Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Fallen color
Posted on September 5, 2015
Fallen Color, Rock Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Canon EOS-1D Mark II
3/10 second
F/9.0
ISO 100
85 mm
When you’re surrounded by beautiful scenery, it’s easy to overlook the small details that make a scene special. But there’s no substitute for the pleasure that comes from spending a little time in a scene, identifying its intricacies, and creating an image that conveys this connection to others. Capturing these intricacies can be the most rewarding aspect of photography, because they’re almost always uniquely reflective your own vision.
About this image
People frequently look at this image and ask if I arranged the red leaves. The answer is an emphatic, No! I usually go on to remind them that you can draw a straight line between any two objects on the face of the earth (or any other planet, as far as I know). In fact, the only arranging I do to an image is myself—circling, rising, dropping—and in that regard I’m quite aggressive.
In the field I look for individual elements to isolate in my frame; or better yet, groups of elements. Of course finding a subject is not the end of the job—without properly positioning the subjects in the frame, the scene is likely to fail. But rather than moving your subjects (the lazy solution), move yourself.
In this scene I circled the leaves slowly, camera to my eye, until the frame felt balanced. And while the leaves ended up at the “rule of thirds” points, that wasn’t a conscious decision on my part, but rather confirmation that the rule of thirds is indeed valid (sometimes).
Putting the Rule of Thirds in its place
What is the rule of thirds? Very simply, imagine a tic-tac-toe grid on your frame—the Rule of Thirds says that important linear elements (like the horizon) should be on the lines, and important compositional elements (like these leaves) should be at (or near) the intersections.
I hesitate to even bring the Rule of Thirds up because it’s one of the easiest photography “rules” to be broken effectively. It’s also probably the rule most frequently abused by well meaning judges at your local camera club. (If you get too much abuse about your Rule of Thirds choices in images you really like, don’t change your compositions, change your camera club.)
I think the Rule of Thirds true value is to help remind beginners not to bullseye subjects, or not to crowd elements against the edges. In fact, I could probably show about as many successful images that break the Rule of Thirds as follow it. When I’m composing a shot, any Rule of Thirds voices in my head are overruled by my intuition, my sense for what what balances a frame, and even more simply, what feels right.
Read more about photographing fall color
A fall color gallery
Click an image for a closer look, and a slide show. Refresh the screen to reorder the display.
The shot less taken
Posted on January 5, 2015
Autumn Reflection, Half Dome, Yosemite
Sony a7R
Sony/Zeiss 24-70
2 seconds
F/16
ISO 200
I’ve never been much of a New Year’s resolution person, but the start of a new year is an opportunity to take stock and regroup. This year I’ve been thinking about the proliferation of derivative images online and in magazines, images that are, no matter how beautiful, simply reproductions of thousands of previous image. Photographers see something they like and go out try to get it themselves.
I understand the urge to impress rather than create (for starters, it’s easier), and confess that I catch myself doing it too. As with pop music and formula fiction, the images that seem to sell best (not to mention garner the most Facebook Likes and “Stunning!” comments), are often facsimiles of preceding material. So photographers who make a living with their images are forced to subvert their creative instincts in favor of putting food on the table; and photographers who do it for pleasure are lured by the attention a well-executed duplicate generates.
The problem is compounded for workshop leaders, who are paid to guide their customers to the iconic spots (why do you think you see so many Yosemite Tunnel View images in my gallery?). My solution is to follow the advice I give my workshop students: Rather than make the “classic” Tunnel View clearing storm or molten Horsetail Fall image your goal, make that image the starting point, before moving on to less conventional ways to capture the scene.
Of course spending lots of time at iconic locations, in the best conditions (or simply getting out anywhere in good conditions), leaves me with a ton of really nice but less creative captures. I share them occasionally, but for the most part I opt for quality over quantity, and usually try to share only the images that stimulated my creative juices. (Another way of putting this would be that I choose to share images that make me happy, rather than images I think will make you happy—sorry.)
Which brings me to the Half Dome reflection image at the top of this post. The first instinct for most at this bend in the Merced River is to capture the wider scene (below), which I certainly did. But most of my clicks this evening were zoomed closer, concentrating on compositions that emphasize the reflection.
I won’t pretend that I’m the first to photograph this scene this way—I share it here to illustrate the way I try to distill a scene to its most essential components. I was leading a group this evening and didn’t take a lot of pictures, but if I’d been by myself I’d have zoomed even tighter on the tree reflection, and certainly would have played with long exposures that would have turned the drifting foam into parallel white streaks.
Even if finding the unique view is already part of your capture paradigm, challenge yourself to do it more. And because it’s only fair to hold myself to the same standard I ask of others, I’m also challenging myself to create more and settle less—it will be my mantra for 2015.
