Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Putting It All Together
Posted on December 19, 2022
Sunset Mirror, Valley View (El Capitan and Bridalveil Fall), Yosemite
Sony α1
Sony 12-24 f/2.8 GM
1/6 second
F/11
ISO 100
Nature’s most spectacular visual moments come thanks to the glorious confluence of its static and dynamic beauty. Nature’s static beauty is its fixed features, the mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, trees (and more) that inspire us to travel great distances with our cameras, confident in the knowledge that they’ll be there when we arrive. Nature’s dynamic beauty is its transient elements, like the light, clouds, color, weather, and celestial objects, that we try to anticipate—but that often surprises/disappoints us.
Whether it’s lightning at the Grand Canyon, the Milky Way in New Zealand, the northern lights in Iceland, or a moonrise above Yosemite, my photo trips are (selfishly) timed to maximize my chance for those times when the inherently beautiful scenes are blessed with special conditions. And though relying on the fickle whims of Mother Nature means the disappointments are frequent and frustrating, I’ve learned to roll with them because the thrill of success is greater than the frustration of failure.
But for a photographer, just being there isn’t enough, because, as thrilling as the moment might be, doing it justice with a camera usually requires more than just a simple point and click. Often (usually?), adding the best of Nature’s dynamic elements changes the scene enough to actually shift the balance of visual power—what might be the best picture in more typical conditions, suddenly takes backseat to the ephemeral beauty unfolding before us.
Getting the most from Nature’s glorious confluences means quickly identifying the scene’s best features right now, and finding a composition that emphasizes them—even if that means deemphasizing the static element that drew you in the first place. For example, at Valley View in Yosemite, photographers can choose between El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, or both of the above (not to mention Cathedral Rocks, Leaning Tower, and Ribbon Fall). As I recently blogged, I’ll photograph this scene completely differently depending on the conditions—sometimes ignoring El Capitan or Bridalveil Fall in favor of the other, and other times including both.
And beyond subject choice are decisions like the amount of sky versus foreground to include, horizontal or vertical orientation, wide or tight focal length, polarizer orientation, motion blur in the water, and on and on. All of these choices depend on the conditions, and the way they’re handled can make or break an image.
My Yosemite Winter Moon photo workshops are timed to coincide with a full moon rising above Yosemite Valley at sunset, as well as (fingers crossed) fresh snowfall in Yosemite Valley. Yosemite Valley is the workshop’s known, static commodity; snow and the moon are its dynamic variables. While getting fresh snow is a complete a roll of the dice when scheduling a workshop a year or more in advance, the moon’s phase and position can be predicted with surgical accuracy. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch in photography, so even though I know where to be and when to be there for the moon, I still have to sweat the clouds—especially in winter.
Which is exactly what I did in this month’s workshop. Having billed this as a “winter moon” workshop, I took my students out to a view of Half Dome that aligned perfectly with the first of my three planned sunset moonrises, then watched and waited while Half Dome played games with the clouds and never came out completely. The moon? Not even close. If you read last week’s blog, you know that we finally had a moonrise success on our third and final try. But it’s what happened on the evening in between that stands out most in my memory.
In a static world, for our second sunset I’d have been at another location beside the Merced River, waiting for the moon to crest Half Dome. Because watching the moon rise above Half Dome at sunset is something I hate missing, even when there are lots of clouds, my usual approach is to lean into the moonrise despite the low odds—you just never know when the sky might open and surprise you by revealing the moon (see last week’s blog). But as the time to make the call on our sunset location approached, I could see that the east side of the valley, including Half Dome, appeared hopelessly engulfed by clouds, while the sky on the west side looked much more open. So I reluctantly (and uncharacteristically) pulled the plug on the moonrise and detoured to Valley View for sunset, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.
At Valley View, I instantly saw that the cloud swallowing Half Dome was a blooming cumulus monster that showed no hint of retreating. My decision to blow off the moonrise (somewhat) vindicated, I got my group settled in. While fairly confident we’d get something better than my Plan A Half Dome spot, I didn’t have especially high expectations for anything spectacular.
Pulling out my Sony α1 body, I surveyed the scene. Normally I start at Valley View with my Sony 24-105 f/4 G lens, but with such a nice sky this evening, I reached straight for my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens.
I see clouds like this one all the time at the Grand Canyon, but rarely in Yosemite—maybe way in the distance, but rarely this close. It only took two frames to realize the 16-35 still wasn’t wide enough, so I returned to my bag for my Sony 12-24 f/2.8 GM lens. Maybe I’ve used this lens at Valley View before, but it’s usually reserved for Yosemite’s closer El Capitan views.
When the cloud lit up and started glowing pink, its reflection switched on too, suddenly making that the scene’s most compelling element. There aren’t many situations where I’d photograph here ultra-wide and vertical, but this time I instantly knew that’s what the scene called for, even if that meant shrinking Valley View’s usually unrivaled landscape features. With my 12 – 24 oriented vertically, not only could I include all of Valley View’s primary static features (El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, Cathedral Rocks), I could also fit the towering pink cloud and its reflection, top to bottom. To avoid including any of the sticks and leaves at my feet, I dropped lower and moved most of my tripod into the shallow water.
This evening’s show was as brief as it was spectacular. If there’s one takeaway, it’s the reminder the most successful landscape images start with finding a combination of Nature’s static and dynamic elements—identifying a location you want to photograph (static), and figuring out when to be there for the best light, color, sky, or whatever (dynamic). But your job isn’t done until you’ve identified what’s working at that moment, and put it into a composition that does the moment justice.
Natural Confluences
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
The Third Time’s the Charm
Posted on December 12, 2022
Moonrise and Clouds, Tunnel View, Yosemite
Sony a7R IV
Sony 24-105 G
1/4 second
F/11
ISO 100
Large or small, crescent or full, I love photographing the moon rising above Yosemite. I truly believe it’s one of the most beautiful sights on Earth. The moon’s alignment with Yosemite Valley changes from month-to-month, with my favorite full moon alignment coming in the short-day months near the winter solstice when it rises between El Capitan and Half Dome (from Tunnel View), but I have a plan for each season. Some years the position and timing are better than others, but when everything clicks, I do my best to be there. And if I’m going to be there anyway, why not schedule a workshop? (He asked rhetorically.)
Strike one, strike two
For last week’s Yosemite Winter Moon photo workshop, I’d planned three moonrises, from three increasingly distant vantage points. On our first night, despite the cloudy vestiges of a departing storm, I got the group in position for a moonrise at a favorite Merced River sunset spot, hoping the promised clearing would arrive before the moon. The main feature here is Half Dome, but the clouds had other ideas. Though they eventually relented just enough to reveal Half Dome’s ethereal outline and prevent the shoot from being a complete loss, the moon never appeared. Strike one.
With a better forecast for the second evening, we headed into the park that afternoon with high hopes. But as the sun dropped, the clouds thickened to the point where not only did I fear we’d miss the moon again, I was pretty sure Half Dome would be a no-show as well. So I completely aborted the moonrise shoot and opted for sunset at Valley View, where El Capitan and freshly recharged Bridalveil Fall were on their best behavior. The result was a spectacular sunset that made me look like a genius (phew), but still no moon. Strike two.
