Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Chasing Lightning at the Grand Canyon (Again)
Posted on August 2, 2020
Rain and Lightning, Lipan Point, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
1/8 second
F/18
ISO 50
Ten days ago my brother and I drove to the Grand Canyon to photograph the monsoon—you can read the story of our trip in my previous blog post.
I don’t get tired of photographing lightning. My brother Jay and I timed last month’s trip because the forecast promised lots of lightning, and though we did indeed see a lot of lightning, most of it was actually too close to photograph. Each day Jay and I headed out right after breakfast, stayed out most of the day, and returned to our room around dinnertime with lots of nice images, but no lighting to show for our effort.
I like to stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and photograph lightning up, down, or across the canyon, but most of the lightning we saw was either coming up behind us, or right on top of us. The frustrating reality of lightning photography is that when there’s too much, it’s usually too close. How close? Fixing dinner one evening, we saw a bolt hit about 50 yards from our room. And one afternoon on the rim, while watching a storm approach from the south and hoping it would hold together long enough to make it over the canyon, I reached to adjust my camera and got a shock—we were back in the car within five seconds.
Given all the lightning we dodged on the South Rim, had we been on the North Rim, we’d have had a field day—but on the South Rim, all we got was wet. Despite our frustration, on our last day the forecast was again promising, so we went back out filled with optimism. As we had on our previous days, we pointed our cameras at lots of promising cells with no success. Lots of dry frames—shutter clicks when the Lightning Trigger detects lightning that wasn’t visible or in my frame (I could have turned down the sensitivity, but don’t usually do that until I’ve had some success)—but just one meh lightning strike I knew I’d never process. That’s just the way lighting photography goes.
But I’m nothing if not persistent, which is how we found ourselves out near Lipan Point late that final afternoon. Despite our lack of lightning success, we’d had a lot of the otherwise spectacular photography that the monsoon often delivers—billowing clouds, dark curtains of rain, light shafts, dappled light, and gorgeous sunset color—and this afternoon was no exception. I was composed on a broad area of falling rain that looked moderately promising, resigned to the fact that it too would probably fizzle (but nevertheless appreciating the gorgeous light and clouds), when a single bolt fired across the canyon. It caught me so off guard that I almost didn’t believe it, but I heard my camera click and Jay exclaim, so I marked the frame (took a picture of my hand to make it easier to find among the hundreds of empty frames) and crossed my fingers.
We saw two more lightning bolts that afternoon, but this turned out to be the only one I deemed worthy of processing. On the drive home Jay and I agreed that our trip was a great success—while we didn’t get as much lightning as we’d have liked, we got lots (and lots) of beautiful storm images, photographed a vivid sunset, and had two great Comet NEOWISE shoots. This lighting strike on our final afternoon was simply icing on the cake.
Lightning photography isn’t hard, but it does take a little education and preparation
Below is the just updated (August 2, 2020) Lightning article from my Photo Tips section
How To Photograph Lightning
Forked Lightning, Point Imperial, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIII
Sony 100-400 GM
Lightning Trigger LT-IV
ISO 400
f/7.1
.4 seconds
Few things in nature are more dramatic than lightning. Or more dangerous. And if “safety first” is a criterion for intelligence, photographers are stupid. Because lightning is both dangerous and unpredictable, the more you understand lightning, how to anticipate it and stay safe in its presence, the greater your odds of surviving to take more pictures.
The shocking truth about lightning
A lightning bolt is an atmospheric manifestation of the truism that opposites attract. In nature, we get a spark when two oppositely charged objects come in close proximity. For example, when you get shocked touching a doorknob, on a very small scale, you’ve been struck by lightning.
In a thunderstorm, the up/down flow of atmospheric convection creates turbulence that knocks together airborne molecules, stripping their (negatively charged) electrons. Lighter, positively charged molecules are carried upward in the convection’s updrafts, while the heavier negatively charged molecules remain near the bottom of the cloud. Soon the cloud is electrically polarized, more positively charged at the top than at the base.
Nature always takes the easiest path—if the easiest path to electrical equilibrium is between the cloud top and bottom, we get intracloud lightning; if it’s between two different clouds, we get intercloud lightning. Less frequent cloud-to-ground strikes occur when the easiest path to equilibrium is between the cloud and ground.