Autumn Twilight, Half Dome and the Merced River, Yosemite
This is a more conventional composition from this location. I captured it about ten minutes after the isolated reflection image above, for no other reason than I thought the twilight tones were pretty (knowing full well I’d probably not do anything with it). And that’s okay too. In fact, if it’s your first visit to a spot, starting with the conventional compositions is more than okay, is a great warm-up to familiarize yourself with the scene.
Photo Workshop Schedule
A gallery of alternate views
Click an image for a closer look, and a slide show. Refresh your screen to reorder the display.
Letting motion work for you
Posted on December 1, 2014
Autumn Swirl, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
154 mm
30 seconds
F/22
ISO 100
Of the many differences between our world and our camera’s world, few are more significant than motion. Image stabilization or (better yet) a tripod will reduce or eliminate or photographer-induced motion, but we often make compromises to stop motion in our scene, sacrificing depth of field or introducing noise to shorten the shutter speed enough to freeze the scene.
But what’s wrong with letting the motion work for you? While it’s impossible to duplicate the human experience of motion in a static photo, a camera’s ability to record every instant throughout the duration of capture creates an illusion of motion that can also be quite beautiful. Whether it’s stars streaked into parallel arcs by Earth’s rotation, a tumbling cascade blurred to silky white, or a vortex of spinning autumn leaves, your ability to convey the world’s motion with your images is limited only by your imagination and ability to manage your camera’s exposure variables.
I came across the this little scene in the morning shade beneath Bridalveil Fall in Yosemite. A thin trickle of water entering at the top of the pool, and exiting just out of the frame behind me, was enough to impart an imperceptible clockwise vortex. To my eye, the motion here appeared to be random drift, but I guessed a long exposure might show otherwise.
To ensure sharpness from the closest rock all the way back to the cascade, I was already at f22; by dropping my ISO to 100, dialing my polarizer to minimize reflections (thus darkening the scene by two additional stops), in the already low light I achieved a 30-second exposure. The result was an image that recorded the path of each leaf for the duration of my exposure, revealing that what looked like random drift, was indeed organized rotation.
Visualizing the way your camera will record motion requires practice—the more you do it, the better you’ll become at seeing as your camera sees. Sometimes you’ll want just the barest hint of movement; other times, lots of movement is best. I usually bracket exposures to cover a broad range of motion—not only does this give me a variety of images to choose from, each click improves my ability to anticipate the effect the next time.
A gallery of motion
Click an image for a closer look, and to enjoy the slide show
If at first you don’t succeed…
Posted on November 7, 2014
Floating Leaves, Merced River, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
105 mm
.6 seconds
F/11
ISO 800
In early November of 2007 I took a picture that didn’t quite work out. That’s not so unusual, but somehow this one stuck with me, and I’ve spent seven years trying to recreate the moment I missed that night.
On that evening seven years ago, the sun was down and the scene I’d been working for nearly an hour, autumn leaves clinging to a log in the Merced River, was receding into the gathering gloom. The river darkened more rapidly than the leaves, and soon, with my polarizer turned to remove reflections from the river, the leaves appeared to be suspended in a black void.
I’d decided my scene lacked a visual anchor, a place for the eye to land, so I waited (and waited) for a leaf to drift into the top of my framed. On my LCD the result looked perfect, and I felt rewarded for my persistence. But back home on my large monitor, I could see that everything in the frame was sharp except my anchor point. If only I’d have bumped my ISO instead of my shutter speed….
Intrigued by the unrealized potential, I returned to this spot each autumn, but the stars never aligned—too much water (motion); dead (brown) leaves; no leaves; too many leaves; no anchor point—until this week. Not only did I find the drought-starved Merced utterly still, “my” log was perfectly adorned with a colorful leaf assortment anchored by an interlocked pair of heart-shaped cottonwood leaves.
I worked the scene until the darkness forced too much compromise with my exposure settings. In the meantime, I filled my card with horizontal and vertical, wide and tight, versions of the scene with the log both straight and diagonal. I also played with the polarizer, sometimes dialing up the reflection of overhanging trees. But I ultimately decided on the one you see her, which is pretty close to my original vision.
I can’t begin to express how happy photographing these quiet scenes makes me. I’ve done this long enough to know that it’s the dramatic landscapes and colorful sunsets that garner the most print sales and Facebook “Likes,” but nothing gives me more personal satisfaction than capturing these intimate interpretations of nature.
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Autumn Intimates
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Seven reasons photographers love rain
Posted on October 22, 2014
Hidden Leaf, Mt. Hood, Oregon
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
168 mm (plus 48mm of extension)
1/100 second
F/4
ISO 400
The difference between a photographer and a tourist is easily distinguished by his or her response to rain: When the rain starts, the photographer grabs a camera and bolts outside, while the tourist packs up and races for shelter.
