiple examples in my own portfolio that violate these rules. And even if breaking an accepted photography “rule” is a problem, refusing to consider an image because it violates someone’s definition of “perfect” discounts all that’s potentially good about it.
If you’re an aspiring photographer and someone dismisses an image for a technical violation, take a step back, inhale, and remind yourself that there are very, very few absolutes in photography. In general, it’s helpful to remember that no matter how strongly it’s stated, advice that doesn’t feel right (even if you can’t articulate why) doesn’t need to be heeded.
I love using blown highlights or completely black shadows to create a striking, distraction-free background for my primary subject. Through creative selective focus, placing all but a narrow range of a scene way out of focus is a great way to emphasize my subject and soften distracting detail. And I’ll center my horizon whenever I please, thank-you-very-much.
I’ve written about horizon placement many times in the past, but since these myths persist, I’ll bring it up again (and again, and again, and …). While this advice might benefit the beginner who automatically centers everything, most people who have owned a camera for more than a day are far beyond that point. And this horizon 1/3 from the top or bottom of the frame thing? Forget about it. I have no problem giving 80 percent, 90 percent, or even more of my frame to my sky or landscape, and neither should you.
Here’s my (comprehensive) list of guidelines for where to split the sky and landscape in your frame:
- Give the area with the most visual interest the most room.
That’s it. If your scene is all about the clouds (or stars, or rainbow, or…), put the horizon near the bottom of the frame and celebrate the clouds (or stars, or rainbow, or…). The better the sky (or the less interesting the foreground), the lower the horizon can go. Conversely, if the sky is boring, by all means, minimize it and feature the landscape. And if you’re lucky enough to have a sky and landscape of equal beauty, feel free to split the frame right down the middle.
About this image
Last week, for the first sunset of the annual New Zealand winter workshop Don Smith and I do each year, we took our group to Bennett’s Bluff vista on the road to Glenorchy, for a view of Lake Wakatipu and the Southern Alps. The prime view here faces west, toward 6000-foot Tooth Peak directly across the lake, and north, up the lake toward a whole flock of more distant 6000-foot+ peaks. Beautiful any season, these peaks are at their best when sporting their winter snowpack.
When we arrived, the sun was about 15 minutes from disappearing behind the mountains left of Tooth Peak. Sometimes we can get a nice sunstar in the seconds before the sun’s departure, but this time a veil of thin clouds subdued the sun enough to thwart those plans. Not a problem, because the clouds, stained buttery yellow by late sunlight, gave us hope for even more color as the sun dropped. And large sections of the lake were glassy smooth, a rare bonus for any lake this large.
When sunset color starts, you never know what’s in store. From our perspective, the ingredients were in place: broken cloud cover, pristine winter air, and an opening on the western horizon. But the sunset viewer’s perspective is incomplete, because out of sight beneath the horizon could lurk more clouds in the sunlight’s path. So we just watch and hope.
This evening we clicked continuously as the yellow warmed to fiery orange, then held our collective breath as the color intensified and slowly transitioned to red, infusing not only the clouds, but the entire lake surface as well. It was just fortuitous positioning that placed the mountain range reflection in the glassiest water.
Armed with my 24-105 lens, I looked for a composition that emphasized the sky and reflection. And absolutely no brain cycles were wasted worrying about the placement of the horizon in this scene—I just let that happen organically, based on the other elements at play.
Though the foreground foliage couldn’t compete with the sky, peaks, and reflection, going tight enough to eliminate the shrubs entirely would have also sacrificed parts of the scene I couldn’t bear to leave out. Instead, I went wide enough to use the dense foliage to frame the bottom of the scene. My other creative decision was adding my Breakthrough Filters 6-Stop Dark Polarizer, enabling a 25-second exposure that smoothed the small waves along the curved shoreline below me.
So I guess the moral of this story is not to overthink creative decisions. When the scene is changing fast, it’s best to set the rules aside and simply trust your instincts.