With lightning comes thunder, the sound of air expanding explosively when heated by a 50,000-degree jolt of electricity. Thunder travels at the speed of sound, a pedestrian 750 miles per hour, while lightning’s flash zips along at the speed of light, more than 186,000 miles per second—nearly a million times faster than sound.
Knowing that the thunder occurred at the same time as the lightning flash, and the speed both travel, we can calculate the approximate distance of the lightning strike. While we see the lightning instantaneously, thunder takes about five seconds to cover a mile: Dividing by 5 the number of seconds between the lightning’s flash and the thunder’s crash gives you the lightning’s distance in miles (divide by three for kilometers).
Lightning safety
The 30 (or so) people killed by lightning in the United States each year had one thing in common with you and me: they didn’t believe they’d be struck by lightning when they started whatever it was they were doing when they were struck. The only sure way to be safe in an electrical storm is to be in a fully enclosed structure or metal-framed vehicle, away from open windows, plumbing, wiring, and electronics.
Unfortunately, photographing lightning usually requires being outside. And though there’s no completely safe way to photograph lightning, it doesn’t hurt to improve your odds of surviving enough to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Most lightning strikes within a ten-mile radius of the previous strike. So, if less than thirty seconds elapses between the flash and bang, you’re too close. And since “most” doesn’t mean “all,” it’s even better to allow a little margin for error. Thunder isn’t usually audible beyond ten miles—if you can hear the thunder, it’s safe to assume that you’re in lightning range.
But if you absolutely, positively must be outside with the lightning firing about you, or you simply find yourself caught outside with no available shelter, there are few things you can do to reduce the chance you’ll be struck:
The thousands of humans killed by lightning each year had one thing in common with you and me: none believed they’d be struck by lightning. The safest place in an electrical storm is a fully enclosed structure or metal-framed vehicle (it has nothing to do with the tires), windows closed, away from windows, plumbing, wiring, and electronics.
The surest way to be struck by lightning is to be outside in an electrical storm, but photographing lightning usually requires being outside. And while there’s no completely safe way to photograph lightning, it doesn’t hurt to improve your odds of surviving.
Most lightning strikes within a six-mile radius of the previous strike, but strikes have been known to happen much farther from the storm. Since thunder isn’t usually audible beyond ten miles, if you hear thunder, you should go inside and stay there until at least 30 minutes after the thunder stops.
If you absolutely must be outside with lightning nearby, or you simply find yourself caught outside with no available shelter, there are things you should know and do to be safer:
- A lightning strike is often preceded by static electricity that makes your hair stand on end
- Avoid high ground
- Avoid exposed areas
- Avoid metal and electronics
- Avoid concrete, which is often reinforced with metal
- Avoid tall isolated objects such as trees and open structures (and tripods)
- Avoid water
- Stay at least fifteen feet from other people
- Do not lie down
- If you’re surrounded by trees, position yourself near shorter trees, as far from trunks as possible
- Rubber soled shoes provide no protection
- As a last resort, crouch on the balls of your feet, with your feet together and your hands covering your ears
Three Strikes, Bright Angel Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon
Lightning How-to
If, after factoring in all the risks, you still like the idea of photographing lightning, you need to gear up. The extreme contrast between darkness and brilliant lightning means photographing lightning at night is mostly a matter of pointing your camera in the right direction with a multi-second shutter speed and hoping the lightning fires while your shutter’s open—pretty straightforward.
Photographing daylight lightning is more problematic. It’s usually over before you can react, so any success just watching and clicking is probably dumb luck. And using a neutral density filter to stretch the exposure time out to multiple seconds sounds great in theory, but in daylight, a lightning bolt with a life measured in milliseconds, captured in an exposure measured in seconds, will almost certainly lack the contrast necessary to show up in an image.
Lightning Trigger: The best tool for the job
Most lightning sensors (all?) attach to your camera’s hot shoe and connect via a special cable to the camera’s remote-release port. When engaged, the sensor fires the shutter (virtually) immediately upon detecting lightning, whether or not the lightning is visible to the eye or camera. With so many lightning sensors from which to choose, I did lots of research before buying my first one. I ended up choosing the sensor that was the consensus choice among photographers I know and trust: Lightning Trigger from Stepping Stone Products in Dolores, CO. At around $350 (including the cable), the Lightning Trigger is not the cheapest option, but after many years leading lightning-oriented photo workshops, I can say with lots of confidence that lightning sensors are not generic products, and the internal technology matters a lot. Based on my own results and observations, the Lightning Trigger is the only one I’d use and recommend (I get no kickback for this). On the other hand, if you already have a lightning sensor you’re happy with, there’s no reason to switch.
