Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
The Show Must Go On
Posted on August 13, 2025
Ablaze, Desert View Sunset, Grand Canyon
Sony a7R V
Sony 100-400 GM
Sony 1.4x Teleconverter
ISO 100
f/9
1/1600 second
Greetings from Grand Canyon.
A big part of nature photography is anticipation and planning. And with planning comes expectations. Sadly, expectations often don’t live up to reality, so another big part of nature photography is how you handle the situations when expectations aren’t met.
To those people who preempt disappointment by simply avoiding expectations (after all, if you don’t have expectations, you can’t be disappointed) I say, what fun is that? Despite the risk of disappointment, I truly enjoy getting excited about upcoming trips—then just do my best to make the most of whatever situation has dashed my expectations.
When planning my workshops, I try to remember that it’s not just my own expectations on the line—big promises also means the potential for big disappointment. And few things ramp up expectations, both my own and my workshop students’, more than the possibility of photographing lightning at the Grand Canyon. Of course with or without lightning, Grand Canyon is special. But let’s be honest—the only reason I schedule this workshop in Grand Canyon’s most crowded month is because that’s the best time for lightning. And despite all the inherent beauty here, lightning is the prime reason most of my workshop students sign up. The number two reason? Probably the opportunity to visit the North Rim.
This year, the first threat to everyone’s expectations came in July, when Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim burned, forcing the closure of that side of the park. Though the North Rim doesn’t have the views to match the South Rim, I’ve always believed the rest of the North Rim experience exceeds the South Rim: fewer people, evergreen forest setting, and rustic Grand Canyon Lodge. Additionally, the North Rim has been the site of some of my groups’ most spectacular lightning successes. But rather than cancel the workshop because we lost our two North Rim nights, I just switched those lost nights to the South Rim, where I believed (crossed my fingers) that the overall experience could be just as good, only different: expectations reset.
Smoke can create havoc at Grand Canyon, but at the time the fire changed my plans, I fully expected that it would be extinguished when my workshop came around (a month later). I also consoled myself with the belief that the chances for lightning this year would be no different than any other year (extremely good). In other words, expectations were back on the rise.
But, as the workshop drew near, the fire actually exploded from fewer than 10,000 acres to its current 145,000 acres (and climbing), with the containment percentages barely budging each day (it’s currently only 44% contained). Worse still, as August approached, it started to become clear that this was not a good monsoon year in Northern Arizona. Expectations cratered.
The workshop’s first day dawned with no hope for lightning, and a canyon filled with smoke—not a great combo. But by this time, we were in “the show must go on” mode, and I was grateful to have a group that was happy to stay as positive as I was. At the orientation I laid out the scenario, and gave them a rundown of all the ways we could make the best of it. I reminded them that some of my favorite Grand Canyon images were only possible because the smoke subdued a brilliant sun, and I’ve seen the forecast turn from clear to thunderstorms with very little warning.
Making it out to the east-side views on our first shoot, we found the skies cloudless, and a fair amount of smoke. But the smoke could have been much worse, and was thin enough to permit at least a decent view into the nearby portions of the canyon, with outlines of the canyon’s internal ridges receding down the canyon to the west. Not the iconic red rock grandeur people expect at Grand Canyon, but quite photogenic for anyone with a telephoto lens and reasonable understanding of exposure.
The view that evening enabled me to reemphasize the point I’d made in the orientation: this would likely be a sunset where the sun, receding ridges, and a telephoto lens would take the day. Even with the smoke, careful exposure would be required to capture (in a single frame) enough canyon detail for silhouettes, without blowing out the sun.
That’s exactly the approach I took for this Desert View sunset image from that first evening. I started by setting up my 100-400 with a 1.4 teleconverter for the biggest sun possible, then composed a few sample frames while the sun was about 15 minutes from the horizon. This gave me enough time to anticipate the spot on the distant canyon rim where the sun would disappear, and to play with the possible compositions, finally arriving at this one at a little less than 500mm. Then I waited.
I held my breath a few minutes later when the sun disappeared into a layer of clouds, exhaling only when it reappeared shortly thereafter. As it dropped to within a sun’s-diameter of the horizon, I started clicking, keeping a close eye on my camera’s histogram and highlight alerts (“zebras”), while pushing the exposure to as bright as I could make it without losing color in the sun. To hedge my bets, I varied my exposure up and down by a couple of stops, my standard practice any time the sun is in my frame. (This allows me to use my large monitor at home to select the image with the best highlights/shadows balance.)
Honestly, the resulting images looked like crap on my LCD: the sun appeared too bright, while the canyon was virtually black. But I know my camera well enough to know that both highlights and shadows were within the recoverable range. Not only that, underexposing everything but the sun turned the clouds a fiery orange-red.
Processing this image was actually a piece of cake: I just pulled Lightroom’s Highlights slider all the way to the left, the Shadows slider all the way to the right, then adjusted the Exposure slider upward until everything felt right. Believe it or not, as soon as I finished those three moves, the sun and clouds looked pretty much like this (no special masking, blending, or color adjustment required)—I actually chose to desaturate the color a bit in Photoshop to make everything look more credible. Besides some moderate noise reduction in the darkest areas of the frame, this image required very little more than that. (Amazing how much simpler processing is when you nail the exposure.)
We’re now on workshop Day 3, and it turns out that initial shoot was our smokiest. Though we haven’t seen many clouds (yet), and have had lots of smoke in the distance, the canyon itself, as well as the sky above, has been sufficiently smoke-free to permit very clear views all the way down to the river, and brilliant sunstars (which require the brightest possible sun) at each sunrise/sunset shoot after that first one.
I’ve also found myself even more thrilled than I expected to be to have much more time on the South Rim—not only do we have two more days here, we also didn’t lose most of one day to the drive to the North Rim. That’s allowed me to take group to a few favorite locations that I’ve never had time to share with groups before. And I’ve been doing this so long, I’ve found very effective workarounds to the daunting South Rim crowds.
And as if to reward everyone’s positive spirit, now the National Weather Service has dangled hints of thunderstorms for tomorrow, and completely dropped the hints in favor of downright promises for the day following (fingers crossed). So things are definitely looking up.
Having lost the North Rim for the foreseeable future, I wasn’t sure I was going to continue this workshop. But after this week’s experience, even without the normal amount of lightning, all systems are go for next year.
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More Monsoon Magic
Storm Chasing Grand Canyon Style
Posted on September 19, 2023
Electric Sunset, Desert View Lightning, Grand Canyon
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 200
f/8
10 seconds
Before returning to the Hawaii trip, I want to wrap up my Grand Canyon trip with another image from the wonderful lightning show on the last night of the second workshop. I wrote about this evening, and the frustrations that preceded it, in my August 29 “Feast or Famine” post. I’ve actually processed three of my favorite lightning strikes from that evening, and it occurs to me that viewing them in sequence adds a little context to the experience—not just for this storm, but for most of the best storms I’ve photographed over my many years storm chasing here.
My approach to photographing Grand Canyon lightning is to take advantage of the broad, distant views along the canyon’s rim to keep a safe(-ish) distance from the storms we photograph. These wide views are a prime reason I use (and strongly recommend to all of the photographers in my workshops) a Lightning Trigger LT IV from Stepping Stone Products in Colorado (I get no kickback or other perks from Stepping Stone—they’ve even discontinued the 10% discount my workshop participants used to get). Not only does the Lightning Trigger miss fewer lightning bolts than any lightning sensor I’ve seen, my groups and I have captured lightning up to 60 miles away—a huge advantage for the kind of lightning photography I do at Grand Canyon.