Epilogue
I can’t it’s been 10 days already. This morning Don and I said goodbye to a fantastic workshop group, grateful (and relieved) to have checked off every major photography box we hope for at the start of the workshop. (And it didn’t hurt to be watching falling snow while reading about 110+ temperatures back home in Sacramento.)
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Rules Broken
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Something Extra
Posted on June 26, 2024
Autumn Moonset, Oxbow Bend, Grand Tetons
Sony a7R III
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 200
f/11
1/6 second
Way back when I started getting into photography as a hobby, my subject selection criteria were pretty basic: is it visually appealing, and can I get there relatively easily? This worked well enough, because the world is full of relatively appealing subjects that are relatively easy to get to, and I was content with merely pretty pictures.
But my decision more than 20 years ago to elevate my serious photography hobby into my actual food-on-table livelihood meant I had much more at stake, and merely pretty pictures would no longer cut it. For starters, choosing my subjects could no longer prioritize convenience. To that point I’d had some success concentrating on under-appreciated beauty in everyday natural elements like flowers and trees, but I also wanted to pursue the more heralded scenes that draw gawkers (and photographers) from around the world (like Yosemite), and knew I’d need to do something to distinguish my images from others’.
I started studying the work of other landscape photographers I admired, and soon realized that most successful images of familiar subjects include something extra that sets them apart from the millions of other beautiful images that preceded them. In other words, to up my photography game enough to pay the bills, I too would need to seek that extra something to distinguish my own images of popular photographic icons. And while that realization alone didn’t spawn instant success, it was an important insight that guided me as I honed my craft and sought subjects.
So, armed with new motivation, after choosing a primary subject, I wouldn’t attempt to photograph it until I could identify an ephemeral element that would (I hoped) set my image apart. Rarely, that extra something might be a beautiful sunset or dramatic light, but I really wanted to match my target subject with something more special, and soon found that this process became much easier when I sought to include things that move me personally.
This helped me understand that a photographer’s best path to creative success is to concentrate on the scenes that cause a reflexive, “Oooh, look at that!,” when sharing time in Nature with a loved one. For me, that long list includes (in no particular order) things like rainbows, reflections, lightning, the Milky Way, and the moon.
Not only do these ephemeral gifts from Nature have the ability to elevate a scene from (merely) beautiful to truly special, each resonates with me personally. Instead of being a chore to pursue, the extra effort, no matter how extra, that’s necessary to incorporate them into already beautiful scenes actually becomes part of the appeal and is never a burden.
One of my very first pursuits was the moon, whose phase and position could be timed with mathematical precision. Soon I was targeting iconic subjects, or identifying striking (but anonymous) landscape features near home, doing the calculations (in the days before computer or smartphone apps could do it for me), and traveling to photograph the convergence. And even if the goal of a trip wasn’t the moon, I’d never visit a location without knowing the moon’s phase and when and where it would appear.
In 2018 I was assisting Don Smith with his annual autumn Grand Tetons workshop. I’d been to the Tetons a few times, mostly with Don, and find the entire park absolutely spectacular, but hadn’t really spent enough time there to make images that really excited me. But this year, at some point before my departure, I checked the moon and discovered that it would be full during the workshop. With a little plotting, I found that from Oxbow Bend we’d be able to align it perfectly with the Tetons and Mt. Moran at sunrise on one particular morning. Since this trip is always timed for peak fall color, the full moon was just a fortuitous confluence, but I was absolutely going to take full advantage.
Speaking of fortuitous confluences, when we got the group out there on the appointed morning, not only did we find the moon in place as expected, we had peak fall color, a reflection, a thin sheet of fog hovering above the water, and another layer of low clouds beneath the peaks.
I don’t really remember a lot of specifics from that morning, but I do remember that there were a lot of people (no surprise). Fortunately, there’s also a lot of room to spread out, and I took full advantage, moving up and down the riverbank to set the moon’s position relative to Mt. Moran and the other peaks. This image came about 15 minutes before sunrise, not long after the foreground had brightened enough to enable me to get detail in the moon and the landscape. (As always, it’s a single click, not a composite.)