Seven reasons photographers love rain
- Smooth, (virtually) shadowless light that eliminates the extreme contrast cameras struggle to handle, and enhances color saturation
- Clouds are vastly more interesting than blue skies
- The best stuff happens in the rain: rainbows, lightning, clinging water droplets
- Clean air means more vivid sunrises and sunsets
- Replenished lakes, rivers, streams, and waterfalls for days, weeks, or months of great photography (rain or not)
- Low light makes easier the long shutter speeds necessary for soft water effects
- (Last, but not least,) we have the landscape to ourselves
Case in point
This week Don Smith and I traveled to Hood River, Oregon for some autumn photography, and to do more prep and reconnaissance for next spring’s Columbia River Gorge photo workshops. It’s rained every day we’ve been here, and you won’t find two happier (albeit wetter) photographers. Not just because our California bones miss rain (they do), but because there is no better time to take pictures than a rainy day.
Monday morning Don and I drove to Lost Lake to scout it as a potential workshop location. Climbing from near sea level to over 3,000 feet in a steady rain, we passed through deciduous forests in varying stages of green, yellow, orange, and red. The fall color peaked at around 2,000 feet, dwindled as we climbed further, until by the time we reached the lake, most of the colorful leaves were on the ground or whisked away by mountain breezes. While Mt. Hood was completely obscured by rainclouds, we spent a couple of hours exploring near the lake before heading back down the mountain with no specific plan other than to stop somewhere and photograph the color we’d enjoyed on the drive up.
Partway down the mountain we pulled over beside an evergreen forest liberally mixed with yellow and red maples, donned our rain gear, and went to work. With dense, low clouds shrinking the view to just the immediate vicinity, grand panorama were out of the question and my 70-200 became my weapon of choice for its ability to isolate nearby leaves and limit depth of field.
An essential but frequently overlooked component of successful rainy day photograph is a (properly oriented!) polarizer to mitigate the ubiquitous, color-sapping sheen reflecting back from every exposed surface. This is a no-exception thing for me—I don’t care if it’s already dark and the polarizer robs me of two more stops of light, without it, images from wet scenes like this would be a complete failure. In this case I bumped my ISO to 400 (and would have as high as necessary if there had been more wind) before composing a single frame.
Beautiful as it was, a scene like this starts as a hodgepodge of disorganized color. Fortunately, it’s never long before individual elements start manifesting—the longer I stay, the more (and smaller) detail I see, until even the littlest thing stands out and I can’t believe it had been there all along. Knowing all this, I usually start at my lens’s wider range and gradually work tighter as the surroundings become more familiar.
And so it was with this little leaf, tucked into the forest behind several layers of dense and dripping branches, hiding from my gaze until nearly an hour into my visit. From the forest’s outskirts I zoomed to 200mm and composed a few frames through the tangle of branches, but it wasn’t long before I needed to be closer.
When I spy something interesting, it’s easy to crash through the forest like an angry grizzly (or frightened bison), but because I was extremely concerned about dislodging the fragile raindrops, I found myself deliberately stalking my prey, more like a stealthy cougar. (I could have just as easily compared my advance to a slithering snake, but for some reason this cougar analog resonated with me. Go figure.) When I made it so close that I was inside my lens’s focus range, I added an extension tube, and finally a second tube.
By this time I was just a few inches from the leaf, and while this ultra-close view was pretty cool, I felt my frame needed more that just a pretty leaf. Until this point I’d been pushing the nearby branches and leaves aside, out my view. But realizing that I was so close (the leaf closest brushed my lens), and my range of focus was so thin, that they would blur to a smear of red that cradled my subject.
With a paper-thin depth of field, finding the right focus point is essential. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to get the entire leaf sharp, so I used live-view to focus on the center water drop (because that’s where I want my viewer’s eye to start).
Staying dry
The rain came and went for the duration of our stay, but never reached an intensity that made shooting difficult. In this case there wasn’t much wind, making my umbrella particularly useful for keeping raindrops off my lens. Nevertheless, without a little simple preparation, this image wouldn’t have been possible. I’ve learned never to take a photo trip without basic rain gear. For me that’s:
- A thin, waterproof shell that fits over whatever else I’m wearing (shirt, jacket, or whatever the temperature calls for)
- Waterproof pants that fit over my regular pants—I have an unlined pair for moderate temperatures, and a lined pair what I think it could get cold, and decide between when I pack
- Waterproof hiking boots
- Waterproof hat
- Wool or synthetic shirts, pants, and socks that will keep me comfortable when my rain gear causes me to perspire (no cotton!)