Revisiting nature photography’s 3 P’s
Because the right mindset is such an important part of successful photography, many years ago I identified three essential qualities that I call the 3 P’s of Nature Photography:
- Preparation is (among many things) your foundation; it’s the research you do that gets you in the right place at the right time, the mastery of your camera and exposure variables that allow you to wring the most from the moment, and the creative vision, refined by years of experience, and conscious out-side-the-box thinking.
- Persistence is patience with a dash of stubbornness. It’s what keeps you going back when the first, second, or hundredth attempt has been thwarted by unexpected light, weather, or a host of other frustrations, and keeps you out there long after any sane person would have given up.
- Pain is the willingness to suffer for your craft. I’m not suggesting that you risk your life for the sake of a coveted capture, but you do need to be able to ignore the tug of a warm fire, full stomach, sound sleep, and dry clothes, because the unfortunate truth is that the best photographs almost always seem to happen when most of the world would rather be inside.
Most successful images require one or more of these three essential elements. Chasing the moon last week in frigid, sometimes wet, Yosemite got me thinking about the 3 P’s again, and how their application led to a (spoiler alert) success on our third and final moonrise opportunity.
Meanwhile…
As we drove into the Tunnel View parking lot, about 45 minutes before sunset, our chances for the moon looked excellent. There were a few clouds overhead, with more hanging low on the eastern horizon behind Half Dome, but nothing too ominous. My preparation (there’s one) had told me that the moon this evening would appear from behind El Capitan’s diagonal shoulder, about halfway up the face, and that area of the sky was perfectly clear. So far so good.
Organizing my group along the Tunnel View wall, I pointed out where the moon would appear, and reminded them of the previously covered exposure technique for capturing a daylight-bright moon above a darkening landscape. Eventually I set up my own tripod and Sony a7R IV, with my Sony 200 – 600 G lens with the 2X Teleconverter pointed at ground 0. In my pocket was my Sony 24 – 105 G lens, which I planned to switch to as soon as the moon separated from El Capitan. Then we all just bundled up against the elements and enjoyed the view, waiting for the real show…
But, as if summoned by some sinister force determined to frustrate me, the seemingly benign clouds hailed reinforcements that expanded and thickened right before our eyes. Their first victim was Half Dome, and it looked like they’d set their sights on El Capitan next. By the time sunset rolled around, my optimism had dropped from a solid 9 to a wavering 2. I knew the moon was up somewhere behind the curtain and tried to stay positive, but let everyone know that our chances for actually seeing it were no longer very good. I reminded them not to get so locked in on waiting for the moon that they miss out on the beauty happening right now. Ever the optimist, I switched to my 24-105, privately rationalizing that even without the moon, we’d had so much spectacular non-moon photography already, nobody could be unhappy. But still…
At that point it would have been easy to cut our losses, come in out of the cold (pain), and head to dinner. But I have enough experience with Yosemite to know that it’s full of surprises, and never to go all-in on it’s next move. So we stayed. And our persistence (we’ve checked all three now) was rewarded when, seemingly out of nowhere, a hole opened in the clouds and there was the moon. The next 10 minutes were a blur of frantic clicking and excited exclamation as my group enjoyed this gift we’d all just about given up on.
A few full moon photography tips
- Sun and moon rise/set times always assume a flat horizon, which means the sun usually disappears behind the local terrain before the “official” sunset, while the moon appears after moonrise. When that happens, there’s usually not enough light to capture landscape detail in the moon and landscape, always my goal. To capture the entire scene with a single click (no image blending), I usually try to photograph the rising full moon on the day before it’s full, when the nearly full (99% or so illuminated) moon rises before the landscape has darkened significantly.
- The moon’s size in an image is determined by the focal length—the longer the lens, the larger the moon appears. Photographing a large moon above a particular subject requires not only the correct alignment, it also requires distance from the subject—the farther back your position, the longer the lens you can use without cutting your landscape subject.
- To capture detail in a rising full moon and the landscape (in a single click), increase the exposure until the highlight alert appears on your LCD (any more exposure blows out the moon). At that point, you can’t increase the exposure any more, even though the landscape is darkening. You’ll be amazed by how much useable data you’ll be able to pull from the in nearly black shadows in Lightroom/Photoshop (or whatever your processing software). In the image I share above, my LCD looked nearly black except for the single white dot of moon. Eventually the scene will become too dark—exactly when that happens depends on your camera, but if you’re careful, you can keep shooting until at least 15 minutes after sunset.
Learn More
Moon Over Yosemite
Near, Middle, Far
Posted on December 5, 2022
El Capitan and Floating Autumn Leaves, Yosemite
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
1/2 second
F/11
ISO 100
I’m in Yosemite for a workshop so my blogging time is significantly curtailed, but let’s see what happens…
Photography is the futile attempt to render a three dimensional world in a two dimensional medium. It’s “futile” because including actual depth in a photograph is literally impossible. But impossible doesn’t mean hopeless. One of the simplest things photographers can do to elevate their images is think about their scene in three dimensions, specifically how to create the illusion of depth by composing elements at multiple distances from the camera.
Many photographers miss opportunities by simply settling for the beautiful scene before them instead of looking for ways to make it even better. A more productive approach is to start with the beautiful aspect of the scene you want to emphasize (brilliant sunset, backlit flower, towering peak, vivid rainbow, plunging waterfall, whatever), then aggressively seek an object or objects nearer or farther to complement it. Of course that’s sometimes easier said than done, but this near/middle/far mindset should be present for every capture.
Thinking foreground and background is a great start, but merely having objects at varying distances isn’t always enough—you also need to be aware of how those objects guide your viewer’s eye through the frame. We hear a lot of photographers talk about using “leading lines” to move the eye, but a line doesn’t need to be a literal (visible) line to move the eye, because viewers will subconsciously connect objects to create virtual lines.
To help me achieve virtual lines that move the eye, I think in terms of “visual weight”: a quality of an object that tugs the eye like gravity, subconsciously pulling the viewer’s gaze in its direction. These qualities include, among other things: mass, shape, brightness, contrast, color, texture, and sometimes just position in the frame. A single one of these qualities can give an object visual weight, but combining then can be even more effective.
Additionally, an object’s emotional power can boost its visual weight. For example, a small moon can pull the eye more than a larger bright cloud, and Half Dome has more visual weight than a random rock occupying the same amount of frame real estate.
With my primary subject and complementary (eye moving) objects identified, I still need to consider the linear connection between these visual components. I like diagonal relationships because of the visual tension created by moving the eye along multiple planes. While creating these virtual diagonals requires careful positioning, it’s surprising how many photographers just remain planted with their tripod as if it has grown roots—either they don’t see the benefit of repositioning, or don’t think moving is worth the effort.
Whatever the reason, it’s important for photographers to understand the power of shifting position to control foreground and background relationships: move left and your foreground shifts right relative to the background; move right and the foreground shifts left relative to the background. Either way, the closer the foreground is relative to the background, the more dramatic the shift. And contrary to what you might believe, it’s impossible to change foreground/background perspective with focal length—to change perspective, you must change position: forward/backward, left/right, up/down.