I love this image, but believe it or not, I only just processed it 4 days ago. I think what happened was that I had just returned from my Hawaii workshop before doing a quick turnaround for the Tetons, then immediately after returning from there, headed off for my Eastern Sierra workshop. Since I usually prioritize the images from my own workshops, and I was suddenly buried with those, the Teton images just fell off my radar. But a couple of weeks ago, someone else from that workshop posted their own image from that morning (thanks, Bernie!), and my first reaction was, “Holy crap, that’s beautiful!” And then it dawned on me that I was there too—so on the 15-hour San Francisco to Sydney leg of my New Zealand flight, I pulled it up, processed it, and here it is.
Something Extra
New Zealand After Dark
Posted on June 19, 2024
Dark Night, Milky Way and Tasman Lake, New Zealand
Sony a7S II
Sony 12 – 24 f/4 G
ISO 10,000
f/4
30 seconds
This week I have New Zealand on my mind. In preparation for the New Zealand Winter photo workshop that begins next week, I started going through unprocessed images from prior New Zealand visits. I was actually looking for something else when I stumbled upon this Milky Way image from the 2019 trip, when Don Smith and I guided a group of Sony influencers around the South Island. I’d already processed a virtually identical composition of this scene back then, but since my Milky Way processing has evolved (improved), I decided to give it another shot.
Day or night, I love this Tasman Lake scene in particular because it so beautifully captures what I love most about New Zealand. We only do this workshop in winter, which of course leads to the inevitable question: “Why?” The simple answer is that the modest sprinkling of tourists, consistently interesting skies, and snowy peaks I love so much, are only possible in winter. I could go on and on with my answer, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll just save you some time and give you six-thousand words worth of examples. (You’re welcome.)
But even once I convince skeptics that winter in New Zealand is in fact quite beautiful, I’m usually hit with a follow-up: “But isn’t it cold?” Sure it’s cold, but by most people’s expectations of winter, New Zealand’s South Island is actually quite mild—with average highs in the 40s and 50s, and lows in the 30s, it’s similar to winter in Northern California and Oregon. I would venture that there’s not a single person reading this who doesn’t already have in their closet enough winter warmth to ensure cozy comfort in a New Zealand winter. Also like Northern California and Oregon, in winter New Zealand’s South Island gets rain and fog in the lowlands, and snow in the mountains, conditions I find so much better for photography (and for just plain being outside) than the sweltering blank-sky California summers I left back home.
All that said, for me the strongest argument for winter in New Zealand is Southern Hemisphere’s night sky. Inherently pristine air and minimal light pollution makes New Zealand is an astrophotographer’s paradise any season. But winter is when the Milky Way’s brilliant core shines in the east after sunset, already much higher above the horizon than my Northern Hemisphere eyes are accustomed to. The galactic core remains visible all night, ascending further and slowly rotating westward, before finally fading on the other side of the sky in the pre-sunrise twilight. That means more than 12 hours of quality Milky Way time, and the ability to place it above landscapes facing east, north, or west, by simply choosing the time of night you photograph it. And joining the celestial show are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds—satellite galaxies of our Milky Way, only visible in the Southern Hemisphere.
Benefiting from our years of experience on the South Island, Don and I have identified many very nice locations for photographing the Milky Way, but our two favorites feature the galactic core above glacial lakes that are bounded by snowy peaks. One of these is on the shore Lake Wakatipu near Queenstown; the other is a vista above Tasman Lake in Mt. Cook / Aoraki National Park. This week’s image, from the 2019 trip, is of the Tasman Lake scene.
From the very first time my eyes feasted on it, I marveled at what a spectacular place the Tasman Lake view would be to photograph the Milky Way. In 2019, Don and I were especially pleased to be guiding this group of young photographers who were as excited about photographing the Milky Way as we were, so this shoot was in our plan since before the workshop started.