- Umbrella for my camera—because I’m dry (see above), I can dedicate the umbrella 100 percent to keeping raindrops off my lens
- Towel to dry things (especially my lens!) when they get wet—I often borrow one from my hotel, which isn’t a problem as long as I remember to return it
- Plastic garbage bag to drape over my camera when it’s on the tripod waiting for me to do something productive—if I forget a garbage bag, the hotel’s laundry or trash liner bags work fine
A rainy day gallery
Click an image for a closer look, and to enjoy the slide show
A simple how and when of fall color
Posted on October 6, 2014
Autumn Bouquet, Zion National Park
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
200 mm
4 seconds
F/16
ISO 200
Few things get a photographer’s heart racing more than the vivid yellows, oranges, and reds of autumn. And the excitement isn’t limited to photographers—to appreciate that reality, just try navigating New England backroads on a Sunday afternoon in October.
Innkeeper logic
But despite all the attention, the annual autumn extravaganza is fraught mystery and misconception. Showing up at at the spot that guy in your camera club told you was peaking at this time last year, you might find the very same trees displaying lime green mixed with just hints of yellow and orange, and hear the old guy behind the counter at the inn shake his head and tell you, “It hasn’t gotten cold enough yet—the color’s late this year.” Then, the next year, when you check into the same inn on the same weekend, you find just a handful of leaves clinging to exposed branches—this time as the old guy hands you the key he utters, “That freeze a few weeks ago got the color started early this year—you should have been here last week.”
While these explanations may sound reasonable, they’re not quite accurate. Because the why and when of fall color is complicated, observers resort to memory, anecdote, and lore to fill knowledge voids with partial truth and downright myth. Fortunately, science has given us a pretty good understanding of the fall color process.
It’s all about the sunlight
The leaves of deciduous trees contain a mix of green, yellow, and orange pigments. During the spring and summer growing season, the green chlorophyl pigment overpowers the orange and yellow pigments and the tree stays green. Even though this chlorophyl is quickly broken down by sunlight, the process of photosynthesis that sustains the tree, during the long days of summer it is continuously replaced.
As the days shrink toward autumn, things begin to change. Cells at the abscission layer at the base of the leaves’ stem (the knot where the leaf connects to the branch) begin the process that will eventually lead to the leaf dropping from the tree: thickening of cells in the abscission layer blocks the transfer of carbohydrates from the leaves to the branches and the movement of minerals to the leaves that had kept the tree thriving all summer. Without these minerals, the leaves’ production of chlorophyl dwindles and finally stops, leaving just the yellow and orange pigments. Voila—color!
Sunlight and weather
Contrary to popular belief, the timing of the onset of this fall color chain reaction is much more daylight-dependent than temperature- and weather-dependent—triggered by a genetically programmed day/night-duration threshold, and contrary to innkeeper-logic, the trees in any given region will commence their transition from green to color at about the same time each year (when the day length drops to a certain point).
Nevertheless, though it doesn’t trigger the process, weather does play a significant part in the intensity, duration, and demise of the color season. Because sunlight breaks down the green chlorophyl, cloudy days after the suspension of chlorophyl creation will slow the coloring process. And while the yellow and orange pigments are present and pretty much just hanging out, waiting all summer for the chlorophyl to relinquish control of the tree’s color, the red and purple pigments are manufactured from sugar stored in the leaves—the more sugar, the more vivid the red. Ample moisture, warm days, and cool (but not freezing) nights after the chlorophyl replacement has stopped are most conducive to the creation and retention of the sugars that form the red and purple pigments.
On the other hand, freezing temperatures destroy the color pigments, bringing a premature end to the color display. Drought can stress trees so much that they drop their leaves before the color has a chance to manifest. And wind and rain can wreak havoc with the fall display—go to bed one night beneath a canopy of red and gold, wake the next morning to find the trees bare and the ground blanketed with color. And of course all these weather factors come in an infinite number of variations, which makes each year’s color timing and intensity a little different from the last.
Despite our understanding of the fall color process, Mother Nature still holds some secrets pretty close to her vest—just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, she’ll surprise us. For example, last year’s Eastern Sierra fall color featured lots of black leaves that I attributed to California’s extreme drought conditions. With the drought persisting, and in fact intensifying, this year, I feared this fall would be even worse. So I was quite pleased to find everything going along right on schedule, with lots of yellow, more red than usual, and hardly a black leaf to be seen. Go figure.
About this image
My first visit to Zion National Park, three years ago, found the fall color peaking. I’d love to say this was through expert knowledge and careful planning, but it just happened that I’d been helping Don Smith with a workshop in Moab and we’d tacked on an extra day to play in Zion. We arrived early enough in the afternoon to explore and shoot for several hours before sunset, and were so thrilled by what we’d found that we decided to return for an hour the or so the next morning before heading home.