Since at least 80% of the storms my groups photograph are too distant for the thunder to reach us, the lens I recommend (and use more than 90% of the time) is a 24-105 (for anyone who doesn’t have a 24-105, a 24-70 is a good second choice). Since we can only guess where the next lightning bolt will strike, this focal range is wide enough for the loose compositions that ensure lightning somewhere in the frame, and long enough to pull in even the most distant lightning the LT captures. And we make our composition decisions with the full understanding that we’ll almost certainly be cropping any resulting lightning image—one of the few times I’m grateful for every single one of the 61 megapixels on my Sony a7R V’s sensor.
Having a distant vantage point has the added benefit of providing a ringside seat for the storms’ evolution and motion. I’ve watched storms develop in place, going from puffy white clouds to towering thunderheads in a matter of minutes. Often the storms will drift up from the south—some traveling great distances and lasting an hour or more, others building and dissipating quickly, only to be replaced by another new storm just a little farther north, until the activity reaches the canyon.
The North Rim is the best place to view these northward-trending storms. Since our North Rim lodging is right on the rim, we’ll often just hang out on one of the (lightning rod shielded) view decks at the lodge and wait for the lightning to come to us. Usually the storms don’t make it all the way across the canyon, but we have been chased inside a few times.
The South Rim is a little trickier for lightning photography for several reasons: more people; our hotel is 15 minutes from the rim; and many storms sneak up behind us. But when we do get in position to photograph a storm on the South Rim, it’s a real treat because this is where we find Grand Canyon’s most expansive views.
The Grand Canyon south-to-north storm path I describe is simply a tendency—far from a rule. We’ve also photographed many storms that have moved down from north of the canyon, as well as many that have moved toward us from up- or down-canyon. The storms can move east-to-west, west-to-east, or curve from a north/south to an east/west path (or vice versa). And then there are the storms that just stay put, dumping rain and stabbing the rim with lightning in one spot for more than an hour.
Because of the storms’ unpredictability, it’s very important to keep a constant eye on them, monitoring the general direction of movement. For safety reasons of course, but also to make the most informed composition decisions. Unlike pretty much every other kind of photography, in lightning photography you really don’t know where the scene’s most important feature will be. The difficulty is balancing the best composition for the scene, with where the lightning is most likely to strike.
I got my latest reminder of this for the Desert View lightning shoot on the the workshop’s final night. After starting the day with lots of optimism, we’d pretty much given up hope for a lightning experience. Sunset that evening was Desert View, one of my favorite Grand Canyon locations. The sunset was a treat, but as the sun dropped, I noticed the rain increasing about 15 miles down-canyon (west), to the point where I thought in might be worth breaking out the Lightning Triggers and crossing our fingers.
Fortunately, this was in the direction of one of Desert View’s best compositions, so we weren’t really losing much pointing this way. Meanwhile, I noticed some clouds with potential moving up from the south, just east of the canyon. Though the clouds to the west looked a little more promising for lightning, I liked a northeast-facing composition (wide enough to capture any lightning out there) even better and soon pointed my camera in that direction—a luxury I had (to choose the best composition over the best chance for lightning) because I have more than enough lightning images already.
To make a long story just a little shorter, I got nothing with my northeast composition, but the people facing west weren’t having any luck either. The (still unproductive) cell to the west seemed to be in a great hurry to move north, across the canyon, and I encouraged everyone pointing in that direction to adjust their compositions accordingly (and to keep their fingers crossed)—while I stubbornly stuck with my composition in the opposite direction.
As soon as the western cell made it across the rim, it made a 90 degree turn and started scooting across the North Rim, directly in front of us. It took a couple of excited exclamations (that could only mean lightning across the canyon) to change my mind, and I turned my camera in that direction (now northwest).
I like the Desert View compositions due west (where the rain had been), and northeast (where I’d been pointing). But the lightning was firing directly across the canyon—my least favorite canyon view at Desert View. So I widened up enough to include some of the really nice view to the west—if I’d guessed right, I’d get that view on the left of my scene, with lightning on the right.
I ended up with three really nice lightning images this evening, each well after sunset. The first one (shared above) came the earliest, when I still had most of the down-canyon view I like so much. The second came nine minutes later, after it had become clear that the lightning was moving east and I needed to adjust accordingly. The final strike was six minutes later, after the darkness had really started to take hold, but the activity had moved far enough east that I could completely change my composition to include the up-canyon northeast view I like so much.
I think from this series of images you can really get a sense for the storm’s movement, and my attempts to balance the best composition with the potential for the best lightning. I’m not always as successful as I was this evening, but I guess that’s part of the thrill of lightning photography.
Join me at the Grand Canyon
Lightning Sequences
Here’s a collection of groups of 2 or 3 images captured together (same shoot); I’ve placed each sequence together, in the order they were captured (it’s probably easier to see the sequences if you click through the gallery)
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Here Comes the Sunstar
Posted on September 4, 2023
Day’s End on the Rim, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 100
f/20
1/8 second
As striking as they might be, some people find sunstars (AKA, diffraction spikes, sunbursts, or starbursts) gimmicky and cliché. When I (and pretty much any other landscape photographer) arrive at a location, of course I hope for some combination of dramatic clouds, vivid color, and soft light. But when the sun dominates the scene, it turns out that including a sunstar is usually the best way to get the most out of the moment.
Adding a sunstar to a photograph does have its challenges: Including any part of the sun in your frame introduces lens flare, not to mention extreme (often unmanageable) contrast. And poorly executed, a sunstar creates an unappealing eye magnet that overpowers the rest of the scene. And while a sunstar doesn’t capture the literal experience of watching the sun’s arrival or departure, it’s almost always better than a washed-out blue sky.
For a long time I considered sunstars merely a lemonade-from-lemons solution—the best way to play a poor hand. But over time I’ve come to appreciate a sunstar’s ability to represent the brilliance of gazing directly into the sun—minus the corneal damage. Like blurring whitewater and waves or freezing airborne droplets to convey motion, a sunstar can serve as a proxy for a natural phenomenon that’s impossible to duplicate in a still photo.
The truth is, the sun is a powerful conveyer of emotion. We all have fond memories of watching the day’s first or last rays as the sun peeks above, or slips below, the horizon. And who doesn’t feel relief when moving from sunlight to shade on a blistering summer afternoon, or from shade to sunlight on a chilly winter day? A sunstar can freeze these natural transitions in a still image, subconsciously stirring their associated emotions.
So what’s going on?
A sunstar forms when brilliant, direct sunlight (or any other bright light) diffracts (spreads) as it passes through the overlapping blades of a lens iris (its aperture). These are the blades that open to admit more light (small f-number), and close to limit light (large f-number).
It’s true that the more circular the aperture opening, the more pleasing a lens’s bokeh. But it’s impossible to get past the fact that you can’t make a perfect circle by connecting a series of straight lines (which is what each aperture blade is). Adding blades helps keep the aperture iris more circular, but as the lens stops down (smaller aperture) to allow less light to pass, the angle between adjacent blades steepens and the more the emulated circular shape (remember, it’s never a true circle) becomes a more obvious polygon—connected straight edges, one for each blade, with each blade intersecting its adjacent blades at identical angles totaling 360 degrees.
As sunlight crosses the straight line made by each iris blade, diffraction spreads spikes of light in both directions perpendicular to the blade. If the lens has an odd number of iris blades, each spike will appear in your sunstar—2 spikes for each iris blade. Lenses with an even number of blades consist of pairs of exactly parallel blades opposite each other around the opening; the diffraction spikes of each matching pair overlap, so you’ll see just one spike for each blade. In other words, the amount of spikes in your sunstar is a function of the number of iris blades in your lens: with an even number of blades you’ll see one spike per blade; with an odd number of blades, it will be 2x the number of blades.