The sky this evening was crystal clear, but as the sky darkened, I found myself still down at the foot of the lake (just out of the frame on the far right), where I’d photographed sunset with most of the group. The majority decided to stay put for the Milky Way shoot, and while I couldn’t deny that this spot would likely be no less spectacular, I couldn’t pass the opportunity at the elevated lake view that had been on my radar for so long. I also thought the Milky Way would align better with the most prominent peaks from this vantage point. So I scrambled back up the boulders to the trail and race-walked more than a mile, then scaled more than 300 stairs in near darkness, to get in position.
I expected to find the few who weren’t down at the lakeside sunset spot (this group always scattered) would already be up here, but I arrived to find the view empty. While I was happy to eventually have the company of a couple of others, the utter solitude I enjoyed for the first 30 minutes felt downright spiritual.
Going with my dedicated night camera, the Sony a7S II, I started with my default night lens at the time, the Sony 24mm f/1.4. But the scene was so expansive, I quickly switched to my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM for a wider view. While that did the job for a while, it wasn’t long before I found myself wanting an even bigger view, so I reached for my Sony 12-24 f/4 G lens. Because light capture is the single most important factor in a Milky Way image, in general I find f/4 too slow. (Today I’d use my 14mm f/1.8 or 12-24 f/2.8, but back then those lenses were still at least a year away.) But really wanting the widest possible view, I rationalized that since the a7S II can handle 10,000 ISO without any problem, and the star motion of a 30-second exposure at 12mm would be minimal, and just went for it. Mitigating the f/4 exposure problems was the fact that the best parts of the scene’s foreground, the snow and water, were highly reflective, while the dark rock wasn’t really essential to the scene.
The result as processed in 2019, while noisier than ideal, was still usable. But as time passes, I’ve become less and less thrilled with many of my old Milky Way processing choices—that image was no exception. Since I’ve been pretty thrilled with the results reprocessing old Milky Way images with Lightroom’s latest noise reduction tool, I thought this might be a great time to reprocess this old scene to see if I could do it better.
For no reason in particular, I chose different image to process, but the compositions are nearly identical. As expected, the new Lightroom noise reduction did a much better job minimizing the inevitable noise that comes at 10,000 ISO, so I was already ahead of the game. The only other major processing improvement I made was the color of the sky, which, as my night sky processing evolves, I’m making much less blue.
Because no one knows what color the night sky supposed to be when given the amount of exposure necessary bring out foreground detail, I’ve always believed that the color of the sky in a Milky Way image is the photographer’s creative choice. I mean, scientists might be able to tell you what color it should be (there’s a very strong case for green), but to me the bottom line is image credibility (and green just won’t do it).
Whatever night sky color I’ve ended up with has entirely a function of the color temperature I choose when I process my raw file in Lightroom—no artificially changing the hue, saturation, or in any other way plugging in some artificial color. Since I do think the foreground (non-sky) of a night image looks more night-like (I don’t want a night image that looks like daylight with stars) with the bluish tint I get when the color temperature is cooled to somewhere in the 3000-4000 degrees range (photographers will know what I’m talking about—non-photographers will just need to take my word), for years I cooled the entire image that way—hence the blue night skies. But Lightroom now makes it super easy to process the sky and foreground separately and seamlessly, so I no longer cool my night skies nearly as much as before (or at all). Now my night skies tend to be much closer to black, trending almost imperceptibly to the purple side of blue (avoiding the cyan side).
Oh, and the color of Tasman Lake you see in this image is real, I swear—the color of the South Island’s glacial lakes is another reason to love this country, but that’s a story for another day.
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This year’s New Zealand workshop is full, but Don and I will do it again next year.
New Zealand After Dark
Channeling Your Camera’s Vision
Posted on June 13, 2024
Whitewater, Deer Creek Fall, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 12-24 GM
1/5 second
F/16
ISO 50
About a month ago I wrapped up my ninth Grand Canyon raft trip. As my guides and I get better at identifying the best spots and when to be there, there’s an aspect of similarity from trip to trip, but thanks to group dynamics, weather conditions, and the secondary stops we chose to make on any given year, each trip always feels unique.