An often overlooked shift that can be quite powerful is up/down. Often I’m able to un-merge objects at different distances by simply raising my tripod or climbing atop a nearby rock. Dropping low will emphasize the closest elements, and when my frame has a large and boring empty space (such as a field of weeds or dirt) between the foreground and background, I drop lower to shrink that gap.
It’s taken me a while to figure out the best way to convey these concepts to my photo workshop students. In most workshops, I find that many of the students haven’t picked up their cameras in weeks or months (or years!), so I’ve learned give them time to get back in their creative zone before laying all this stuff on them.
For example, in my Yosemite workshops I usually start with the classic shots that probably drew them to the park in the first place, places like Tunnel View and Valley View, where there are obvious compositions that lead to easy success. At the first image review I give a little talk on composition and moving the eye (among other things), then everyone shares images and I offer my feedback.
By the second day, armed with that foundation and a little Day 1 success, they’re usually ready to challenge their creativity and attack the less heralded spots whose beauty is more subtle. This growth is obvious as soon as the Day 2 image review. I’m frequently blown away by how quickly they’ve refined their inherent creative vision well enough to see beyond the obvious and find compositions that are both beautiful and unique.
One autumn favorite creative spot is the section of the Merced River from the Pohono Bridge upstream to Fern Spring, and even a little beyond. Fern Spring alone, with its stair-step cascades and a small reflecting pool that’s covered with color each fall, has enough to occupy a creative photographer for hours. And just across the road is a trail that skirts the river and traverses a forest filled with colorful maple and dogwood trees. The entire area is chock-full of creative opportunities that include whitewater, still water reflections, and of course (lots of) fall color.
In last month’s Fall Color and Reflections workshop, once I was satisfied that everyone was comfortable with their cameras and starting to trust their creative instincts, I took them to Fern Spring. Once there, I gave them the lay of the land and encouraged them to explore. Early in the workshop my groups tend to stick close to me, but this afternoon I was encouraged to see everyone instantly scatter. That’s always a good sign that they’re starting to get in the zone—even though it means I need to chase each one down to make sure they’re doing okay.
By the time I’d finished my rounds and confirmed that each person had things under control (and fearing that my presence might actually be a distraction), I was left with about 20 minutes to do a little shooting of my own. I quickly grabbed my camera and beelined upstream to a spot that I can’t take a group to because there’s no room for more than one person, no trail to get there, and it’s frighteningly easy to fall in the river. (I’ve had a couple of minor mishaps here that required changing shoes and socks, and maybe spending a couple of hours in pants wet to my calf, but was always grateful it wasn’t worse).
Rather than a standard fall color location, this is a fallen color spot that accumulates leaves that have drifted downstream from elsewhere to float among the rocks. Each year, the quality of the floating color varies from none to lots—not enough water and the leaves don’t make it into the rocks; too much water and the leaves just wash right by to locations downstream.
I was happy to confirm that this was indeed a good year for the floating color. Being in a hurry, I could have very easily snapped off a couple of frames from where I stood and called it good. But often the difference between an image that’s merely a decently executed rendering of a beautiful scene, and an image that stands out for the (often missed) aspects of the natural world it reveals, is the time it takes to identify and connect the scene’s visual relationships. So I took just a little more time to align the elements.
In this case that meant positioning myself so the foreground rocks and leaves aligned with the middle-ground rocks and reflection, which aligned with cloud-shrouded El Capitan in the background. Words cannot express how awkward this position was, requiring a grand total of 5 splayed legs—3 tripod and 2 human. But still it wasn’t quite right—until I dropped my tripod down to about a foot above the water to make the leaves more prominent.
After setting my exposure, I focused on the third small foreground rock, then dialed my polarizer to reduce the reflection on the leaves while retaining the upstream reflection. Click.
Near, Middle, Far
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Secure Your Borders
Posted on November 28, 2022
Autumn Leaves on the Rocks, Valley View Reflection, Yosemite
Sony a7R IV
Sony 24-105 G
1/40 second
F/16
ISO 100
It’s easy to be overwhelmed at the first sight of a location you’ve longed to visit for years. And since by the time you make it there you’ve likely seen so many others’ images of the scene, it’s understandable that your perception of how the scene should be photographed might be fixed. But is that really the best way to photograph it?
Valley View in Yosemite is one of those hyper-familiar scenes. El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, and Cathedral Rocks pretty much slap you in the face the instant you land at Valley View, making it easy to miss all the other great stuff here. This month’s workshop group visited Valley View twice, with each visit in completely different conditions, which got me thinking about about the number of ways there are to photograph most scenes, and how it’s easy to miss opportunities if you simply concentrate on the obvious. Most scenes, familiar or not, require scrutiny to determine where the best images are—on every visit.
Sunrise Reflection, El Capitan, Yosemite
On our first visit, Bridalveil Fall was just a trickle lost in deep shadow, so I focused my attention on El Capitan, opting for a vertical frame to emphasize El Cap, the beautiful clouds overhead, and the reflection. When we returned a couple of days later, Bridalveil had been recharged by a recent rain, the soft light was more even throughout the scene, and patches of fallen leaves and pine needles now floated atop the reflection. All this called for a completely different approach.
On this return visit, since I thought there was (just barely) enough water in Bridalveil to justify its inclusion, I went with a horizontal composition. It would have been easy to frame up El Capitan, Bridalveil, and Cathedral Rocks, throw in a little reflection and call it good. But (as my workshop students will confirm) I obsess about clean borders because I think they’re the easiest place for distractions to hide.
So before every click, I do a little “border patrol,” a simple reminder to deal with small distractions on my frame’s perimeter that can have a disproportionately large impact on the entire image. (I’d love to say that I coined the term in this context, but I think I got it from fellow photographer and friend Brenda Tharp—not sure where Brenda picked it up.)
To understand the importance of securing your borders, it’s important to understand that our goal as photographers is to create an image that not only invites viewers to enter, but also persuades them to stay. And the surest way to keep viewers in your image is to help them forget the world outside the frame. Lots of factors go into crafting an inviting, persuasive image—things like compositional balance, visual motion, and relationships are all essential (and topics for another day), but nothing reminds a viewer of the world outside the frame more than an object jutting in or cut off at the edge.
When an object juts in on the edge of a frame, it often feels like part of a different scene is photobombing the image. Likewise, when an object is cut off on the edge of the frame, it can feel like part of the scene is missing. Either way, it’s a subconscious and often jarring reminder of the world beyond the frame. Not only does this “rule” apply to obvious terrestrial objects like rocks and branches, it applies equally to clouds.
And there are other potential problems on the edge of an image. Simply having something with lots of visual weight—an object with enough bulk, brightness, contrast, or anything else that pulls the eye—on the edge of the frame can throw off the balance and compete with the primary subject for the viewer’s attention.
Of course it’s often (usually?) impossible to avoid cutting something off on the edge of the frame, so the next best thing is to cut it boldly rather than to simply trim it. I find that when I do this, it feels intentional and less like a mistake that I simply missed. And often, these strongly cut border objects serve as framing elements that hold the eye in the frame.