I won’t get into lots of specifics about how to set up the Lightning Trigger because it’s simple and covered fairly well in the included documentation. But you should know that of the things that sets the Lightning Trigger apart from many others is its ability to put your camera in the “shutter half pressed” mode, which greatly reduces shutter lag (see below). But that also means that connecting the Trigger will probably disable your LCD replay, so you won’t be able to review your captures without disconnecting—a simple but sometimes inconvenient task. You also probably won’t be able to adjust your exposure with the Lightning Trigger connected.
The Lightning Trigger documentation promises a range of at least a 20 mile, and after using mine at the Grand Canyon for years, I’ve seen nothing that causes me to question that—if anything, without actually testing it, I’d guess that its range is at least 30 miles. The LT documentation also says you can expect the sensor to fire at lightning that’s not necessarily in front of you, or lightning you can’t see at all, which I will definitely confirm. For every click with lightning in my camera’s field of view, I get many clicks caused by lightning I didn’t see, or that were outside my camera’s field of view. But when visible lightning does fire somewhere in my composition, I estimate that the Lightning Trigger clicked the shutter at least 95 percent of the time (that is, even though I got lots of false positives, the Lightning Trigger missed very few bolts it should have detected). Of these successful clicks, I actually captured lightning in at least 2/3 of the frames.
The misses are a function of the timing between lightning and camera—sometimes the lightning is just too fast for the camera’s shutter lag. In general, the more violent the storm, the greater the likelihood of bolts of longer duration, and multiple strokes that are easier to capture. And my success rate has increased significantly since switching from a Canon 5DIII to the much faster Sony Alpha bodies (more on this in the Shutter Lag section).
The Lightning Trigger documentation recommends shutter speeds between 1/4 and 1/20 second—shutter speeds faster than 1/20 second risk completing the exposure before all of the secondary strokes fire; slower shutter speeds tend to wash out the lightning. To achieve daylight shutter speeds between 1/4 and 1/20 second, I use a polarizer and usually set my ISO to 50 and aperture to f/16 or smaller. Of course exposure values will vary with the amount of light available, and you may not need such extreme settings when shooting into an extremely dark sky. The two stops of light lost to a polarizer helps a lot, and 4- or 6-stop neutral density filter is even better with fairly bright skies (but if you’re using a neutral density filter, try to avoid shutter speeds longer than 1/4 second).
Shutter lag
Lightning is fast, really, really fast, so the faster your camera’s shutter responds after getting the command to fire, the more success you’ll have. The delay between the click instruction (whether from your finger pressing the shutter button, a remote release, or a lightning sensor) and the shutter firing is called “shutter lag.”
In general, interchangeable lens cameras (mirrorless and DSLR) have the fastest shutter lag. But even with an ILC, it’s surprising how much shutter lag varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, and even between models from the same manufacturer.
Ideally, your camera’s shutter lag should be 60 milliseconds (.06 seconds) or faster, but 120 milliseconds (.12 seconds) is usually fast enough. Most of the top cameras from Sony, Nikon, and Canon are fast enough—currently, Sonys are fastest, Nikon is a close second, and Canon is third.
And shutter lag can vary with the manufacturer’s model: While my Sony a7RIV may be the fastest camera out there, my original a7R was unusably slow, so you need to check your model’s shutter lag.
Unfortunately, shutter lag isn’t usually in the manufacturers’ specifications. The best source I’ve found is the “Pre-focused” time in the Performance tab of the camera reviews at Imaging Resource.
Other equipment
In addition to a lightning sensor and fast camera, you’ll need:
- Solid tripod and head: Don’t even think about trying to photograph lightning hand-held. And contrary to popular belief, a carbon fiber tripod is no safer than an aluminum tripod.
- Rain gear that keeps you dry from head-to-toe
- Umbrella (a.k.a., Wile E. Coyote Lightning Rod) to shield your camera and lightning sensor (many sensors, including the Lightning Trigger, aren’t waterproof) while you compose and wait in the rain. The umbrella is for when you’re photographing storm cells at a great distance, such as on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the lighting is across the canyon. Obviously, when the lightning gets within 10 miles, put the umbrella down and run for cover.)