As with most spectacular locations, Grand Canyon has more worthy subjects than we have time to visit, but there are five primary spots we never miss: Nankoweap granaries, Little Colorado River, Elves’ Chasm, Deer Creek Fall, and Havasu Creek. Additionally, we have a couple of south-facing campsites we target for the best possible Milky Way photography. But making all this happen in the best conditions for photography sometimes feels like three-dimensional chess. Starting with our first evening, our campsite choice (the number of river miles we cover) creates a cascading effect on the timing of our photo stops and campsites for each subsequent day of the trip—not enough, or too many, miles on any given day and we’re completely out of synch.
But my guides and I have gotten really good at it, and I’ve really grown to appreciate the rhythm of this trip. The moderate pace and not too crazy rapids of our first two days allows everyone to get comfortable with the whole rafting experience—both on the river and in camp. That’s a good thing, because Day 3 is Rapid Day! To set us up for downstream stops, on that third day we cover nearly 60 miles and navigate dozens of large to massive rapids (the vast majority of the canyon’s largest rapids). Finishing with a celebratory party in camp that evening, the entire day is a blast, and the bonding is complete.
Given the frenetic pace of Day 3, everyone is ready for our (relatively) relaxing Day 4. Without too many miles to cover, we make it to Deer Creek Fall early enough (fingers crossed) to snag the campsite directly across from the fall—this year we made it by lunchtime—where we can hang out (kick back) in camp, waiting for the crowds to clear out so we have the fall to ourselves for the rest of the day.
Of course rafting Grand Canyon isn’t all river and campsites. The photography down here is downright spectacular, and we get to do quite a bit of it. As with every workshop I lead, I try to get an idea of what everyone hopes to accomplish and do all I can to accommodate them. But since safety and schedule have to take priority on the river, and the conditions are beyond my control, I can’t always grant everyone’s wish—but I can’t imagine anyone ever being disappointed.
Having done this trip as many times as I have, I’ve become a little more selective about my own photo choices, with many of those decisions depending on the conditions. But one subject I never miss, regardless of conditions, is Deer Creek fall. Gushing from a red rock slot canyon, Deer Creek Fall is truly one of the most beautiful waterfalls I’ve ever seen. But, as with most natural beauty, the real challenge here is doing it justice.
Every nature scene worthy of a photograph possesses inherent beauty—the nature photographer’s job is to identify that beauty and figure out the best way to convey it with a camera. Anyone who has been disappointed by their images from a beautiful moment in nature (that would be pretty much everyone) knows that a good picture isn’t a simple matter of pointing a camera and clicking the shutter. There are just too many differences between the human and camera views of the world to expect a point and click approach to succeed reliably.
Subjects like Deer Creek Fall, especially at first sight, are surprisingly difficult to photograph well because of the instinctive tendency to just frame up the first beautiful thing we see and start clicking, wrongly assuming that our pictures will look just like what our eyes see. But that’s literally impossible.
The better approach starts with understanding the camera’s unique vision and accepting that it is no less valid than the human perspective. Once we start channeling our camera’s vision (rather than trying to force our camera to submit to our vision), we can leverage the exposure variables (that control depth, motion, and light), subject relationships, and creative framing, to provide a fresh view of familiar subjects.
Since this Deer Creek Fall image from the most recent raft trip illustrates many of the differences between human and camera vision, I thought sharing my approach to its capture would be a good opportunity to (once again) distinguish the camera’s vision from human vision. But first, let me cite the significant human/camera vision differences I had to deal with this afternoon:
- Boundaries: While my own world was unbounded, the world in my viewfinder was surrounded by a rectangular box. To a certain extent I can control the size of that box with focal length choice, and where I point it in the scene, but every image has a boundary.