Light diffracts (spreads) as it passes through a small opening—the smaller the opening, the greater the diffraction. Since diffraction reduces resolution, we usually we try to choose apertures that minimize diffraction. But when a sunstar is the goal, a small aperture makes the sunstar more distinct.
Sunstar how-to
If you’re still with me, you’ll be happy to know that creating a sunstar is much more straightforward than understanding its optics. Here’s a quick recipe:
- Start with a brilliant point of light: You can create a sunstar with any bright light source—the moon, stars, or even an artificial light such as a lighthouse, or car headlights—but I’m going to talk about the brightest, most ubiquitous, and easiest light source: the sun. Rather than using the entire sun, it’s usually best (but not always—you decide the look you prefer) to block most of the light with the horizon, a cloud, or some terrestrial feature, such as a rock or tree. And clouds and atmospheric haze can reduce the brilliance enough to significantly limit your sunstar. Sometimes I’m not even aware of clouds or haze until I see the sunstar spikes are faint, spread out, or non-existent.
- Different lenses will yield different results: Experiment with your lenses to see which one gives the most pleasing sunstar effect. As a general rule, wide lenses are better, and the better the quality of the lens, the better its sunstar effect. Prime lenses tend to do a better job, but today’s best zooms create beautiful sunstars too, especially at their widest focal lengths. Remember, the number a sunstar spikes is determined by the number of diaphragm blades.
- Remove filters: The more glass between the sun and your sensor, the more reflections and lens flare you’ll get, so remove your polarizer (which has no benefit anyway when you’re pointing at the sun) and UV filter. If you must use a graduated neutral density filter to hold down the dynamic range, go ahead.
- The smaller your aperture, the better your sunstar: A wide-open aperture is a nearly perfect circle (not good for sunstars), but the angle between the diaphragm blades increases as the diaphragm closes down, improving the sunstar as the angles increase. For my sunstars, I generally stop down to f/16 or smaller (larger f-number)—usually f/18 or f/20.
- Size matters: The larger the visible portion of the sun, the bigger the sunstar, but also the more lens flare and blown highlights. Conversely, if most of the sun is blocked, you’ll get a smaller sunstar, but it will also be more precise and delicate. There’s not absolute ideal size, it’s more of a balancing act to find the right mix for your taste and situation.
- Composition: The extreme dynamic range of a sunstar image makes it essential to photograph the scene the way your camera sees it, not the way your eyes see it. I generally set up my composition before I meter, brightening the foreground enough to make it plainly visible in my mirrorless LCD (ideally I do this before the sunstar appears). If you’re new to sunstar photography, or don’t have a camera with lots of dynamic range, a silhouette or high key image are good options. Start with a foreground shape, or shapes, that standout against the sky—for silhouettes, meter on the sky and underexpose; for high key, meter on your foreground subject and overexpose slightly (to turn the sky white or nearly white—see poppy example in the gallery below).
- Manage the highlights: With the sun actually in your frame, you’re invariably dealing with a sky that’s much brighter than your foreground—overexposed highlights and underexposed shadows are virtually unavoidable. To maximize the usable data you capture, start with a raw—a jpeg file just doesn’t have enough dynamic range to handle the extreme highlights and shadows of a sunstar image. Nevertheless, it’s likely the image will look like crap on your LCD—even in a properly exposed sunstar image, the highlights will probably look too bright and the shadows will look too dark. On the other hand, if the sky looks great, the shadows are probably hopelessly dark (unrecoverable); if the highlights look great, the sky is probably hopelessly bright. When I’m exposing for a sunstar, I watch the histogram (a benefit of mirrorless photography is the pre-capture histogram in my viewfinder) and try to find a balance between the extreme highlights near the sun, and the dark shadows of the surrounding scene. In most of my photography don’t bracket for exposure, but sunstars are one significant exception. Since the dynamic range is so extreme that the histogram shows both shadows and highlights completely clipped (blown), I try to start with an exposure where their both more-or-less equally clipped, then bracket over at least a 6-stop range (3 stops up and down from my midway starting point) in 2/3-stop increments, changing exposures as rapidly as possible to give me a good number of different exposures to choose between.
- Processing: I promise that you’ll need to do some processing to get the most out of the highlights and shadows, but take a look at my gallery below—each image was captured with one click (no HDR or any other multi-image blending), and most (all?) were captured without a GND filter. My usual processing approach is to start with one of the frames near the middle of the exposure range that I used, pull the Highlights slider all the way to the left (-100) and pull the Shadows slider all the way to the right (+100). Then I pull the exposure slider to the right until satisfactory detail appears in the shadows. If this brightens my highlights too much, I discard these changes and move to a darker image. Following this approach, I can usually find at least one frame with usable shadow/highlight balance.
- Practice: You can practice sunstars any time the sun’s out. Just go outside with your camera, dial in a small aperture, and hide the sun behind whatever object is convenient (a tree, your house, etc.).
About this image
I captured today’s image on the first sunset shoot of last month’s first Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshop. You can read all the details of that shoot in an earlier blog post: Where to Draw the Line. Because I was with my group that evening, and especially because this was our first evening, I stayed in one place so I could continue working with anyone who needed help. That kind of limited my composition options, but I was very happy to have this striking tree directly in front of me, so I just tried to find as many ways as possible to feature it.
The Grand Canyon’s expansive views make it especially easy to lock into horizontal compositions, a mistake I almost made. Fortunately, since we were using clouds rather than the horizon to block most of the sun, we had multiple sunstar opportunities as the sun and clouds shifted. And though I was set up for a sunstar, when the sun first appeared, it was the shafts of light that stood out most. For those I’m glad my camera was oriented horizontally. (And I still got a little sunstar.)
But when the shafts faded and the sunstar became more prominent, I’m pleased to have given myself some vertical options. I’m actually surprised how much I prefer the vertical version of this later scene (after the shafts) to the horizontal orientation I was stuck in. In the horizontal version (it’s in the gallery below), I don’t the think the tree stands out nearly as well. This vertical version really becomes all about the tree and the sunstar, connected by the canyon’s receding red ridges.
Join Me at the Grand Canyon
A Star is Born
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Where to Draw the Line
Posted on August 7, 2023
Beams of Gold, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
ISO 100
f/16
1/25 second
I’m in the midst of 11 days and two workshops chasing lightning at Grand Canyon. Despite daily 4:15 a.m. wake-ups, very late dinners, and lots of waiting for something to happen punctuated by bursts of extremely intense activity, I am in fact (to quote Cosmo Kramer) lovin’ every minute of it.
The first workshop group photographed an assortment of monsoon thrills that included lightning, dramatic clouds, and vivid sunrises and sunsets. We also enjoyed skies as clean (haze-free) as I’ve ever seen at the Grand Canyon, which made for a spectacular Milky Way shoot on the North Rim. The second group started yesterday afternoon, and while the lightning spigot has briefly turned, starting this afternoon it’s forecast to return for the rest of the workshop. (Fingers crossed.)
One mantra I find myself frequently repeating to all Grand Canyon workshop groups is, “Less sky, more canyon.” That’s because, even though a landscape photographer’s objective is to maximize beauty (right?), and it’s a rare sky that rivals with the beauty of Grand Canyon, I frequently see photographers here giving too much of their frame to a sky that simply can’t compete with the canyon below.
This doesn’t mean Grand Canyon images should never include lots of sky, but it does mean that the sky you give your Grand Canyon (and other scenic locations) image should be earned. A towering rainbow? Shimmering Milky Way? Horizon-to-horizon sunrise or sunset color? By all means, widen your lens and tilt the camera skyward. But don’t forget that even when the sky is spectacular, it’s the canyon below that makes your image special.