Though my time was limited, a couple of things made this morning’s shoot even more productive than previous afternoon’s. First was the familiarity I’d gained the day before. And second was the morning’s soft light and utter stillness. Anxious to get going, we started before sunrise and were the first people to enter the canyon that morning—without wind or human interference, the air was so still that it seemed even the river was whispering. In these conditions it’s easy to forget time, ignore the chill, and immerse myself in world devoid of human obligation and discomfort.
What struck me most about Zion’s color was the crimson maples, a color we just don’t get in California. While yellow was ubiquitous, red leaves were quite plentiful too, and I tuned my vision to identify any red I could highlight against the predominant yellow. Identifying this bunch of red leaves was just the beginning of my composition. Isolating a subject requires more than positioning it in the frame’s two-diminsional up-down/left-right planes; it also requires controlling the virtual third dimension, depth, by careful management of the background and depth-of-field. In this case I refined my find by moving left/right and up/down until I was satisfied with the way the background complemented the red leaves.
Equally important was finding the appropriate depth of field—too little DOF would mean not enough of the nearby red leaves, my subject, would be sharp; too much DOF much would risk resolving so much background that it would compete with my leaves. I decided to use my 70-200 lens, moving back far enough to include all of the red leaves at 200mm. That long focal length compressed the distance separating the foreground leaves and background trees (make the yellow trees seem closer to the red leaves). Because depth of field decreases with focal length, even at f16 background trees were soft enough.
A few other subtle but significant considerations went into this image. First, note the long shutter speed: the air was so still that I had no qualms about using ISO 200, f16, and a polarizer, even though it dropped my shutter speed to four seconds. Also, don’t underestimate the importance of a polarizer in shady or overcast scenes: color-robbing glare from leaves’ waxy sheen is reduced significantly by a properly oriented polarizer. And finally, in front of these leaves were a few fluffy white seed pods—I knew they were close enough that at 200mm they would be blurred to little puffs of white, and simply decided to shoot through them.
Read how to photograph fall color in my Fall Color Photo Tips article.
A fall color gallery
Click an image for a closer look, and to enjoy the slide show
Made in the shade
Posted on December 2, 2013
Cascade in Autumn, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
15 seconds
F/22
ISO 50
60 mm
Imagine that you want to send an eight-inch fruitcake to your nephew for Christmas (and forget for a moment that you’ve been come that relative), but only have a six-inch box. You could cut off one end or the other, squish it, or get a bigger box. If the fruitcake represents the light in a scene you want to photograph, your camera’s narrow dynamic range is the box. Of course the analogy starts to fall apart here unless you can also imagine a world where box technology hasn’t caught up with fruitcake recipes, but the point I’m trying to make is that whether it’s fruitcake or light, when you have too much of something, compromises must be made.
So, forgetting about fruitcakes for a moment, let’s look at this image of Bridalveil Creek in Yosemite. In full daylight on a sunny day the creek would have been a mix of sunlight and shade far beyond a camera’s ability to capture in a single frame—photographing it would have forced me to choose between capturing the highlights and allowing the shadows to go black, or capturing the shadows and allowing the highlights to go white. But photographing the scene in full shade compressed the dynamic range naturally, to something my camera could handle—suddenly everything was in shadow, and all I needed to do was keep my camera steady enough for the duration of the shutter speed necessary to expose the scene at the f-stop and ISO I chose.
This illustrates why “photographer’s light” is so different from “tourist’s light.” It also explains why your family gets so irritated when you base your vacation stops on when the light will be “right.” (Or, if you (wisely) defer to your family’s wishes, you get so frustrated that your vacation photos don’t look like the photos that show-off in your camera club submits for every competition.)
I love photographing a colorful sunset as much as the next person, but I’m never happier as a photographer than when I’m able to play with a pretty scene in full shade. Overcast skies are great because they allow me to photograph all day, but because clouds are never a sure thing, at every location I photograph I try to have weather-independent spots that will allow me to photograph when clear skies fill the rest of the landscape with sunlight. For example, Bridalveil Creek—nestled against Yosemite Valley’s shear south wall, much of the year Bridalveil Creek is in full shade until at least mid-morning, and then again by mid-afternoon. I never have to worry about what the light is here because I know exactly when I’ll find it in wonderful, (easy) low contrast shade.
The morning I captured this image was one of those blue sky days that can shut a photographer down, but I knew exactly where I needed to be. Arriving at about 8 a.m., I had several hours of shooting in easily manageable, constant light. As I scrambled up the creek toward the fall, I fired off a few frames but nothing stopped me until I came across this small pool swarming with recently fallen leaves. A couple of “rough draft” frames were enough to know that there was an image in here—I just needed to find it.