To avoid these distractions, I remind myself of “border patrol” and slowly run my eyes around the perimeter of the frame. Sometimes border patrol is easy—a simple scene with just a small handful of objects to organize, all conveniently grouped toward the center, usually requires minimal border management. But more often than not we’re dealing with complex scenes containing multiple objects scattered throughout and beyond the frame. Even when you can’t avoid cutting things off, border patrol makes those choices conscious instead of random, which is almost aways better.
As nice as the Valley View reflection was on this visit, it was sharing space with a disorganized mess of rocks, driftwood, and leaves. Organizing it all into something coherent was impossible, but I at least wanted to have prominent color in my foreground and take care to avoid objects on the edge of my frame that would pull viewers’ eyes away from the scene.
Unfortunately, as I used to tell my kids all the time (they’re grown and no longer listen to me), you can’t always have what you want. In this case, including the best foreground color also meant including an unsightly jumble of wood, rock, and pine needles in the lower right corner. But after trying a lot of different things, I decided this was the best solution—especially since I managed to find a position and focal length that gave me completely clean borders everywhere else in my frame.
I very consciously included enough of the mass in the lower right that it became something of a boundary for that corner of the image (not great, but the best solution possible). I also was very careful to keep an eye on the ever-changing clouds. The light on El Capitan that broke through just as I had my composition worked out felt like a small gift.
Workshop Schedule || Purchase Prints || Instagram
Valley View Variety
Pandemic Lessons
Posted on November 21, 2022
Autumn Reflection, Three Brothers, Yosemite
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
1/13 second
F/11
ISO 100
It feels trite to wait until Thanksgiving week to detail blessings I feel year-round, but there’s nothing like a global pandemic and all its disruptions to refocus priorities. Pre-Covid Thanksgivings were an opportunity to remind myself to appreciate my life by concentrating on the big stuff like good health, a loving family, and a career that lets me travel and (almost) never feels like work. Since Covid, I’m simply grateful for the resumption of family gatherings (large and small), unrestricted travel, and (not insignificantly) the return of the bottom half of everyone’s face—things I swear I’ll never again take for granted.
Another thing I’ve grown to appreciate about my current life, also underscored by the pandemic, is the autonomy of self-employment. While losing workshops was incredibly stressful, once I convinced myself that the lost workshops were simply postponed and not cancelled, I was able to use the downtime productively—without flapping in the ever-changing breeze of government and employer workplace rules.
I do have to admit that sometimes the idea of a 9-to-5 job with weekends and paid vacations sounds mighty good (I’m speaking in very general terms and don’t mean to offend anyone pinned to a cubicle 10 hours per day just to pay the bills—I’ve been there), but the bottom line is that I do love the flexibility of having complete control of my schedule.
When I left the 9-to-5 world to pursue this crazy passion more than 15 years ago, the vanished safety net was a great motivator—I was only as successful as the next art show (which I no longer do) or photo workshop. Weekends? Holidays? Irrelevant. Back then, the closest I got to a vacation was when my wife and I traveled to scout for a new workshop. And alarm clocks? They’re for workshop sunrises only.
But as the years go by (is it me, or is time moving faster?), I’ve come to truly value my freedom—in no small part because I’ve learned how to manage it. Today I can look at my calendar and, if nothing’s there, do whatever I want. And while that might mean cramming the things that must be done into times when others might be in their recliner watching HBO, or sunbathing at the beach, it’s 100 percent my choice and I love it.
The pandemic restrictions also helped me realize that I may have even started to take for granted my home that’s close enough to Yosemite that I can drive there and back in a day. To prevent this in the past, each time I enter the park I’ve always tried to imagine I’m viewing it for the first time, but since the pandemic I’ve been doing this with renewed focus and appreciation and it feels good.
An under-the-radar revelation when my workshops resumed was how much I missed the people. I knew I missed my workshop students, but it surprised me how much I enjoyed their return. This month’s Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections group, a wonderful blend of humor and enthusiasm that made my job easy, did nothing to dispel my enthusiasm.
Since there was a little bit of weather during most of the workshop (nice clouds, a little rain and snow), I deviated from my typical schedule, one day delaying my normal midday break when the conditions were too good to stop, and throughout the workshop adjusting my visits to other locations to account for the special conditions.
The fall color and reflections were in fact spectacular as advertised, but with the waterfalls pretty much their normal autumn dry (Bridalveil Fall was a trickle, Yosemite Falls was just a wet stain with no visible water flowing), we turned to Yosemite’s monoliths for background and reflection subjects.
Perhaps Yosemite’s most underrated granite feature is the Three Brothers. While technically not a monolith (a triolith?), the Three Brothers—Lower Brother, Middle Brother, and… (go ahead, guess)…, wrong(!), it’s Eagle Peak—is to my eye one of Yosemite’s most striking features. Nevertheless, despite its towering presence above the heart of Yosemite Valley, many Yosemite visitors never see the Three Brothers. That’s because when viewed from the east, Three Brothers looks an ordinary granite wall that just kind of blends into the scenery, and from most west-side vantage points, it’s blocked by El Capitan. And nowhere in the valley is Three Brothers clearly visible without a small effort (you can’t just pull into a vista and hop out of the car to view it.)
So it’s always fun to walk my groups out to this spot on the Merced River for their first look at Three Brothers. Even here, with the view dominated by El Capitan, I sometimes need to point upstream to the Three Brothers and let them know this will be their only opportunity to photograph it.
On this chilly morning earlier this month we started at the spot with the best El Capitan view (least obstructed by trees) and a decent Three Brothers view. I told the group that about 100 yards downstream they’d get a better Three Brothers view and reflection, as well as a decent (partially tree-obstructed) El Capitan view. I gave them plenty of time for both spots and encouraged them to take advantage of it.
On the morning of our visit, golden cottonwoods colored the reflection that stretched from riverbank to riverbank and was fringed by a sprinkling of leaves. The sky was mostly cloudy, but every once in a while a shaft of sunlight would break through and spotlight part of El Capitan or the Three Brothers for a few seconds. Even though I come here a lot, I found these conditions were too nice to resist taking a few clicks of my own.
I was looking for leaves to put in my foreground when I found this view at the downstream vantage point. Getting out here required some serious mud sloshing (thank you waterproof boots!), but thanks to an encroaching shoreline and photobombing patch of grass, still struggled to get the entire reflection. I finally decided that by elevating my tripod to the max and planting it as far into the river as my arms could reach, I could separate Lower Brother’s reflection from the shoreline and get 2/3 of the brothers—the best I could do. My polarizer I oriented to remove the reflection from the leaves, but was still able to spare enough of the Three Brothers and trees reflection to recover it in Photoshop.
Have a great Thanksgiving! (I realize this is an America-only holiday, but I strongly encourage everyone, holiday or not, to pause from time to time to appreciate their good fortune, whatever it might be.)
Epilogue
I’m also thankful for heated seats and noise cancelling headphones.