For example, below are a couple of images captured from Hopi Point at different sunsets. The first one was a blank sky day, so I used the absolute least amount of sky possible, and augmented it with a sunstar. The second one was an electric sunset that filled the sky with red. To include even more sky without sacrificing the best part of the canyon, I even went with a vertical composition.
I suspect people’s too much sky choice happens for a few reasons. Many photographers, so focused on their prime subject, tend to forget about the rest of their frame. Less experienced photographers often reflexively split their frame with the horizon, while other photographers, victims of bad advice, have become slaves to rigid rules. These photographers avoid putting the the horizon in the middle with biblical fervor, instead putting it 1/3 of the way down from the top, or 1/3 up from the bottom. But despite what you might have heard from the “expert” judging images at your neighborhood camera club, or viewed from that YouTube photography pro your brother-in-law swears by, there is no rule for where to place the horizon line.
In other words, I’ll put my horizon wherever I want to, thankyouverymuch. If I think the horizon belongs 1/3 of the way down from the top, 1/5 of the way up from the bottom, or straight across the middle of the frame, that’s exactly where it will go.
How do I determine where the horizon belongs? Put simply, that’s entirely dependent on the relative merits of the sky versus the landscape in the scene I’m photographing.
Without doing actual math (heaven forbid), I mentally weigh the landscape versus the sky and arrive at some kind of virtual score: if I like the landscape 4-times more than the sky, the landscape gets 4-times more frame than the sky; if I like the sky twice as much as the landscape, the sky gets twice as much frame as the landscape.
As I said, I don’t actually do this math in my head, I just end up here by feel. You can too, by trusting your instincts. And if you don’t trust your initial instincts, try popping the camera off the tripod (you are using a tripod, right?), pointing it in the direction of your scene, then slowly moving horizon line up and down the scene until a position feels right. Over time you’ll grow to recognize and trust the subtle signals your instincts send.
The image I’m sharing today was captured last Tuesday, on the first sunset of the first workshop. Because I’d started the shoot with my 100-400 lens, the foreground wasn’t a factor in my decision where to set up—I just chose an opening amidst the rest of my group. But as sunset approached, it started to look like something special was possible. Not only had a narrow gap appeared in the clouds near the horizon, the clouds were riddled with small openings with potential to allow sunlight to stream through as the sun dropped.
Because I was with my group and this was our first day, I didn’t do my usual anticipatory exploration for the best foreground, I just worked with the scene right there among my group. After replacing the 100-400 with my 16-35 f/2.8 lens, I started by trying to figure out the best way to handle the dead tree jutting up from below the canyon wall.
By shifting a couple of feet to my left to stand atop a light-color rock platform, I was able to block the less appealing middle foreground hill with the dense green shrub on the right, and to frame the dead tree (which had now become an important foreground element) between the two nearby shrubs. After determining that I wanted as little of the rocky dirt on the left as possible, I went to work on establishing the top of my frame.
The sky above the contiguous cloud bank blocking the sun was a lot of blue with a scattering of individual clouds. It was pretty in an ordinary way, but nowhere near as beautiful as the sunlit clouds and canyon below. That left me with two options for the top of my frame: directly above the clouds to include no more than a thin stripe of blue sky, or somewhere in the clouds with no blue sky.
I photographed it both ways for multiple options to choose between when I review my images on my computer. As you can see, I chose the former because I couldn’t find a good place to cut the clouds without putting a bright spot at the top of the frame and/or cutting off part of the sunstar.
This sunset display continued for about 15 minutes, continually changing as the sun dropped. I’ve actually processed another, very similar, image captured a few minutes later, without beams but with a better sunstar and have added it to the gallery below.
Of course all this advice applies pretty universally to whatever location you’re photographing, but few places provide examples as dramatic as Grand Canyon. Check out the gallery below for proof.
Join me at Grand Canyon
More Grand Canyon Skies
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Beam Me Up
Posted on August 7, 2022
Evening Glory, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
1/100 second
F/20
ISO 100
I won’t lie: The primary reason I go to the Grand Canyon in monsoon season—and for that matter, the primary reason most people sign up for my Grand Canyon monsoon workshops—is to photograph lightning. But as we all know, lightning is a fickle phenomenon, even during the Grand Canyon’s usually electric monsoon season. Because lightning is never guaranteed, I always do my very best to moderate my own expectations, and to let people who sign up for a workshop know I can’t promise it. But still…
Fortunately, the Grand Canyon in any season is pretty spectacular, and especially so during the monsoon. The carved sediment’s enduring beauty, combined with billowing cumulus clouds that turn some shade of pink, red, and/or orange at sunrise/sunset, and sometimes (fingers crossed) deliver vivid rainbows, makes the Grand Canyon summer monsoon my favorite time to be on the rim, even without lightning. But still…
The forecast the for the final day of this year’s second (and final) workshop was “Sunny,” the first such forecast I’d seen in my nearly two weeks at the Grand Canyon. But I’ve learned that a monsoon “Sunny” forecast just means fewer clouds, and rarely no clouds. And you never know—even with no rain or clouds in the forecast, I made sure everyone in the group packed a Lightning Trigger because I can share multiple stories of similar Grand Canyon forecasts that nevertheless resulted in lighting. Alas…
If you were expecting one of those plot-twist happy endings, you’ll be disappointed. Because as you might infer from this image, we did not get any lightning this evening. But as you can also see, we had no reason to be disappointed.
After a short stop at Moran Point, the group and I spent the rest of that afternoon and evening photographing my three favorite Grand Canyon vistas, first at Lipan and Navajo Points, before setting up for our final sunset at Desert View.
All three of these views stand out for their view of the Colorado River’s 90 degree detour from a north/south trending river to an east/west trending river. Standing on the rim at any of these vistas offers expansive views north, upstream and into Marble Canyon, and west, downstream toward what’s arguably Grand Canyon’s most iconic stretch. I can’t think of any other rim view that offers bigger, better views of the canyon than these east-most South Rim vistas. (But Hopi Point is close.)
Despite lowered expectations, we departed this afternoon hoping for lightning (which, I should add, given the two sunset lightning shoots that preceded this sunset, was downright greedy). Instead we found the canyon walls bathed in warm light shafting through scattered clouds hang above the western horizon. Not lightning, but too shabby either.
Even before the light started to warm, I decided that the best show this evening would be to the west, featuring the canyon’s receding ridges below the setting sun. And with a slight haze hanging in the canyon, what excited me most was the potential for sunbeams streaming through openings in the clouds and gaps in the ridges.
I digress
This might be a good time to explain the difference between some popular but different phenomena popular among landscape photographers: sunstars (or sunbursts, starbursts, and probably some other labels I’ve missed), sunbeams, and crepuscular rays.
- Sunstars are diffraction spikes that are created in the lens when sunlight is bent by the slight change of direction at the intersection of the lens iris’s blades (that comprise the aperture). They’re a photographic phenomenon, visible in the viewfinder and resulting image, but not to the unaided eye.
- Sunbeams are atmospheric phenomena caused when sunlight passes through openings in clouds or landscape features like tree branches or mountain peaks. They’re visible to the unaided and most prominent when the atmosphere is filled with water or dust particles that scatters the sunlight.
- Crepuscular rays are sunbeams that happen at twilight, only when the sun is below the horizon and its light passes through clouds, mountain peaks, or some other unseen obstruction beneath the horizon. As a subset of sunbeams, crepuscular rays are also atmospheric phenomena visible to the unaided eye, and benefit from airborne dust or water vapor.