I suspected I needed to be closer, but between the large, slippery rocks and frigid creek, movement was quite difficult. Nevertheless, with each composition I seemed to manage to work my way a little closer, until I finally found myself at water’s edge. I started my composition at eye level, but that gave me too much water. To better balance the background cascade, middle-ground pool, and foreground leaves, I dropped down to about a foot above water level—this allowed me to include the foreground leaves with a telephoto that brought the cascade closer and shrunk the water separating the two.
Framing the scene this way required zooming to 60mm; because I wanted as much sharpness throughout the frame as possible, I stopped all the way down to f22 (an extreme I try to avoid). While the dense shade made the scene’s dynamic range manageable, it also made it quite dark; adding a polarizer to cut the glare subtracted two more stops. Sometimes I can increase my ISO enough to achieve a shutter speed that gives a little definition in the water, but given all the other exposure factors I just cited, my water was going to be blurred no matter what ISO I chose. So I decided to go the other direction and maximize my shutter speed to emphasize the motion of the leaves swirling on the pool’s surface.
* * *
FYI, your nephew would probably prefer an Amazon gift card. And if you must send a fruitcake, this one looks good (feel free to try it and send a sample).
Chasing the moon in Yosemite
Posted on November 18, 2013
Moonrise Reflection, Half Dome and the Merced River, Yosemite
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
1.3 seconds
F/16.0
ISO 200
40 mm
The highlight of my just completed Yosemite Autumn Moon photo workshop was a full moon rising above Half Dome at sunset. But rather than settle for just one Half Dome sunset moonrise, I’d “arranged for” three. Clouds shut us out on sunset-moonrise number two, but sunset-moonrise number one was a huge success. (And sunset-moonrise number three, from Tunnel View, was so special that I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to it.)
Any location’s “official” sun and moon rise/set times assume a flat horizon—if you read that today’s moonrise is at 5:00 p.m., you need to account for the time it takes for the moon to rise above whatever obstacles (mountains, hills, trees) are between you and the flat horizon. And due to the same motion around Earth that causes the moon’s phases, anyone planted in the same location night after night would see the moon rise about fifty minutes later each day (this is an average—the nightly lag varies with many factors). For example, a moon that hovered right on the horizon at sunset last night will rise too late to photograph tonight.
While you can’t do anything about the moon’s absolute position in the sky, you can control the elevation of your horizon simply by changing your location. In other words, careful positioning makes it possible to photograph a moonrise at sunset on multiple nights—move lower and/or closer to the horizon to delay the moon’s appearance, higher and/or farther to view the moon sooner.
The earlier the moon will rise, the closer to your subject (for example, Half Dome) you should be to increase the angle of view; the later the moonrise, the farther back and higher you should be. So, positioning ourselves on the valley floor, close to Half Dome, provided a steep angle of view that delayed the moon’s appearance on Thursday night, when it rose (above a flat horizon) several hours before sunset. Conversely, standing at elevated Tunnel View a couple of nights later decreased our angle of view, enabling us to see the moon sooner when official moonrise is closer to sunset.
Last Saturday night, from Tunnel View on Yosemite Valley’s west side (farthest from Half Dome) the moon was “scheduled” to appear about five minutes after sunset—that would put it in the magenta, post-sunset band with just enough light for about ten minutes of shooting before the dynamic range (the brightness difference between the sunlit moon and darkening foreground) shut us down. While that was the shoot we were most looking forward to, for Friday night I’d picked a mid-valley spot by the Merced River that would put the moon above Half Dome just about sunset. And for our initial sunset on Thursday evening, I took the group to a riverside spot on Yosemite Valley’s east side, much closer to Half Dome.
Clouds obscured the moon Friday night, but Thursday night was a real treat. Not only did we find the fall color in the cottonwood trees upriver still hanging in there (despite a fairly early autumn in most of Yosemite Valley), the clouds parted just in time for the moon’s arrival. In addition to Half Dome, the trees, and the moon in the distance, we were able to get a mirror image of the scene reflected on the glassy surface of the Merced River at our feet.
While the downside of moving closer to Half Dome (or whatever your subject is) is that the wider focal length necessary to include the entire scene also shrinks the moon, I’ve always believed a small moon adds a powerful accent that makes an already beautiful scene even more special. But what if you prefer your moon big? Simple: just wait a day or two, and move back as far as possible. Stay tuned….
Join me next fall as we do this all over again.