Yosemite’s Monoliths
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Variations on a Scene
Posted on November 14, 2022
Autumn Leaves and Reflection, Half Dome, Yosemite
Sony α1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
1.3 seconds
F/11
ISO 100
One million words
January 2023 will mark the start of my (more or less weekly) Eloquent Nature blog’s 13th year. Not counting the 30 or so sporadically created Photo Tips articles, today’s post will be number 710. Doing the math, that actually turns out to be more than 1 blog post per week; at 1500 words per post (a conservative estimate), I’ve written more than 1 million words. Yikes.
According to WordPress, I have nearly 40,000 followers, but so far have resisted the urge to monetize my creation. I have nothing against money (I in fact kind of like it), but haven’t yet found a way to generate dollars from my blogging effort without detracting from the page or cheapening the visitors’ experience. (So, you’re welcome.)
But my motives aren’t entirely altruistic. Writing about creativity and inspiration each week encourages introspection that has given me a clearer understanding of myself and the creative process. And my (obsessive) desire to understand my subjects has cause me to research and ponder countless topics that might otherwise have been off my radar.
My drive to write just seemed to happen organically. I remember in first or second grade, each Monday we’d be assigned a list of spelling words (am I dating myself, or do they still do that?) to learn for the spelling test that always came on Friday. To help us learn that week’s words, the week’s homework assignment was to a create “spelling sentences,” one for each word. Instead of spelling sentences, I would write spelling stories that used every one of a the week’s words—I can’t explain why, except that I thought it was fun.
And ever since, whether it was in school or at work, I somehow became the designated writer—not necessarily because I was better at it, more because I was the most willing to do it. From there it wasn’t much of a leap for that willingness to write to become part of my job description. Eventually I became a tech writer for a large Silicon Valley tech company.
I’ve somehow managed to avoid the trap that befalls many creatives, where merely attempting to monetize their passion robs them of its joy. And I feel extremely lucky to have two creative pursuits, photography and writing, that give me great pleasure and synergistically combine to support me financially.
I’m thinking about this because I’ve decided to (slightly) change my blogging schedule, and I’ve found that a surprising number of people seem to notice when my weekly post is late, even by just a day. (Nothing abusive, more like occasional mild disappointment.) Of course it very much pleases (and surprises) me to hear that people actually look forward to my posts and actually read them.
So what’s this big change? For years my personal commitment was to post a new blog each Sunday. I’ve actually become pretty good at meeting this goal, but as my wife recently pointed out, this commitment pretty much blows up our weekend. Since we both work from home, on schedules entirely of our own making, weekends are really just a state of mind for both of us (there’s a reason we’ve each set our watches to display the day of the week)—I never considered our lost weekends a big deal. But I do have to admit that it would be nice to be a little more in sync with the rest of the world’s weekend state of mind, and have therefore made the radical decision to move my weekly blog day to, wait for it… Monday. Whoa.
(Only a writer would come up with 500 words explaining something that could have been said in 10 words: Effective this week, new blog posts will appear on Mondays.)
Autumn Leaves and Reflection, Half Dome, Yosemite
So anyway
If you’re still with me (thank you), you’ve probably already forgotten about the image at the top of this post. It’s another product of last week’s incredibly rewarding Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections photo workshop. Rewarding because it was a great group that very much deserved the wonderful photography we enjoyed: nice clouds throughout, a couple of clearing storms, a colorful sunrise (not as common in Yosemite as you’d think), (only) one morning of bright sunlight that came just as we were in the perfect spot for it (Cook’s Meadow elm tree, if you must know), and even a little snow.
And what’s a “fall color and reflections” workshop without actual fall color and reflections? This year’s Merced River was its usual low and slow reflective self, and the fall color was just starting to peak. So yeah, a pretty good week.
The workshop’s final shoot was at one of my favorite Yosemite Valley Half Dome views, just upriver from Sentinel Bridge. I photograph here a lot. A. Lot. So much that I rarely get out my camera when I’m with a group. But I made an exception this time because I liked the clouds hovering around Half Dome, the light was just so darn nice, and I found a foreground I could work with.
Finding unique images at frequently photographed locations is usually some combination of special conditions and/or a new foreground. The conditions this evening, while not spectacular, were definitely good, and I was able to combine that with a static pool in the Merced that had accumulated a colorful assortment of leaves and pine needles. Dropping my tripod/camera to about 2 feet above the ground, I eliminated a large empty gap between the leaves and Half Dome’s reflection to make my foreground about nothing but the best stuff.
Because the group was my priority, after finding my composition, I just left the tripod/camera in place while I worked with them, returning every 5 or 10 minutes to fire off a handful of frames. The clouds around Half Dome were changing rapidly, so even though my composition didn’t change (at all), each session gave me something a little different.
The only other thing that changed with each click was my polarizer orientation. This was one of those catch-22 conundrums where dialing up the reflection with my polarizer also dialed up the reflective (color robbing) sheen on the floating leaves, and brightened the water on which the leaves floated (reducing the contrast between the leaves and their background). Dialing the reflection down to maximize the color of the leaves and blacken the water also nearly erased the Half Dome and clouds reflection.
So with each visit to my camera, I fired at least one frame with the reflection maximized, another with it minimized, and a couple somewhere in between. I found that I could in fact hit a midway point with the polarizer that spared most of the reflection beyond the leaves (Half Dome and the clouds), and reduced most of the reflection on and around the leaves.
-
- Autumn Snow, Half Dome Reflection, Yosemite
-
- Autumn Snow and Reflection, Half Dome, Yosemite
-
- Autumn Reflection, Half Dome, Yosemite
I won’t pretend that I’ve created a brand new take on this frequently photographed view, but I am pretty pleased to have found a new variation on one of my favorite scenes.
See you next Monday…
Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
No Secrets
Posted on November 6, 2022
Sunrise Reflection, El Capitan, Yosemite
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
.6 seconds
F/11
ISO 50
It amuses (and frustrates) me when photographers guard their information like state secrets. Photography isn’t a competition, and I’ve always felt that the more photographers can foster a sense of community, the more everyone benefits. (I will, however, protect locations at risk of being damaged by too much attention.) With that in mind, I’m sharing below some of the photography insights I’ve learned from a lifetime of Yosemite visits, and encourage you to share your own insights, wherever and whatever they may be, when the opportunity arises.
Yosemite FAQs
I get asked all the time, what’s the best season to be in Yosemite? For many reasons, including the fact that everyone defines “best” differently, that’s an impossible question to answer. So instead I try to identify the pros and cons of each season in Yosemite and let the questioners decide for themselves what sounds best to them.
- Winter: Because the crowds have vacated, Yosemite is at its most peaceful in winter. And it’s never more beautiful than when smothered with fresh snow, but in the relatively warm temperatures of Yosemite Valley, snowstorms only happen a few times each winter so I try to time my visits so I can be there during a storm.
- Spring: With its booming waterfalls, vivid greens, mirror-like vernal pools, and ubiquitous dogwood blooms (okay, so technically they’re bracts), spring is classic postcard Yosemite. Spring is also when the crowds return.
- Summer: For tourists only—but if you find yourself in Yosemite on a crowded (understatement) summer day, rising at the first sign of pre-sunrise light will give you at least a couple of hours of glorious peace.