- Lens hood to shield some of the raindrops that could mar the front element of your lenses
- Neutral density filter and/or polarizer to slow shutter speed into the ideal range (1/4 – 1/20 second)
- Garbage bag (my choice) or rainproof camera jacket (haven’t found one I like) to keep your camera and sensor dry during a downpour
- Extra lightning sensor batteries: Better safe than sorry
- Extra memory cards: When a storm is very close or active, your lightning sensor could detect 20 or 30 strikes per minute (even when little or no lightning is visible to the eye)
- Infrared remote to test your Lightning Trigger; I sometimes borrow the remote from my hotel room, but the Apple TV remote works great and is extremely compact (fits nicely into the Lightning Trigger pouch)
- Towel
Lightning app
I’ve used a few lightning apps, but I finally think I’ve found one worthy of recommending: My Lightning Tracker. I have the “pro” version, which just means I paid a few dollars so I don’t have to see ads. This app has too many useful features to list here, but the most important thing it does is give me a good idea where the lightning is firing now (as long as I have a cellular or wifi connection), and how far away it is. It will also alert me of any strikes within a user-specified radius. It’s easy to use and seems to be reliable.
Getting the shot
Even if you can photograph lightning from your front porch, it’s usually best to pick a nice scene, then monitor the weather so you can be there to capture lightning with a great foreground. I strongly recommend that you scout these lightning scenes in advance, not just for possible compositions, but for safe places to set up, escape routes, and a place to retreat to if the lightning gets too close. I try never to shoot more than a quick sprint from my car.
Once you’re there, don’t wait until you see lightning before setting up your gear. If the sky looks even a little promising, get everything ready: tripod out, camera and lens mounted, lightning sensor attached. Then test your lightning sensor to make sure it fires your camera—I can’t tell you how easy it is to overlook one little thing and wonder why the lightning is firing but your camera isn’t. I test my Lightning Triggers, with a TV remote, or with the flash from my iPhone camera.
As I said earlier, the trickiest part of lightning photography is getting the right shutter speed. Too fast and you risk missing all of the strokes; too long and you risk washing out the lightning. My target shutter speed is usually 1/8 second, +/- 1/8 second—long enough to include multiple pulses, but not so long that I risk washing out the lightning.
When the sky is relatively bright, dropping to 1/20 second can help the lightning stand out better than 1/8 second, but risks losing secondary strikes. Conversely, when the sky is extremely dark and the lightning is firing like crazy, extending to 1/4 second might increase your chances for capturing multiple pulses.
Even with a polarizer on, getting the shutter speed to my sweet spot usually requires dropping to ISO 50 and stopping down to f/16 or smaller. In these situations, a neutral density filter is a big help, but take care not to let the shutter speed go longer than necessary.
Lightning is most likely to strike in or near the gray curtains that hang beneath dark clouds (clearly recognizable as distant rain)—not only near the center, but often on the fringe or just outside. And the darkest and tallest clouds are usually the most likely to fire lightning. If you’re in the storm that you’re photographing, you’re too close.
The best lens for lightning is usually a midrange zoom, such as a 24-70 or 24-105. If you find yourself reaching for your 16-35 (or wider), you’re too close.
I generally start fairly wide to increase my margin for error (to avoid missing a bolt just outside my frame), but once I’m sure I’ve captured some good strikes, I often tighten my composition. While this narrower field of view can reduce the number of frames with lightning, the ones I get are much larger in the frame.
Here are a few more composition points to consider:
- Identify the most likely lightning cell and find the best composition that includes it.
- The more resolution you have, the looser you can compose, then crop to the best composition later.
- Don’t include too much room above the lightning—the most frequent rookie mistake I see is too much sky/clouds in the frame. I like my lightning bolts to originate just below the top of my frame.
- The second most frequent rookie mistake I see is lightning cut off at the top. Note the height from which the lightning originates and try to include enough cloud to get the stroke’s origin point. And if you’re really wide and still can’t get all the lightning, run! (Like I did after the image below.)
- Don’t forget to try some vertical compositions.