So anyway…
Expectations reset, I shifted to the dual potential for both a large sun and sunbeams, and prepared accordingly: already on my Sony a7RIV was my Sony 24-105 f/4 G lens; to my Sony 𝛂1 I added my Sony 100-400 GM lens and Sony 2X Teleconverter. I started shooting as soon as the sunbeams appeared, using the wider setup to capture as much canyon and shafting light. Early on I occasionally switched to the telephoto; once the sun dropped below (most of) the clouds and the sunbeams faded, I finished up entirely with the telephoto combination.
The trick to exposing a scene like this with one click (always my goal) is to make sure I don’t blow out (overexpose) the highlights. While I had no expectation of capturing detail or color in the sun (it was too bright to prevent from blowing out), I knew the surrounding clouds and sky had the potential to turn a rich yellow-gold before the sun dropped below the horizon. Saving the sky color would mean underexposing the canyon, but closely monitoring my histogram enabled me to capture just enough foreground light to retain the outline of the ridges shrinking in the distance, at the same time preventing that great sky color from washing out.
The result is this image, with a sky that’s remarkably close to what I saw and a foreground that’s much darker than my eyes saw. Since this image is all about the sky and sunbeams, letting the canyon go dark (-ish) aided that emphasis. Even though the canyon looked nearly black on my camera’s image-review screen, a moderate Lightroom Shadow-slider increase confirmed later that the dark foreground contained exactly the amount of detail I wanted. Score another win for the histogram. (And if you’re wondering why I used f/20, it’s because I’d set up for a possible sunstar and forgot to switch back to the f/11 I usually default to.)
One more thing
Lest you feel sorry for my second workshop group for not getting lightning, let me reassure you that this group did not lack for quality lightning. At Cape Royal two nights before this, we witnessed what I instantly called one of the top-5 lightning shoots of my life. Then at Hopi Point the next night, we witnessed a lightning display that arguably topped it. I have so many excellent lightning images from these two shoots that I haven’t had time to go through them and decide which ones to process. And since I shared a lightning image (from the first workshop) last week, I figured I’d share something that’s not lightning. But rest assured, I’ll be sharing more lightning soon. Lots more.
Grand Canyon Photo Workshops
More Monsoon Magic
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
(More) Lightning Lessons
Posted on August 22, 2021
Downpour and Lightning, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
1/8 second
F/8
ISO 50
This post is all about different aspects photographing lightning—some of the stuff I write about here is covered in much more detail in my Lightning Photo Tips article, so you might want to start there
I’ve been photographing lightning at the Grand Canyon (especially) and elsewhere for 10 years, but I’m happy to say that I’m still learning. While going through my images from this year’s recently completed Grand Canyon monsoon workshops, it occurred to me that now might be a good time to share a couple of this year’s insights.
Lightning Trigger (where it all begins)
You simply can’t photograph daylight lightning consistently without a lightning sensor that detects the lightning and triggers your shutter. And if you follow my lightning photography at all, you’ve no doubt heard me singing the praises of the Lightning Trigger from Stepping Stone Products in Colorado. (There are a lot of lightning sensors out there, but since Lightning Trigger is trademarked, this is the only one that can legally use “lightning trigger.”) I don’t get anything from Stepping Stone for my endorsement, I just know it’s in my best interests to give everyone in my groups the best chance to photograph lightning, and so far I haven’t found anything that comes close the the success of the Lightning Trigger.
But despite my strong advice to the contrary, every year one or two people will show up with a sensor that’s not a Lightning Trigger. And every year, these are the people who have the poorest lightning success. Sometimes the reason for failure is obvious—like a sensor that allowed the camera to go to sleep after 30 seconds of inactivity. But usually the reason isn’t quite so obvious—I just know that the people with the “other” sensors are much more likely to get shut out. This year was no exception.
The first workshop (of three) started with a bang, with an active storm building across the canyon, about 12 miles away, just before the workshop orientation. Because lightning trumps everything in these monsoon workshops, I cancelled the orientation and herded everyone to the view deck behind Grand Canyon Lodge (I’d advised them to show up with their gear for this very reason), frantically flying around from person to person to introduce myself, help them set up, and make sure their cameras were clicking with each lightning strike.
After about 15 minutes, all but one seemed comfortably settled in, excitedly reporting that their camera was responding to each bolt. In addition to my one participant who wasn’t having success, there was a woman who wasn’t in my group trying to photograph lightning with a sensor—she too was growing frustrate because her camera seemed be ignoring the lightning too. The one thing these two people had in common? Perhaps you already guessed: they were the only two not using a Lightning Trigger.
I actually tried to help both of them troubleshoot the problem, starting with confirming that everything was plugged in right, then quickly moving to lots of fiddling with camera settings, cables, and batteries. But since I could make their sensors respond with the TV remote I always have nearby when I photograph lightning (the easiest way to test a Lightning Trigger in the field), I wasn’t real optimistic—if the remote triggers the camera, the problem is unlikely to be the connection, power, or camera. That leaves the sensor itself as the most likely culprit.
When leading a workshop I don’t have lots of time to get too scientific with my troubleshooting, but think I solved the mystery the next day, when a similar storm started up at about the same time in more less the same place. For the second day in a row we all set up on the Grand Canyon Lodge view deck, and for the second day in a row, the only person in the group whose camera wasn’t responding was the person with the off-brand sensor. (The woman from the prior day wasn’t there.)
While the prior day’s storm moved laterally across the canyon, this storm moved in our direction, approaching to within a couple of miles (and eventually driving us all for cover in the lodge). When, as the storm got closer, the rogue sensor started triggering its camera, I realized that what sets the Lightning Trigger apart from its competition is most likely its range.
My superior range theory got more confirmation on the South Rim a couple of days later. Driving out toward the South Rim’s eastern-most views for our sunset shoot, my eyes were drawn to a massive thunderhead blooming in the distance. With the forecast offering no hope for lightning to chase, that evening’s plan was to make a couple of quick stops at Lipan and Navajo Points, before finishing with sunset at Desert View. But pulling into Lipan Point it was instantly apparent that the thunderhead was straight up the canyon—we weren’t there long before we could also see it was delivering lightning. (One reason I tell everyone to always carry their Trigger, regardless of the forecast.)
Because this turned out to be a spectacular show that lasted until sunset, we never left Lipan Point. Unlike the previous storms, where the lightning was front-and-center in every composition, the lightning this evening was much farther away—between 22 and 25 miles distant, according to the My Lightning Tracker app on my iPhone. While all the Lightning Triggers didn’t seem to miss a single bolt (“not missing” in this case just means firing when there’s a visible bolt—you’ll see below that this is by no means a guarantee that the bolt will be capture), our rogue sensor not seem to see the lightning at all.
Further confirmation of the Lightning Trigger’s range came in the third workshop, when we were photographing lightning more than 30 miles away. I’ve had success with the Lightning Trigger and distant lightning in the past, but this was the first time I’ve had an app (and cellular connectivity) to actually pinpoint the location and distance.
Slower than the speed of lightning (or, About this image)
One of the most frustrating things about photographing lightning is not capturing a spectacular strike. The first half of the capture equation is a sensor that sees the lightning and triggers the camera (see Lightning Trigger discussion above); the other half is having a camera that responds quickly enough to the click instruction from the sensor. And as I’ve said before, all the three major camera brands are fast enough, but where lightning is concerned, the faster the better—and it’s impossible to be too fast. FYI, according to Imagining Resource, Sony Alpha camera’s are the fastest, followed closely by Nikon, with Canon a fair amount slower (but usually not too slow).
I can confirm the Imaging Resource data. While I had good success while using Canon my first few years photographing lightning, my success rate has been noticeably higher since switching to Sony in 2014 (my first Sony lightning shoot was in 2015). But despite a faster camera, the frustration with missed lightning hasn’t disappeared completely. Usually it’s just one or two here and there—I just shrug my shoulders because I know I’ll probably get the next one. But in this year’s third workshop, one especially frustrating shoot got my attention.