- Autumn: By autumn the crowds have left, and while Yosemite’s waterfalls have fallen silent, the low and slow water turns the Merced River into a reflecting ribbon that splits Yosemite Valley. The resulting mirror reflections of granite monoliths mingling with the season’s red and gold are one of my favorite things to photograph in Yosemite.
Another question I get asked a lot is some version of, “Where in Yosemite should I photograph sunrise/sunset.” Again there’s no absolute answer, so I just try to provide enough information for the questioners to make their own decisions.
- Sunrise: Yosemite is not an inherently good sunrise location. In fact, on a typical California clear sky morning, it’s pretty lousy. That’s because most of Yosemite Valley’s best views face east, toward shaded subjects against the brightest part of the sky. Clouds flip the equation, subduing the bright sky and (fingers crossed) filling it with color. But even the cloudless days aren’t an excuse to stay in bed. On these days try to be in position for the first light on El Capitan, about 15/20 minutes after the “official” (flat horizon) sunrise. And in winter Yosemite Falls also gets beautiful morning light.
- Sunset: Even without clouds, Half Dome gets nice sunset light year-round. In the long-night months (from the autumnal equinox to the vernal equinox) so does El Capitan. In the long-day months (from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox), the late light goes to Cathedral Rocks and Bridalveil Fall.
Send in the clouds
Regardless of the season, clouds change everything, especially when storm clouds that swirl about Yosemite’s monoliths. Even high or thin clouds can be difference makers that paint the usually boring sky with color and (if you’re lucky) reflect in foreground water.
Unfortunately, storm clouds often drop all the way to the valley floor, obscuring all the features you traveled to photograph. Rather than giving up, my approach to stormy weather in Yosemite is to wait it out. A clearing storm is the Holy Grail of Yosemite photography, an experience that never gets old, no matter how many times it’s witnessed. And when I say wait it out, I don’t mean just returning to your room and looking outside every once in a while, I mean circling the valley in your car, or parking somewhere with an eye on the sky. Tunnel View is a great spot for this.
My other tip for photographing a clearing storm in Yosemite is not staying in one place too long. If you wait until it’s not beautiful anymore before moving on, you won’t leave until the show’s over everywhere—instead, remind yourself that it’s just as beautiful everywhere else, and move on when you find yourself repeating compositions.
Reflecting on reflections
Regardless of the location or conditions, a reflection can turn an ordinary pretty picture into something special. That’s especially true in Yosemite. Yosemite’s reflection spots change with the season: in spring, they’re best in the vernal pools that form in the meadows, and a small handful of Merced River spots, where it widens (like Swinging Bridge) or pools near the river’s edge; in autumn (and late summer), pretty much the entire Merced River is a mirror. Winter Merced River reflections can be nice too, depending on the weather and amount of runoff.
A lifetime of Yosemite visits helps me pursue its reflections. But even if you don’t know the spots for Yosemite reflections, they’re not hard to find if you keep your eyes open.
The most frequent reflection mistake I see is photographers walking past a reflection because it doesn’t contain an interesting subject. Maximizing reflection opportunities starts with understanding that, just like a billiard ball striking a cushion, a reflection always bounces off the reflective surface at exactly the same angle at which it arrived.
Armed with this knowledge, when I encounter any reflective surface, I scan the area for a reflection-worthy subject and position myself to intercept my target subject’s reflected rays, moving left/right, forward/backward, up/down until my reflection appears. Another important aspect of reflection management is juxtaposing the reflection with submerged or exposed objects in the water.
Putting it all together
These cloud and reflection factors aligned for me in last week’s Yosemite Fall Color and Reflections workshop. Based on the weather forecast when we wrapped up the previous night, I gathered the group early enough for our sunrise departure to swing into Tunnel View for quick survey of Yosemite Valley. If there had been no clouds, clearing storm clouds, or zero-visibility clouds, we’d have stayed there. But when I saw a nice mix of high to mid-clouds, I went with Plan-B and beelined to Valley View.
We arrived more than 30 minutes before sunrise and I was pleased to see only one other car in the parking lot. I’d already brought my group here once, so everyone already had an idea of what they wanted to do—a few went just upstream from the cars to the nice reflection of Cathedral Rocks and Bridalveil Fall; the rest made their way out to the new-ish (last couple of years) and quite conveniently placed logjam that provides a perspective of El Capitan that previously would have required walking on water to achieve.
I left my gear in the car, moving back and forth between the two cohorts and and monitoring the sky. I’ve photographed here so much, I had no plan to this morning, but when the clouds overhead started to pink up, I couldn’t resist. Rather than grabbing my entire camera bag, I just pulled out my tripod and Sony a7R IV with the Sony 24-105 f/4 G lens already attached and trotted down to the natural platform formed by the log jam.
I knew I didn’t have much time, so I quickly found a spot where, by dropping my tripod a little, I could frame El Capitan’s reflection with several of the many protruding rocks. Since Bridalveil Fall wasn’t flowing very strongly, and the light on El Capitan was better, I went with a vertical composition that featured El Capitan only.
The pink was so intense that for a minute or so, it slightly colored the rocks. Before the color faded, I managed to capture several frames with this composition, each with a slightly different polarizer orientation, but I ended up choosing the one that maximized the reflection.
Workshop Schedule || Purchase Prints || Instagram
Yosemite Autumn Reflections
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Ready or Not…
Posted on October 30, 2022
Moonrise Through the Trees, Olmsted Point, Yosemite
Sony α1
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 800
f/16
1/500 second
Let’s review
Consistently finding great photo opportunities isn’t just luck, but neither is it a divine gift. With that in mind, I sometimes refer to “The 3 P’s of nature photography,” describing the effort and sacrifice necessary to consistently create successful landscape images: Preparation, Persistence, and Pain.
- Preparation is your foundation, the research you do that puts you in the right place at the right time, the mastery of your equipment that allows you to wring the most from the moment, and the creative vision honed from prior experience.
- Persistence is patience with a dash of stubbornness. It’s what keeps you going back when the first, second, or hundredth attempt has been thwarted by unexpected light, weather, or a host of other frustrations. Persistence keeps you out there long after any sane person would have given up.
- Pain is the willingness to suffer for your craft. I’m not suggesting that you risk your life for the sake of a coveted capture, but you do need to be able to ignore the lure of sound sleep, a full stomach, dry clothes, and a warm fire, because the unfortunate truth is that the best photographs almost always seem to happen when most of the world would rather be inside.
Of course every once in a while you might come across an image that simply fell into your lap and all you had to do was whip out your smartphone and click. But those images are few and far between, and I daresay are rarely as rewarding as the images you worked for.
Picking a favorite image and trying to assign one or more of the 3 P’s to it is a fun little exercise I sometimes use to remind myself to keep doing the extra work. Take a few minutes to scan your portfolio; ask yourself how many didn’t require at least one of the 3 P’s. (I’ll wait.) …….. See what I mean?