- Depth: Photography is an attempt to render a 3-dimensional world in a 2-dimensional medium. Of course that’s impossible, but there are things we can do to create the illusion of depth.
- Dynamic range: The human eye can see a much wider range of tones, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights, than the camera can. The many ways to handle this difference are a creative choice.
- Motion: A still image can’t display actual motion, but it can create an illusion of motion that stimulates the viewer’s brain into imagining the scene’s motion. While nothing like our experience of the world, a camera can freeze the extreme chaos of a single instant, or combine a series of instants into a blur that conveys patterns in the motion indistinguishable to the eye.
Though this image isn’t high dynamic range, that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to factor dynamic range into my calculus this afternoon. Despite a fair amount of cloud cover, some of it rather threatening, Deer Creek Fall spent most of the afternoon in full sunlight. And while my camera can handle this extreme dynamic range, I try to avoid mixing brilliant highlights and deep shadows whenever possible. Studying the clouds, I decided there was a decent chance that they’d eventually provide the shade on the fall necessary to shrink the dynamic range, then went to work searching for my composition while I waited.
I wanted to feature the waterfall, but I also wanted to take full advantage of the abundant foreground subjects that would significantly enhance the illusion of depth. I explored many options, from looking up at the base of the fall, as close as I could get without soaking myself and my camera, to scaling a nearby slippery rock ledge for a different perspective. I finally decided the perspective that worked best was actually in the creek. Once I made that decision, I spent nearly 10 minutes micro-positioning myself relative to the nearby rocks until I was satisfied with the way the rocks and rapids moved the viewer’s eyes through the frame. Finally, to emphasize the rocks and shrink the (less interesting) open rocky beach, I dropped as low as I could go—less than a foot above the water—without merging the large nearby boulders with the smaller ones behind them.
With my perspective established, it was time to frame up the scene. There were other photographers in my group just out of the scene on the left; on the right was a large boulder and unattractive shrubs, and above the fall was bright sky that really didn’t add anything. Adjusting my focal length, I was able to use my frame’s boundaries to completely eliminate these distractions and distill the image to the most important visual elements: Deer Creek Fall, the whitewater of Deer Creek itself, and the array of boulders protruding from the creek.
My final decision was how to handle the extreme water motion. With the fall in full sun, I played with some images that froze the water in place, but those turned out to be practice shots that just helped me refine my composition. Since most of the creek was already in shade, and the fall would soon be as well (even if the clouds didn’t come through for me, I was willing to wait for the sun to drop behind the rocks), I knew my real decision wasn’t whether or not to blur the water, it was how much to blur it. When the clouds finally delivered, my composition was ready, and all I had to do was click. But I didn’t just click once—I ran through a range of shutter speeds so I’d have a variety of motion effects to choose from later—when I wasn’t standing on slippery rocks in chilly whitewater.
Grand Canyon: The View From the River
(Mostly) Unrelated Ramblings on Editing and Color in Nature
Posted on June 5, 2024
Brilliant, Little Colorado River, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 12-24 GM
1/800 second
F/18
ISO 100
Lately I’ve been on a bit of a crusade against manufactured images in general, and AI use in particular. But, lest you perceive me as a luddite and old-school photography codger (“In my day, every shoot was a 5-mile uphill walk through snow in both directions, and sunrise always came at 1:00 a.m.”), let me just say that I am all-in on digital capture and all most of its benefits, from instant image review, to the histogram, to the ability to dodge and burn my color captures. It’s been more than 20 years since my digital conversion, and I can’t think of a single thing I miss about shooting film. (Okay, maybe my Olympus OM-2, and being able to use the same camera for more than 25 years.)
Most of my digital editing is stuff like setting the color temperature, simple dodging and burning, and an occasional crop. But one capability that I’ve grown especially fond of is the ability to remove things that don’t belong. But before I talk about that, let me set the scene for this image.