The third group didn’t have any lightning luck on the North Rim for our first two days, but the forecast looked more promising for the South Rim half of the workshop. Unfortunately, the best chances were forecast for the day of our 4-hour rim-to-rim drive. Since it’s such a nice drive, I usually give everyone the whole day to make it, suggesting stops then setting them free after the sunrise shoot—we don’t gather as a group again until late afternoon on the other side. But with such a promising lightning forecast, this time I had everyone meet me at Desert View, the first South Rim vista when driving from the North Rim, at 1:00 p.m., hoping that we’d get the workshop’s first shot at lightning.
Setting up on the rim just west of the Desert View Watchtower, we just hung out for awhile, waiting for something to happen. Our patience was rewarded after about an hour, when a few people in the group saw lightning in the east. This was out toward the Painted Desert—not actually over the canyon, but close enough to get lightning and the canyon in one frame. Better yet, it soon became clear that the storm was moving, not just toward the canyon, but toward one of my favorite Grand Canyon views.
This whole shoot lasted at least a couple of hours. Standing there on the rim, we watched the lightning first migrate north, eventually intersecting the canyon just beyond the Little Colorado River confluence. It then started to shift westward, crossed the canyon, continued drifting west, and everyone was pretty excited. That is, until we realized that it was also getting closer. We were preparing to retreat when a bolt hit inside the canyon, less than two miles away, sending our sense of urgency into overdrive.
Since this was this group’s first lightning, everyone was especially excited when their camera clicked with each lightning bolt. Though I knew no one would get every single bolt, with several dozen visible strikes, I was pretty confident everyone’s success numbers would be in the double digits—mine included.
But checking my images in my room that night, I was disappointed to count only three frames with lightning. I was just going to write it off as one of those things—perhaps my LT battery was weak, or maybe I was too focused on working with others in the group (in other words, doing my job) to adjust my composition frequently enough to track the continuously shifting storm.
But when I mentioned my poor success to Curt, my assistant on this trip, he expressed similar results. And talking to the group the next day, we learned that no one else got more than a (very small) handful of strikes. How could a dozen people using a lightning sensor that years of experience proves works reliably, on a variety of cameras, have such similarly poor results on just one shoot? Adding to the mystery, it became clear by the images shared in the image review that the lightning everyone did capture, was all the same strikes. What’s going on?
One of the things I love most about working with Curt is that he’s as inquisitive and bulldog-tenacious tracking down these mysteries as I am. We got to work researching what could be going on, both on our own, and together on a one-hour conference call with Rich at Stepping Stone, the mastermind behind the Lightning Trigger.
Rich suggested that it could be that we encountered a storm that was mostly positive lightning. Positive lightning, which comprises about 5 percent of lightning strikes, usually spends all of its energy in a single stroke, making that one stroke very bright, but also much faster from start to finish. He thought that maybe the lighting was done before everyone’s cameras could react. That made sense.
But after a little research on positive lightning, I (tentatively) ruled it out as our culprit because: 1) I saw nothing that indicates that positive lightning is storm-specific (though I’m open to correction); 2) positive lightning originates near the top of the cloud, and I saw no sign of that in this storm; 3) positive lightning tends to come near the end of the storm, and we photographed this one from start to finish; and finally, 4) positive lightning typically strikes outside the main rain band, and we saw very little of this.
But that conversation with Rich convinced me that our problem this afternoon had to indeed be a caused by lightning that was too fast for our cameras. And after mulling that thought for awhile, then digging deeper into my lightning resources, I theorized that we’d probably just encountered a storm that didn’t have as much juice as the typical monsoon storms I’m accustomed to.
This makes sense if you understand that a typical negative lightning strike that looks like a single bolt to the eye (or camera), is actually a series of strokes following the same channel. The number of strokes in a single lightning bolt varies with the amount of energy the lightning needs to release—the more strokes, the longer the strike seems to last. (As an interesting aside, earlier in the trip Curt got accidental confirmation of lightning’s multiple stroke aspect when, with his camera set to Continuous rather than the Single Shot that I use, he got the same lightning bolt in two, and at least once, three contiguous frames.)
The jury is still out on this theory, but it makes sense. If I learn anything more, I promise to share it. Right now I’m in the process of updating the Lightning Photo Tips article with this and more insights gained since the last update, so that’s the best place to check for new information.
Oh, and the image I share here was one of my three successes that afternoon, so I’m not really complaining.
2021 Grand Canyon Monsoon Highlights (processed so far)
Spoiler Alert: It’s not just lightning
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
Smoke on the Landscape (and Fire in the Sky)
Posted on August 15, 2021
Smoky Sunset, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIV
Sony 200-600 G
Sony 2x teleconverter
ISO 100
f/18
1/60 second
After 2 1/2 weeks at the Grand Canyon for three monsoon photo workshops, I’ve had very little time (and even less connectivity) for posting, but I wanted to share this image while the experience is still fresh in my mind. Here’s a new image and a short descriptive post, followed by a longer, but far more important, “refurbished” post.
Beauty comes in many forms. Usually it’s some version of thrilling or soothing, but last week I witnessed beauty that I can only label alarming.
My first week at the Grand Canyon (for three workshops) included the monsoon staples people sign up for: beautiful clouds, vivid sunrises and sunsets, rainbows, and lightning—lots and lots of lightning. But when Mother Nature flipped off the moisture switch at the end of the first week, all that monsoon magnificence was replaced by cloudless skies and smoke—smoke in the sky, and smoke in the canyon.
Without the cleansing monsoon showers, visibility into the canyon varied with the fickle winds, ranging from okay to opaque. And even when we could see across to the other side, a thick brown haze hugged the horizon in all directions.
Adopting my best lemonade-from-lemons stance, I encouraged everyone in the second group to appreciate the rare opportunity to include a red, orange, or yellow (depending on the smoke’s thickness) sun in their images. This wasn’t what everyone was hoping for, but I tried to make that point that as depressing as the smoke is, these images shouldn’t feel like a consolation prize because they really can be pretty cool.
Fortunately, the Grand Canyon is ideal for these shots that emphasize the seemingly infinite supply of ridges that disappear into the distance. Normally photographing these receding ridges by pointing toward sunrise or sunset results in a harsh white sky and hopelessly blown out sun. But smoke knocks down the sun’s brilliance, allowing its color to shine through. And, the smoke that robs the vistas of their glorious canyon views also helps simplify images down to basic color and shape. Wide or tight, the result is a relatively unique visual take on the Grand Canyon’s beauty.
I captured this image on the second group’s first sunset. I like starting the workshop at Desert View because we can all set up together along the rim, allowing me to work individually with the participants to identify who will need what assistance throughout the workshop. But once we got settled in, everyone started to work on their own version of the scene and I got a minute to think about my own shot.
I kicked myself for not lugging my Sony 200-600 lens out in the first place, and ended up jogging back to the car to grab it and my 2X teleconverter, hoping to enlarge the sun and apply extreme compression to the disappearing ridges. Adding this combo to my Sony a7RIV, I couldn’t resist starting by zooming all the way out to 1200mm to make the sun as large as possible. After that I played with a variety of focal lengths, ultimately choosing this one, around 600mm, because I could include more of the ridges. The sun slipping into a few wispy cloud fragments just before it disappeared was a bonus.
To avoid washing out the color in the sun, I had to seriously underexpose the foreground. On my LCD, the ridges you see in this image were black—so dark in fact that there was no way to distinguish one from the next. But I love my Sony bodies and knew that my a7RIV had indeed captured all the shadow detail I would need, a fact I easily confirmed upon opening this image in Lightroom.