Ready or not, here it comes
Moonrise Through the Trees, Olmsted Point, Yosemite
For this image, I will thank preparation. But, if you know how obsessively I plan my moonrises, not the kind of preparation you might think. Since I started photographing the moon long before The Photographer’s Ephemeris and other moon-plotting apps were available (long before smartphones, in fact), my moonrise/set workflow has always been to just plot everything manually using location-specific moon altitude and azimuth data, combined with topo map software (pretty much the same thing TPE does behind the curtain). But I didn’t do that for this moonrise because the moon wasn’t on my radar this evening.
Guiding my Eastern Sierra workshop group to Olmsted point for the workshop’s final sunset, I hadn’t plotted the moon because this workshop didn’t coincide with the full moon (I’d scheduled it for peak fall color, not the moon), and because the moonrise doesn’t align with any feature of particular interest at Olmsted Point.
But even when the moon isn’t part of my plan, it’s never far from my mind. (This is where the preparation part kicks in.) I always make it a point to know what the moon is doing, both its phase and general rise/set time and direction, whenever I’m out with my camera. Once I got my group situated on the granite at Olmsted Point, I mentally checked on the moon. Knowing that a 90% waxing gibbous moon would be rising in the southeast a couple of hours before sunset, I wondered how long it would take it to crest the ridge above us.
On my iPhone is an app called Theodolite that I can point at any feature to learn its altitude and azimuth in degrees of whatever I point it at. I wouldn’t trust this data enough to engineer a bridge, but since it works without connectivity, it’s perfect for exactly what I wanted to do—get a general idea of when and where the moon would appear. I pointed Theodolite at the ridge (using my phone’s camera, it computes and transposes the various angles on the display), and learned that the ridge rose 8 degrees above my location.
Next I switched to my Focalware app (which also doesn’t require connectivity) and learned that the moon should appear (rise to 8 degrees) a little less than 30 minutes before sunset. Focalware also gives me the moon’s azimuth at any given time, an angle I was able to find on the ridge using Theodolite (by pointing it at the ridge and shifting the view until the crosshairs aligned with the desired azimuth), giving me a general idea of the location on the ridge where the moon would rise.
Not only was I able to alert my group to this bonus moonrise, I was able to tell them when and where to look. The light on Half Dome was so good that some decided to pass on the moon, but those who wanted to photograph it had plenty of time to set up with their desired lens and composition.
For the moon’s appearance, especially when there isn’t an iconic landscape feature to pair it with, I like going long, the longer the better. Even though I had no expectation of using it, I’d still carried my Sony 100-400 GM lens on the short hike out to Olmsted—because, well, you never know. That, combined with my Sony 2X Teleconverter (which I also always carry), gave me 800mm.
There was nothing special about the ridge, so I tried to find a tree (or trees) to juxtapose with the rising moon. Though I knew about where the moon would appear, I wouldn’t know exactly where to point until I actually saw it. So I identified a few potential target trees, then pasted my eyes on the ridge.
By the time the moon rose, the warm light from the setting sun was just about to leave the granite. I raced to the spot that aligned with the first tree I’d identified and went to work. As soon as the moon separated from the ridge, I sprinted along the granite until I could frame it with a pair of trees, shifting slightly after every two or three clicks.
To summarize…
The preparation I credit for this image starts with my general sense of the moon’s phase at rise time. I was also there with all the tools I needed, from my long lens and teleconverter, to a couple of apps that allowed me to get the information I needed on the fly. And finally, because the moon ascends surprisingly fast, it helped a lot to have pre-identified my foreground targets.
Moon Over Yosemite
Long Shot
Posted on October 24, 2022
Aspen, Lundy Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Sony 𝛂1
Sony 100-400 GM
ISO 400
f/5.6
1/30 second
Imagine you have a guitar and want to make music your career. Since Eric Clapton is your favorite artist, and “Let It Rain” is your favorite song, you you work hard until you can play it perfectly. But wait—before you move on to “Layla,” let me suggest that your best path to musical fame and fortune is not to replicate the works others, no matter how great they are. (Also, there’s a reason Duane Allman isn’t answering your calls.)
Using Eric Clapton as a model for your music is fine—the more you listen to Clapton, the more your guitar playing will be influenced by his creativity and craftsmanship. But at some point you need to choose between carving your own musical path, or languishing as a cover artist.
Make the world your own
The same applies to photography. In my photo workshops I encounter many people who have travelled great distances to duplicate a photo they’ve seen online, in a book, or in a print somewhere. I certainly understand the desire to create your own version of something beautiful, and I can’t say that my portfolio doesn’t contain its share of photography clichés—but, and I can’t emphasize this too strongly, if you must photograph something exactly as it’s been photographed before, make that recreation is your starting point, not your ultimate goal.
Once you’ve captured your “icon” (that word is a cliché itself) shot, take a breath and spend a little more time with your scene. Identify what draws your eye and ways to emphasize it. Look for alternate foreground and background possibilities (move around), seek unique perspectives (move around some more), tweak your exposure variables to experiment with depth and motion. If your first inclination was to shoot horizontal, try vertical, and vice versa.
It also helps to remove your camera from the tripod and pan slowly, zooming in and out as you go until something stops you (don’t forget to return to the tripod before clicking). Even if nothing immediately jumps out, I promise that the simple act of slowing down and spending time with a scene will reveal overlooked secrets that might spur further creativity.
Going long
One of the easiest ways to stretch your style is taking lens choice off autopilot. The expansiveness of most landscape scenes almost begs for a wide angle lens that includes it all, but if your goal is to create something rather than covering what’s already been done, consider a telephoto lens for your landscapes.
I sometimes catch myself automatically reaching for a wide lens, only going to a telephoto when I see a specific composition that requires one. But I’ve learned that those times when I’m struggling to find a shot, the easiest way to reset my creative instincts in the field is often to simply view the scene through a telephoto lens, just to see what my wide-angle bias might be missing.
If telephoto vision doesn’t come naturally to you in the field, you can train your eye in the comfort of your own home by opening any wide angle image in Photoshop (or your photo editor of choice), setting the crop tool to 2/3 aspect ratio (to match what you see in your viewfinder), and see how many new compositions you can find. (I’m not suggesting that you shoot everything wide and crop later—this crop tool suggestion is simply a method to train your eye.) But whether you do it in the field, or later in Photoshop, once your eye gets used to seeing in telephoto, you’ll find virtually every scene you photograph has telephoto possibilities you never imagined were there.
Still not convinced? In addition to providing a fresh perspective, telephoto lenses offer undeniable, tangible advantages in landscape photography:
- Bigger subject: Bigger isn’t always better, but there’s often no more effective way to emphasize your subject than to magnify it in your frame.
- Isolate: By zooming closer, you can banish distractions and unwanted objects to the world outside the frame, distilling the scene to its most essential elements.
- Highlight the less obvious: Sometimes a scene’s compelling, but more subtle, qualities are overwhelmed by the cacophony of dramatic qualities that drew you in the first place. By all means, shoot the grand drama that drew you, but take the time to discover the smaller stuff that’s there.
- Selective focus: The longer your focal length, the shallower your depth of field. One of my favorite ways to emphasize a subject that might otherwise be overlooked is to render it as the only sharp object surrounded by a sea of soft color and shape.