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One final point: Notice the cool (blue) color cast of this scene. This is an indication of not just the rapidly advancing twilight, but also the depth of the shade there in the shadow of the steep valley walls and dense evergreens. An image’s color temperature is a creative choice made during processing by photographers capturing in raw (unprocessed) mode. While warming the light would have made the trees more yellow, I decided that the coolness adds a soothing calmness that is lost in the warmth of a daylight scene.
A Yosemite Autumn Moon Gallery
Variations on a stream
Posted on November 7, 2013
Leaf and Rocks, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
5 seconds
F/11
ISO 200
100 mm
In my November 4 post, I wrote at length about a recent morning spent photographing a single leaf I found plastered to a rock beside Bridalveil Creek in Yosemite (and my feelings about staged scenes). While my entire shoot that morning was all about one found leaf, it was just the latest in a long succession of focused visits to Bridalveil Creek. Each time I visit here the creek is different: In spring Bridalveil Creek spills into three distinct branches, each bulging with rushing snowmelt; most autumns, the creek has shrunk one branch, a trickle of its former self, decorated with yellow leaves; in winter the banks are lined with snow and ice crusts the surface. On each visit I usually choose a scene and work it to within an inch of its life. On this most recent morning I spent an hour photographing this one leaf, making sure I left no shot un-shot: Multiple lenses, a range of focal lengths, horizontal and vertical orientation, and a variety of perspectives.
Here are more samples:
Here’s the version of the leaf I featured in my November 4 post. I started with wider compositions and gradually moved to tighter frames like this one. (If I were one to arrange leaves in my scenes, I might have been tempted to place one about where the pine needle sits on the rock opposite the leaf.)
Here’s the same image rotated into a vertical. Whenever possible, I like to horizontal and vertical version of each scene I photography, but rarely do they come out identical because each orientation requires its own crop. But an advantage of photographing a scene from directly above is that there’s no top or bottom to the scene. To make the horizontal scene into a vertical, I could have rotated my camera 90 degrees and re-shot, but it was much easier to simply rotate the image in Photoshop.
Shortly after I started working on the scene, a breeze kicked up and deposited a green leaf right on top of the pine needle mentioned above. Not only was it a not particularly photogenic leaf, it was upside-down (clearly I need to work on my powers of telepathic manifestation). But rather than knock the rogue leaf into the creek, I included it in my composition, capturing several frames before the breeze returned and did the dirty work for me.
No leaves were harmed in the making of this image
Posted on November 4, 2013
Leaf, Bridalveil Creek, Yosemite
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
10 seconds
F/16
ISO 200
78 mm
“Did you put that leaf there?”
I’m not sure how many more times I’ll need to answer that question, but let me just say that my answer will never change: No. I feel very strongly that photography needs to be a source of pleasure, and my pleasure from photography comes from discovering beauty in its natural state. But that’s just me—others enjoy staging images by adding or moving elements to suit their composition, which, as far as I’m concerned, is fine as long as the photographer is forthright about what she’s done.
Sadly, the ease of digital manipulation has made people hyper-sensitive to the possibility that an image might not be “real” (whatever that means). Analog manipulation (like arranging leaves) has gone on since the first photon/film connection. And darkroom manipulation, while not nearly as easy as digital manipulation, has been around since the first darkroom—Ansel Adams was a notorious darkroom manipulator who often revisited older images and re-printed vastly different versions. Adams actually got a kick out of people who believed he was capturing the world exactly as he saw it.
Whatever the “manipulation” (a word with a much more negative implication than it deserves in this context), the ultimate litmus test is whether deception is involved. Most people who arrange the elements in their scenes do so without devious intent; while I may not be as excited about an image when I learn that the photographer placed the leaf on that rock, or Photoshopped the moon above between those mountains, I won’t think less of him as a person or photographer if he’s honest about it.
Nevertheless I sometimes find myself getting a little defensive when the “Did you put that leaf there?” question is posed. It’s not so much the question itself (which I understand), as it is the implication that I’ve been caught in a deception that so frequently wraps the question. Nevertheless, regardless of the questioner’s tone, I just smile and affirm my innocence of whatever nefarious act they might suspect me of. I try my best not to expose their ignorance, and when I’m in a more patient frame of mind, I’ll even attempt to educate anyone who wants to be educated. But sometimes I just feel like asking, “Do you really not believe that nature can be this beautiful?”
Fallen Color, Rock Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Here’s one that gets the “Did you do that?” question all the time. I didn’t touch the leaves, but because any two objects in the Universe can be connected by a straight line, I did position myself to emphasize the line connecting this pair.
Oh well. I’m sure I get the question so much because of what and how I shoot—browse my galleries and you’ll see many images with a single leaf, or maybe a small group of leaves. But that’s because I aggressively seek solitary elements to isolate from whatever larger scene I’m in, or multiple elements that I can compose into a natural pattern by simply positioning my camera a certain way.