I should add that despite all the smoke, all was not completely lost for the middle group. For our final sunset, the sky above Cape Royal cleared wonderfully, allowing the sun to paint Wotan’s Throne with beautiful warm light. (The view of Wotan’s Throne from Cape Royal is one of my favorite Grand Canyon views.) Great canyon views and relatively few cross-canyon lights makes Cape Royal my favorite Grand Canyon rim Milky Way location, so we stayed out and enjoyed the best Milky Way shoot of any monsoon workshop I’ve ever had—so great, in fact, that we voted to blow off sunrise to stay out later.
With the monsoon returning for the final week, the third workshop group enjoyed two spectacular lightning shoots and a couple of equally spectacular sunsets. Just as significant, the frequent showers banished the smoke and the visibility returned, at least temporarily. But with smoky summer skies becoming the norm here in the West—and this year most of the country is suffering from our smoke—I fear that we’ve all reached the point where summer outdoor plans will require a smoke contingency, much as we’ve always had to do with the potential for rain.
I’ll be back soon with more conventional Grand Canyon monsoon drama (something this trip didn’t lack), but in the meantime, I hope you take the time to read below and gain a little understand of climate warming and the undeniable truth of humans’ role.
Workshop Schedule || Purchase Prints || Instagram
Where There’s Smoke (2019)
Sun and Smoke, Sierra Foothills, California
Sony a6300
Sony 100-400 GM
Sony 2x teleconverter
ISO 100
f/16
1/8 second
Humans, we have a problem
Earth’s climate is changing, and the smoking gun belongs to us. Sadly, in the United States policy lags insight and reason, and the world is suffering.
Climate change science is complex, with many moving parts that make it difficult to communicate to the general public. Climate change also represents a significant reset for some of the world’s most profitable corporations. Those colliding realities created a perfect storm for fostering the doubt and confusion that persists among people who don’t understand climate science and the principles that underpin it.
I’m not a scientist, but I do have enough science background (majors in astronomy and geology, before ultimately earning my degree in economics) to trust the experts and respect the scientific method. I also spent 20 years doing technical communication in the tech industry (tech writing, training, and support) for companies large and small. So I know enough to know that the fundamentals of climate change don’t need to intimidate, and the more accessible they can be to the general public, the better off we’ll all be.
It’s personal
Recently it feels like I’ve been living on the climate change front lines. On each visit to Yosemite, more dead and dying trees stain forests that were green as recently as five years ago. And throughout the Sierra (among other places), thirsty evergreens, weakened by drought, are under siege by insects that now thrive in mountain winters that once froze them into submission. More dead trees means more fuel, making wildfires not just more frequent, but bigger and hotter.
Speaking of wildfires, for a week last month I couldn’t go outside without a mask thanks to smoke from the Camp Fire that annihilated Paradise (70 miles away). I have friends who evacuated from each of this November’s three major California wildfires (Camp, Hill, and Woolsey), and last December the Thomas Fire forced a two-week evacuation of Ojai, where my wife and I rent a small place (to be near the grandkids). Our cleanup from the Thomas fire took months, and we still find ash in the most unexpected places (and we were among the lucky who had a home to clean).
The debate is dead
Despite its inevitable (and long overdue) death, the climate change debate continues to stagger on like a mindless zombie. We used to have to listen to the global warming skeptics claim that our climate wasn’t changing at all, so I guess hearing them acknowledge that okay-well-maybe-the-climate-is-changing-but-humans-aren’t-responsible can be considered progress.
Climate change alternative “explanations” like “natural variability” and “solar energy fluctuations” popular on social media or fringe websites have been irrefutably debunked by rigorously gathered, thoroughly analyzed, and closely scrutinized data. (And don’t get me started on the ridiculous “scientists motivated by grant money” conspiracy theory.)
Science we all can agree on
One thing that everyone does agree on is the existence of the greenhouse effect, which has been used for centuries to grow plants in otherwise hostile environments.
As you may already know, a greenhouse’s transparent exterior allows sunlight to penetrate and warm its interior. The heated interior radiates at longer wavelengths (infrared) that don’t escape as easily through the greenhouse’s ceiling and walls. That means more heat is added to a greenhouse than exits it, so the interior is warmer than the environment outside.
There’s something in the air
Perhaps the most common misperception about human induced climate change is that it’s driven by all the heat we create when we burn stuff. But that’s not what’s going on, not even close.
Our atmosphere behaves like a greenhouse, albeit with far more complexity. The sun bathes Earth with continuous electromagnetic radiation that includes infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet that we’re all familiar with. Solar radiation not reflected back to space reaches Earth’s surface to heat water, land, and air. Some of this heat makes it back to space, but much is absorbed by molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, forming a virtual blanket that makes Earth warmer than it would be without an atmosphere. In a word, inhabitable.
Because a molecule’s ability to absorb heat depends on its structure, some molecules absorb heat better than others. The two most common molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, nitrogen (N2: two nitrogen atoms) and oxygen (O2: two oxygen atoms), are bound so tightly that they don’t absorb heat. Our atmospheric blanket relies on other molecules to absorb heat: the greenhouse gases.
Also not open for debate is that Earth warms when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rise, and cools when they fall. The rise and fall of greenhouse gases has been happening for as long as Earth has had an atmosphere. So our climate problem isn’t that our atmosphere contains greenhouse gases, it’s that human activity changes our atmosphere’s natural balance of greenhouse gases.
Earth’s most prevalent greenhouse gas is water vapor. But water vapor responds quickly to temperature changes, leaving the atmosphere relatively fast as rain or snow, while other greenhouse gases hold their heat far longer.
The two most problematic greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide (CO2: one carbon atom bonded with two oxygen atoms) and methane (CH4: one carbon atom bonded with four hydrogen atoms). The common denominator in these “problem” gases is carbon. (There are other, non-carbon-based, greenhouse gases, but for simplicity I’m focusing on the most significant ones.)
Carbon exists in many forms: as a solo act like graphite and diamond, and in collaboration with other elements to form more complex molecules, like carbon dioxide and methane. When it’s not floating around the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, carbon in its many forms is sequestered in a variety of natural reservoirs called a “carbon sink,” where it does nothing to warm the planet.
Oceans are Earth’s largest carbon sink. And since carbon is the fundamental building block of life on Earth, all living organisms, from plants to plankton to people, are carbon sinks as well. The carbon necessary to form greenhouse gases has always fluctuated naturally between the atmosphere and natural sinks like oceans and plants.
For example, a growing tree absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, keeping the carbon and expelling oxygen (another simplification of a very complex process)—a process that stops when the tree dies. As the dead tree decomposes, some of its carbon is returned to the atmosphere as methane, but much of it returns to the land where it is eventually buried beneath sediments. Over tens or hundreds of millions of years, some of that sequestered carbon is transformed by pressure and heat to become coal.
Another important example is oil. For billions of years, Earth’s oceans have been host to simple-but-nevertheless-carbon-based organisms like algae and plankton. When these organisms die they drop to the ocean floor, where they’re eventually buried beneath sediment and other dead organisms. Millions of years of pressure and heat transforms these ancient deposits into…: oil.
Coal and oil (hydrocarbons), as significant long-term carbon sinks, were quite content to lounge in comfortable anonymity as continents drifted, mountains lifted and eroded, and glaciers advanced and retreated. Through all this slow motion activity on its surface, Earth’s temperatures ebbed and flowed and life evolved accordingly.
Enter humans. We have evolved, migrated, and built civilizations based on a relatively stable climate. And since the discovery of fire we humans have burned plants for warmth and food preparation. Burning organic material creates carbon dioxide, thereby releasing sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. Who knew that such a significant advance was the first crack in the climate-change Pandora’s Box?