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on the Little Colorado River where it intersects with the Colorado River. Prior to my Grand Canyon raft trip, my only exposure to the Little Colorado came far up stream, where I’d get a quick view of its muddy brown puddles or (in wet years) thin brown stripe, briefly visible from the bridge as I zipped through Cameron, Arizona, on my way to and from the North Rim or Page.
By the second day of my first Grand Canyon raft trip, I was already completely blown away by the unique and completely unexpected features at the bottom of the canyon. That day had been a mix of clouds and sun—ideal for photography, but since I still wasn’t completely sure that the guides knew what was important to us photographers, I stayed vigilant for worthy subjects as we floated beneath the towering walls. After spending most of the trip to this point in relatively narrow Marble Canyon, just upstream from (what I now know to be) the confluence with the Little Colorado River, the canyon walls separated a bit and I could tell the geology was changing. When we tied up at a nondescript sandy beach, I remember looking around and thinking, Really? Surely we can find a better spot to take advantage of this great light.
When Wiley, my lead guide, suggested that we grab our cameras and go explore for 45 minutes or so, at first I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted to lug my camera bag, but since this was my group, I decided needed to set a good example. Camera bag in tow but still skeptical (me, not the camera bag), I followed a short trail through the shrubs with the rest of the group on my heals like a string of ducklings. Rounding a corner, I emerged from the brush and stopped like I’d slammed into a brick wall. Unable at first to process what I was seeing, I finally turned and managed to call back to Wiley, “Uh, we’re going to need more time here.”
Defying expectations
This might be a good time to mention that there is nothing subtle about color in nature. Perhaps you’ve noticed? In fact, the vivid natural hues that surround us may just be my favorite thing to photograph. I’m afraid most of us live our lives taking for granted a certain range of natural color constants: that the sky will feature a familiar blue throughout the day, bracketed by certain shades of red or orange at sunrise and sunset, before darkening to something close to black at night. Our daytime clouds are white or gray, and water is some predictable shade of green or blue, depending on light and clarity. Even when nature’s color intensifies to a hue and brilliance that moves us to pause and take note (or photograph), it’s reliably within our range of expectations—a crimson sunset, spring wildflowers, or the extra rich blues of a mountain lake.
But sometimes nature throws us a curve. It’s impossible not to be gobsmacked the greens and reds of an aurora; Death Valley’s aptly named Artist’s Palette features a bizarre array of purple, green, and pink rocks; smoke from wildfires can turn the midday sky an otherworldly orange, sometimes thousands of miles distant. And I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on the green and blue glacial lakes of the Canadian Rockies and New Zealand. But for me, none of these sights were as disorienting as my first view of the Little Colorado River’s azure hues.
So what’s going on?
What happened to the familiar brown puddles I remember upstream? Clearly, somewhere in the 55 or so river miles between Cameron and Grand Canyon, the Little Colorado had gotten an upgrade. Not only was there a lot more water, its shade of blue was not a color I’d ever seen in water.
As it turns out, after leaving Cameron, the Little Colorado twists along a scenic canyon of its own creation, carving deep enough to puncture a travertine-laced aquifer that recharges, and colors, its meager flow. The travertine (limestone formed by mineral springs) is infused with magnesium and calcium that adds the blue hue to the water, and deposits other minerals that paint the rocks and riverbed a reflective white, creating a complementary contrast to the azure hue. Adding to all this magnificence is the rich red of the surrounding Grand Canyon walls.
Threading the needle
Of course like most things in nature, the Little Colorado’s color is not guaranteed. When the source of its flow is runoffs, either from snowmelt or the summer monsoon, the Little Colorado’s natural blue is overpowered by reddish brown sediment washed downstream. So each year I try to thread the needle between the end of the snow runoff and start of the monsoon runoff, scheduling my raft trips for May. Not only does May usually ensure a blue LCR, we also get to enjoy the Colorado River at its translucent green best by avoiding the Colorado River’s monsoon sediment that’s not unlike chocolate pudding.