Lightning Explosion, Oza Butte, Grand Canyon North Rim
There’s a lot of standing around while photographing lightning, but storms move, so the more you can keep your eyes on the sky (instead of your phone), the better you’ll be at keeping lightning in your frame as the storm moves, and knowing when the activity is picking up or winding down. The light can change by several stops as the storm moves, intensifies, or winds down, so check your exposure frequently. And monitor your surroundings for active cells moving up behind you.
Be aware that electrical storms can move quite quickly, and more than one cell can be active in a given area, so monitor the sky closely—not just the storm you’re photographing, but scan for potential cells that could be sneaking up on you. Sometimes this simply means adjusting your composition to account for shifting lightning; other times it means retreating to the car if the cell threatens your location. No shot is worth your life.
One final note: If you check my exposure settings, you’ll see that my shutter speed here was .4 seconds, well outside the 1/20-1/4 second range I suggest. But if you look at the other settings, you’ll see that I’d opened up to f/7.1, and had cranked my ISO to 400, an indication that twilight was settling in. Successful lightning photograph is all about contrast, and the darker the sky, the better the bolt stands out, even in a longer exposure. Had we stayed past dark (and lived), we could have jettisoned the Lighting Triggers and used multi-second exposures.
Join and me in my next Grand Canyon Monsoon Photo Workshop
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A Lightning Gallery
Click an image for a closer look and slide show. Refresh the window to reorder the display.
Road Trip (in the Time of Coronavirus)
Posted on July 26, 2020
Painted Sunset, Mather Point, Grand Canyon
Sony a7RIV
Sony 12-24 G
1.3 seconds
F/11
ISO 100
With the exception of a couple of recent up-and-back trips to photograph Comet NEOWISE (8 hours of driving for 1-2 hours of photography), photography-wise I have been pretty much homebound since March. I’d been keeping my fingers crossed that things would stabilize enough for me to do my Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshops in August, but two weeks ago circumstances forced me to reschedule them to next year. After losing my Grand Canyon raft trip to COVID-19 in May, I suddenly faced the prospect of a year without my Grand Canyon fix. Could that really happen?
Nope. Since my August Grand Canyon workshops count on the Southwest summer monsoon to deliver the lightning and rainbows everyone signs up for, I always monitor the monsoon conditions in Arizona—not just in the week leading up to my workshops, but all summer and quite obsessively (I know I can’t control the weather, but I can’t help rooting for ideal conditions, not unlike a sports fan rooting for my favorite team). So I knew that the monsoon was really late this year—it still hadn’t arrived by mid-July. But a few days after losing this year’s workshops, I saw signs of monsoon activity at the Grand Canyon, and within two days I was on the road.
The negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic is undeniable and extreme. But I can also say that it’s also not without its small perks—after losing 8 workshops to the pandemic, I am happy to take whatever consolations COVID wants to offer. In this case, with two days’ notice, I was able to snag four nights at a hotel about 300 yards from the South Rim for a ridiculously small sum.
My brother Jay and I hit the road for the South Rim Wednesday morning (Mom still makes me bring my little brother wherever I go*), visions of lightning and comets dancing in our heads. Thirteen hours later, we were pulling into our hotel in the dark.
Travel in the time of Coronavirus is not without its challenges—some beyond our control, others self-imposed (to avoid being a CDC statistic). Masks are mandatory in public (it’s the law, but also just plain common sense), and bathroom breaks need to be strategized because most roadside dining options are drive-thru only—I’ve learned never to pass a roadside rest area. (Note: The person who invents public restroom technology that can be operated entirely with elbows will make a fortune.) And at the hotel, there’s no daily maid service—they do a thorough cleaning after each guest leaves, and keep the room empty for a couple of days before the next person checks in.
There are also a lot dining changes here at the Grand Canyon. Unlike California, which is take-out only, there are restaurants open here at the park, including at our hotel. But Jay and I made a conscious decision to avoid eating out, and brought everything we need to prepare all over our meals. Breakfast and dinner are in the room, and lunch is at whatever spectacular Grand Canyon vista we find ourselves at when we get hungry.
I’ve visited the Grand Canyon in every season, but I’ve never seen it this empty. That doesn’t mean that it’s empty-empty, but there’s plenty of parking at every vista point, and social distancing is never a problem. Nevertheless, even when outside, we have masks with us at all times and don them when people are nearby. And with just a few exceptions, our fellow visitors have been similarly respectful of the situation.