For thousands of years the demand for fuel was met simply by harvesting dead plants strewn about on the ground and the reintroduction of carbon to the atmosphere was minimal. But as populations expanded and technology advanced, so did humans’ thirst for fuel to burn.
We nearly killed off the whales for their oil before someone figured out that those ancient, subterranean metamorphosed dead plants burn really nicely. With an ample supply of coal and oil and a seemingly boundless opportunity for profit, coal and oil soon became the driving force in the world’s economy. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon was being reintroduced to our atmosphere as fast as it could be produced—with a corresponding acceleration in greenhouse gases (remember, when we burn hydrocarbons, we create carbon dioxide).
Compounding the fossil-fuel-as-energy problem is the extreme deforestation taking place throughout the world. Not only does burning millions of forest and jungle acres each year instantly reintroduce sequestered carbon to the atmosphere, it destroys a significant sink for present and future carbon.
Scientists have many ways to confirm humans’ climate change culpability. The most direct is probably the undeniable data showing that for millennia carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere hovered rather steadily around 280 parts per million (ppm). Then, corresponding to the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen steadily and today sits somewhere north of 400 ppm, with a bullet.
Humans don’t get a pass on atmospheric methane either. While not nearly as abundant in Earth’s atmosphere as carbon dioxide, methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas, trapping about 30 times more heat than its more plentiful cousin. Methane is liberated to the atmosphere by a variety of human activities, from the decomposition of waste (sewage and landfill) to agricultural practices that include rice cultivation and bovine digestive exhaust (yes, that would be cow farts).
While the methane cycle is less completely understood than the carbon dioxide cycle, the increase of atmospheric methane also correlates to fossil fuel consumption. Of particular concern (and debate) is the cause of the steeper methane increase since the mid-2000s. Stay tuned while scientists work on that….
Balancing act
For humans, the most essential component of Earth’s habitability is the precarious balance between water’s three primary states: gas (water vapor), ice, and liquid. Since the dawn of time, water’s varied states have engaged in a complex, self-correcting choreography of land, sea, and air inputs—tweak one climate variable here, and another one over there compensates.
Earth’s climate remains relatively stable until the equilibrium is upset by external input like solar energy change, volcanic eruption, or (heaven forbid) a visit from a rogue asteroid. Unfortunately, humans incremented the list of climate catalysts by one with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and our thirst for fossil fuels.
As we’re learning firsthand in realtime, even the smallest geospheric tweak can initiate a self-reinforcing chain reaction with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity’s long-term wellbeing. For example, a warmer planet means a warmer ocean and less ice, which means more liquid water and water vapor. Adding carbon dioxide to water vapor kicks off a feedback loop that magnifies atmospheric heat: More carbon dioxide raises the temperature of the air—>warmer air holds more water vapor—>more water vapor warms the air more—>and so on.
But that’s just the beginning. More liquid water swallows coastlines; increased water vapor means more clouds, precipitation, and warmer temperatures (remember, water vapor is a greenhouse gas). Wind patterns and ocean currents shift, changing global weather patterns. Oh yeah, and ice’s extreme albedo (reflectivity) bounces solar energy back to space, so shrinking our icecaps and glaciers means less solar energy returned to space even more solar energy to warm our atmosphere, which only compounds the problems.
Comparing direct measurements of current conditions to data inferred from tree rings, ice and sediment cores, and many other proven methods, makes it clear that human activity has indeed upset the climate balance: our planet is warming. What we’re still working on is how much we’ve upset it (so far), what’s coming, and where the tipping point is (or whether the tipping point is already in our rearview mirror).
We do know that we’re already experiencing the effects of these changes, though it’s impossible to pinpoint a single hurricane, fire, or flood and say this one wouldn’t have happened without climate change. And contrary to the belief of many, everyone will not be warmer. Some places are getting warmer, others are getting cooler; some are wetter, others are drier. The frequency and intensity of storms is changing, growing seasons are changing, animal habitats are shifting or shrinking, and the list goes on….
We won’t fix the problem by simply adjusting the thermostat, building dikes and levees, and raking forests. Until we actually reduce greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, things will get worse faster than we can adjust. But the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging we have one.
About this image
Sun and Smoke, Sierra Foothills, California
The Camp Fire had been burning for ten days, devouring Paradise and filling the air in Sacramento with brown smoke so thick that at times not only could we not see the sun, we couldn’t see the end of the block. But on this afternoon, when an orange ball of sun burned through the smoke I donned a mask, grabbed my camera bag, and headed for the hills.
I have a collection of go-to foothill oak trees for sun and moonsets, but most of these trees are too close to my shooting position for the extreme telephoto image I had in mind. Too close because at this kind of focal length, the hyperfocal distance is over a mile. So I made my way to a quiet country road near Plymouth where I thought the trees might just be distant enough to work. But I’m less familiar with this location than many of my others, so I didn’t know exactly how the trees and sun would align. Turning onto the road, I drove slowly, glancing at the sun and trees until they lined up. Because there wasn’t a lot of room to park on either side, I was pleased that the shoulder at the location that worked best was just wide enough for my car.
Envisioning a maximum telephoto shot, I added my Sony 2X teleconverter to my Sony 100-400 GM lens. While my plan was to use my 1.5-crop Sony a6300, when I arrived the sun was high enough that that combination provided too much magnification, so I started with my full frame Sony a7RIII. But soon as the sun dropped to tree level I switched to the a6300 and zoomed as tight as possible.
When I started the sun was still bright enough that capturing its color made the trees complete silhouettes, with no detail or color in the foreground. But as the setting sun sank into increasingly thick smoke, it became redder and redder and my exposure became easier. It always surprises me how fast the sun and moon move relative to the nearby horizon, so found myself running around to different positions to get the right sun and tree juxtaposition as the sun fell. The smoke near the horizon was so thick that it swallowed the sun before it actually set.
Later I plotted my location and the sun’s position on a map and realized that I was pointing right at San Francisco, about 100 miles away, with a large swath of the Bay Area in between. Then I thought about this air that was thick enough to completely obscure the sun, and the millions of people who had been breathing that air for weeks.
I’d be lying if I said I don’t like this image—it’s exactly what I was going for. But I’d be very happy if I never got another opportunity to photograph something like this.
Learn more
- https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
- https://grist.org/article/we-broke-down-what-climate-change-will-do-region-by-region/
- https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/greenhouse-gases.php
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Where There’s Smoke…
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Last Light
Posted on August 16, 2013
Advancing Squall at Dusk, Desert View, Grand Canyon
Canon EOS 5D Mark III
30 seconds
F/14
ISO 200
29 mm
It occurred to me while processing this image that, just like the lightning strike image in my previous post, this was my next-to-last image of the day. Which got me thinking about why I like these late-light images, and also about the similarities and differences between the two images.
Both images were captured in conditions much darker than the final image indicates. In this scene from Desert View on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, the sunset’s fading vestiges clung to the northeast horizon, while a rain squall swept across the opposite rim. The workshop group had just wrapped up a glorious sunset shoot that included a double rainbow in the east, and fully illuminated, golden curtains of rain in the west. While I have many far more spectacular images from that evening (that I’ll no doubt get to eventually), there was something about the quiet of the rim after most of the photographers and sunset gawkers had vacated, that caused me to keep shooting in the gathering darkness.
As with Saturday night’s lightning image, the canyon’s color this evening was no longer visible, but it was still light enough to make out definition in the walls all the way down to the twisting Colorado River. And unlike the lightning shoot, when I was tense with anticipation of the next strike, my feeling this evening at Desert View was one of utter calm. I’d found my scene, the light was fading gradually, and all I had to do was wait for the advancing rain squall to move into my frame. Sublime.
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 