When I find a compositional element I think will work, I stick with it until I’m sure I’ve found every possible way to shoot it, then continue just a little longer. Which brings me to today’s leaf. I photographed it and nothing else for a full hour—it was the only thing I photographed that morning.
On the final morning of last week’s Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections workshop I guided those workshop students who didn’t mind a little rock scrambling to my favorite spot on Bridalveil Creek. Within easy earshot of the fall, the creek back here tumbles between boulders as large as cars, descending in cascading steps interrupted by quiet pools. In autumn, the scene is augmented by yellow leaves that dart through the cascades, drift on the pools, and cling to wet rocks.
While the others zeroed in on a triple cascade (that I’d photographed many times before), I hopped nearby boulders in search of something new. My search ended when I found this single, rock hugging leaf. Unfortunately, the star of my show was in a most inaccessible spot, inches from the rushing water at the bottom of a steep and slippery rock, deep in a narrow notch between a trio of large boulders.
From atop a nearby rock I could shoot down at about 45 degrees from maybe fifteen feet away, but I soon realized that a tighter composition from directly above was really the shot I wanted. Getting in position for this required angles I didn’t know my tripod legs were capable of, and gymnastic contortions this body hasn’t attempted in years. I can’t even begin to describe how awkward this was, but of course that won’t stop me from trying:
It was clear from the outset that securing my tripod in the open air above the leaf would require help from three widely separated rocks. After much trial, error, and imminent mishap, I finally managed to splay each tripod leg onto its own rock with the camera in positioned directly above the leaf. Okay, now what? There was no way I could even get close to the viewfinder, but spread-eagled between two rocks and using the tripod for balance (but not for support), through the genius of live-view, I was able to get close enough to my LCD that I was pretty sure I could compose and focus. So far so good.
I next removed the camera from the tripod to meter. With Bridalveil Creek in the shadow of six-hundred vertical feet of granite (in these low-sun months I can photograph here in low contrast, full shade for most of the morning), my exposure choices were pretty straightforward. I guessed that I’d need a least a foot of depth of field, that my camera would be about five feet above the leaf, and that my focal length would be around 80mm. Plugging these values into my hyperfocal app told me f16 would give me the one-and-a-half feet of depth of field I thought I’d need.
Experience with workshop students has shown me that many photographers vastly underrate the value of a polarizer in a shaded scene like this (and vastly overrate its value for the sky!). Without a polarizer, the glare on the wet rocks and leaf risked rendering this image unusable (even with the scene fully polarized, the glare remains quite noticeable). So, before returning my camera to the tripod, I oriented my polarizer by pointing my camera in the direction of my scene, looking through the viewfinder, and turning the polarizer’s outer ring until the wet rocks darkened.
At this distance and focal length, with water moving as fast as this, there’s virtually no difference in the blur effect between 2 and 20 seconds. Given that I see little noise difference between 100 and 200 ISO, rather than exposing 20 seconds at 100 ISO, I went with 10 seconds at 200 ISO for no better reason than it halved the wait time for each image.
Okay. Camera back on the tripod, I switched on live-view and found my composition. Moving the focus box to the leaf, I magnified 10x and focused carefully. Almost ready, but before clicking I returned to 1x view and reevaluated my composition. Then I clicked, evaluated, refined, and clicked again. But even with the LCD a few feet away I could see that those first couple of meticulously composed and focused attempts were slightly soft and framed wider than I knew I’d composed them. Hmmm. I double-checked my tripod and confirmed that everything was solid. Scratching my head, I recomposed and focused once more. Watching my camera closely this time, I saw that the extreme downward angle was causing the telescoping barrel of my 24-105 lens to slowly extend during my exposure. Crap. Camera back off the tripod, I retreated from my perch. Returning to my camera bag, which was safely balanced on a rock about ten feet away, I switched to my 70-200 lens.
While switching lenses was a pain, not only did it solve the drifting problem, the longer lens forced me to tighten and simplify my composition to its most basic elements: one leaf, two rocks, water. And variations on those elements are pretty much what I did for the next hour or so. The longer I worked the scene, the more variations I found, and also the more adept I became at adjusting my tripod, camera angle, and even myself, to achieve whatever shot I wanted. Every once in a while I descended to assist someone in the group (leaving the tripod and camera, thank-you-very-much), taking advantage of the break to relieve my cramping legs, back, and neck. By the time I finished my muscles were screaming and my hands were little pink ice cubes, but I was happy.
I walked back to the parking lot knowing I had some really nice images. And despite all the effort and discomfort, I had a complete blast. But please, please don’t ask me if I put that leaf there.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 