Since I have to schedule this trip more than a year in advance, there’s no way of knowing whether the LCR will be blue until we arrive at it. Even the guides can do no more than guess at its current status because there’s no webcam or other direct monitoring at the confluence, and reports from prior trips need to wait until they’ve navigated the final 200 miles downstream.
The other tricky thing is the sky—without clouds, midday visits aren’t great for photography, so in recent years we try to time our LCR arrival for late afternoon. This puts large segments in deep shadow, even on sunny days, and also pretty much guarantees that we’ll be the only ones there.
I’ve only found the LCR brown once—that year we could tell as we approached the LCR confluence and saw the brown mixing with the Colorado’s deep green. We just aborted our landing and continued on downstream.
This year’s visit
This year’s trip enjoyed a really nice mix of clouds and blue sky throughout. Most of the clouds were of the puffy, photogenic variety, but we did have a few that looked pretty threatening. And aside from a handful of raindrops one night (not enough that anyone who wasn’t already awake would have even noticed), we stayed completely dry—while we were on solid ground.
There was a small disagreement among the guides about our chances for a blue LCR—Lindsay was skeptical because of brown water a couple of weeks prior; Wiley said there had been enough time for the brown runoff to abate. I couldn’t tell if Wiley’s take was just whistling in the dark optimism, or if he really believed it, so I held my breath as we approached the LCR confluence. When I heard his reaction at the first sight of distinctive blue (“Gary, you’re the luckiest guy I know!”), I could tell he hadn’t been quite as confident as he’d sounded.
This year’s LCR visit was a preview of the mix of sky and clouds we’d enjoy all week, and we took full advantage. For most of the group, the reaction to their first view of the otherworldly blue was similar to my reaction the first time I saw it. But the scene here is about far more than striking blue water—towering buttes, jutting red boulders, polished sandstone shelves, and green-gold reeds create an abundance of compositional variety. But with an open campsite directly across the river, we had the schedule flexibility to enjoy plenty of quality time there before setting up camp.
As soon as we were off the boat people scattered. With so much going on visually, scenes like this can be a little overwhelming to first time visitors, so I took my time wandering upstream, answering questions and making suggestions on the way. It was really cool to see people using everything from ultra-wide to telephoto—all valid approaches.
At first the clouds dominated the sky, but I couldn’t really take advantage and only managed a handful of shots, none of which especially thrilled me. But when the clouds started to break up, I saw an approaching opportunity to create a sunstar and looked around for a composition to go with it. With little time to spare before the sun emerged, I found something nearby that would work—the only problem was, one of the people in my group was set up and firing away at his own scene no more than 10 feet in front of me.
Since my personal rule when I’m with a group is that my images always take backseat to my groups’, I never ask anyone to move when they’re actively working on something. So I just framed up my shot anyway, and waited for the sun. It popped out about 30 seconds later, long enough for me to get a half-dozen or so frames with a beautiful sunstar, as well a not so beautiful photographer, before the clouds swallowed the sun and I moved on to other opportunities.
The sun came and went several times that afternoon, and I got a few more sunstar images that didn’t include another photographer, but when I got home and loaded my images, that first one was my favorite. Enter Content-Aware Fill.
In a matter of seconds—just the time it took to circle the offending subject in Photoshop and hit my Delete key—I ended up with the scene you see here. The resulting replacement was amazingly close to what it would have been had he not been there, and I defy anyone to tell me exactly where the replacement happened.
Of course this opens another can of worms that I don’t want to get into today: what’s an “appropriate” edit? All I’ll say is that each photographer draws his or her own line, and there are no absolute rules besides honesty. Where’s my line? I will remove things that (in my opinion) don’t belong—e.g., contrails, other people, car lights—as long as I can do it in a way that doesn’t noticeably alter the scene from what it would have been had those unnatural elements not been there. I absolutely don’t add or move things.
As someone who tries to photograph the natural world as it would be without human interference, Lightroom/Photoshop remove tools are a godsend. Just don’t get me started AI fabrication…
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Color in Nature
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 