About this image
I love aspen. Not only are they beautiful trees, they’re fascinating subjects. For example, did you know that a stand of aspen is actually a single organism connected by one common, extensive root system? In other words, each trunk that we identify as an individual tree is in fact part of (and genetically identical to) every tree surrounding it.
A single aspen stand (known, appropriately enough, as a “clone” of aspen), can be tens of thousands of years old. The oldest and largest aspen clone, in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, is the oldest, largest living organism on Earth (much older and larger than any of the far more heralded bristlecone or sequoia trees).
Aspen Carpet, Lundy Canyon, Eastern Sierra (2021)
On last year’s visit to Lundy Canyon, I went exploring the aspen clone on the trail to Lake Helen with my Sony 12-24 GM, seeking to capture the sturdy trunks emerging from a gold-carpeted forest floor (image on the right).
This year, looking for something different, I went at this same aspen clone with my Sony 100-400 GM lens (on my Sony α1), trying first to isolate a single leaf against the colorful background. After a few unsatisfying attempts, I turned my attention to the aspen trunks, looking for a way to emphasize their stark whiteness, papery texture, and protruding knots.
It took a while, but I finally found a tree that offered the combination of separation and background I was looking for. There was nothing especially distinctive about the tree I found, but it displayed a healthy white bark, a prominent knot to anchor my frame, and was separated enough from the surrounding trees that I could get it perfectly sharp, while significantly softening its neighbors.
I started with vertical compositions, but as soon as I switched to horizontal I knew that’s how I wanted to handle this scene. With that determined, I spent the rest of my time making micro-adjustments to my position and focal length, looking for the perspective and framing that gave me the absolute minimum merging of trunks. I also experimented with a variety of focal lengths and f-stops before deciding that I liked the absolute softest background best. I shot the image I share today at nearly 400mm and f/5.6 (wide open).
While I started this post writing about creating unique images, I know I’m not the first person to photograph aspen like this. (Nor do I mean to imply that I’m the Eric Clapton of landscape photography.) But I do feel it’s important for all photographers, myself included, to constantly seek fresh takes on old subjects by pursuing the qualities that move them, and experimenting with new ways to reveal them.
Workshop Schedule || Purchase Prints || Instagram
Long Shots
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Natural Light Painting
Posted on October 16, 2022
Mono Moonlight, South Tufa, Mono Lake
Sony 𝛂1
Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM
20 seconds
F/8
ISO 3200
Once upon a time, moonlight was the only kind of night photography I did. As lifelong astronomy enthusiast, I’ve always been mesmerized by all the stars that come out when the moon is down, but film and the earliest digital cameras were just not capable of adequately capturing the world after dark without help from multiple exposures or artificial light (dealbreakers for me).
While waiting for digital technology to catch up with my Milky Way aspirations, I watched other photographers achieve beautiful results using night photography techniques that didn’t appeal to me: Light painting (long exposures with foreground subjects illuminated by artificial light), and blue-hour blends (one image captured with the foreground illuminated by twilight “blue hour” sky, blended with a second image of the stars from later total darkness at the same location).
Longing for something different than moonlight, while staying true to my one-click natural light objective, I added star trails to my night sky toolbox. Start trails allowed me to keep my shutter open long enough to reveal the landscape beneath a moonless, star-fill sky—albeit with star streaks that bore no resemblance to the pinpoint stars I was so fond of gazing at. Another perk star trail photography was the opportunity to kick back beneath a star-filled ceiling while waiting for my exposure to complete.
When digital sensors finally improved enough to enable usable starlight (moonless) images, I was all-in. Armed with my newly acquired Sony a7S camera (and subsequent versions) and super-fast and wide prime lenses, I aggressively pursued images of the Milky Way’s brilliant core above my favorite landscapes.
So thrilling was this Milky Way revelation, I all but dropped moonlight photography. In fact, moonlight and Milky Way photography are mutually exclusive because when the moon is full, the Milky Way is lost in the moon’s glow. So by 2015, the only moonlight photography I was doing came during my annual spring moonbow workshops in Yosemite, where bright moonlight is required for the lunar rainbow’s appearance.
As much as possible I time my trips, both personal and workshops, for moonless nights to maximize the Milky Way photography opportunities. One exception is my annual autumn visit to the Eastern Sierra, which is always timed for early October to coincide with the best fall color while letting the moon phase fall where it may.
When the moon cooperates, the dark skies east of the Sierra are ideal for Milky Way photography
This year’s Eastern Sierra visit was joined by a waxing gibbous moon that was well on its way to full (the day after my scheduled return home). Yet despite the nearly full moon, I longed for a night shoot. So on my first night in Lee Vining I decided to revisit (non-moonbow) moonlight photography for the first time in seven years and drove out to Mono Lake’s South Tufa after dinner. (Shout-out to the Whoa Nellie Deli.)
With my very first click, memories of how enjoyable moonlight photography is came rushing back: Composition and (especially) focus are orders of magnitude easier than with Milky Way photography; there’s no worry about getting lost or tripping over something (or someone); and even with the sky washed out by moonlight, the camera captures many times more stars than my eyes see. None of these insights were actually new, but they still felt like revelations because I’d been doing nothing but dark sky photography for so long.
This might be a good time to mention that for anyone interested getting into night photography, I strongly encourage starting with moonlight. Unlike Milky Way photography, you don’t need fancy gear—just a decent tripod, any mirrorless or DSLR body, full frame or cropped, made in the last 20 years (pretty much since the first digital cameras) will work, and an f/4 lens is plenty fast enough. Read my Photo Tips article on moonlight photography for more detailed instruction on moonlight photography.
One thing that made this Mono Lake night especially nice was the disappearance of the light breeze that had chopped up the reflection at sunset a couple of hours earlier. The lake wasn’t quite mirror-like, but the surface had settled to gentle undulations that smoothed completely in my multi-second exposures, revealing a gauzy reflection that stood out beautifully in each image. And the 82% moon, while not quite full, was more than bright enough to illuminate the water and limestone tufa towers better than any light painting could have.
I started with images of just water and Mono Lake’s iconic “shipwreck” tufa feature beneath the stars, but soon went exploring for a more interesting foreground. When I found the scene in this image, I oriented my Sony 𝛂1 vertically to maximize the sky, and widened my Sony 16-35 f/2.8 GM lens to 16mm to include more foreground than I usually do in a night image.
In almost all of my night images I simply focus on the stars, but this foreground started about 5 feet away and had so much interesting (important) detail, I stopped down to f/8 and focused about 6 feet from my camera to ensure front-to-back sharpness. Using my 𝛂1’s Bright Monitoring feature (I highly recommend to Sony mirrorless shooters who do night photography that they assign it to a custom button), I was able to manually focus through my viewfinder.
To compensate for the light lost to the smaller aperture and less than completely full moon, I bumped my ISO to 3200 and exposed for 20 seconds—less than ideal, but the 𝛂1 handles ISO 3200 easily, and at 16mm there’s not much visible star movement in a 20 second exposure, so I wasn’t worried.
I was only out here for about an hour, but it was such a joyful experience, and I’m so pleased with my results, that I know there’s a lot more moonlight photography in my future.
More Moonlight
Click any image to scroll through the gallery LARGE
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 