The bottom line is, I feel like we’ve been able to pull this trip off with minimal risk to our health and others’. But what about the photography? I thought you’d never ask.
We’ve seen lots of clouds and lightning, and had two beautiful Comet NEOWISE shoots, but the image I’m sharing here is from Friday night’s sunset. We’d ended up at Mather Point because we were beat after a day of chasing lightning and Mather is easy, but also because when I saw clear western horizon and these clouds to the east, I wanted a spot with a view opposite the sun. Sometimes things just work out.
Photographing sunset is a different mindset than lightning photography because with lightning, the lightning bolt is the focal point and too much foreground and sky can be a distraction. For a nice sunset, I like to feature a strong foreground with lots of sky.
The canyon walls were already starting to catch fire when we arrived, so I took the first foreground subject I found. What drew me was the tree, but I was soon drawn to the pocked limestone and small pool of rainwater.I started with a Sony 16-35 GM lens on my Sony a7RIV, but to really emphasize the foreground and what looked like it was going to be a spectacular sky, I switched to my Sony 12-24 G lens.
Often when the light and color is changing fast I pick a single composition and work small variations until the show is over. But this evening I was a little more active, moving all around my perch to change up foreground/background relationships (when the foreground is this close, shifting just a few feet can make a big difference), and never spending more than one or two clicks on a single composition. For example, by moving from one side of the tree to the other, I was able to put it on the left or right side of my frame, and I did it both ways.
Here I put the tree on the right, taking care not to block Wotan’s Throne and Vishnu Temple in the distance. Balancing the tree and monuments were the limestone, pool, and canyon on the left. The sky just speaks for itself. At 14mm and f/11, depth of field wasn’t a huge concern—for this frame I focused about 1/3 of the way along the cliff edge on the left.
One final observation: The serpentine scar angling across the center of the frame is the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, home of the canyon’s best (biggest) rapids, and some of my very best Grand Canyon memories.
Monsoon Madness (Images of Monsoons Past)
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
Remembering my Dad
Posted on July 19, 2020
Comet NEOWISE and the Big Dipper Above El Capitan, Taft Point, Yosemite
Sony a7RIV
Sony 20mm f/1.8 G
20 seconds
F/1.8
ISO 12800
My dad would have turned 90 today. We lost him 16 years ago, but I have no doubt that he would still be going strong if Alzheimer’s hadn’t taken over. I have always been grateful for Dad’s love, gentle discipline, wisdom, advice, and laughs (especially the laughs), but it takes being a parent to fully appreciate our own parents’ love, and their influence on the adults we become.
Dad was a United Methodist minister who literally practiced what he preached. In 1965, when Martin Luther King issued a plea for clergy to join him on his voting rights march to Montgomery, Dad borrowed money and flew across the country to join Dr. King in Selma, Alabama (where he was on national TV getting arrested).
His was an inclusive, Jesus-centric theology that respected all religions and people: I remember him opening his pulpit to the local rabbi one Sunday morning, then reciprocating the following Saturday with a sermon of his own at the synagogue. Dad welcomed everyone into his churches, and became an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights (before the acronym made it into popular culture). He frequently provided odd-jobs around the church to people who were down on their luck, and I lost track of the number of homeless people, including families with young children, we housed while they tried to get back on their feet.
In addition to the values he instilled, so many of the things that define my personality are directly attributable to my dad’s influence. My positive spirit, sense of humor, and love for sports were absolutely modeled by Dad. And when asked how I became a photographer, the instant answer has always been that my dad was a serious amateur photographer whose 80-hour work week offered too little time to pursue his passion, so he made up for lost time on our summer family vacations. So frequent were the photo stops, I grew up believing that a camera was just a standard outdoor accessory.
But I think his influence on my photography goes deeper than that. More than simply modeling camera use, Dad instilled in me his appreciation of nature’s beauty, and his longing for its soothing qualities. I realize now, because I see it in myself, that it’s not simply photography that dad loved, he was motivated by an insatiable desire to record and share the people and places he loved.
On a minister’s budget, our family summer vacations were, without exception, camping trips—always tent-camping, though in the later years we splurged on a used, very basic tent trailer (no kitchen, bathroom, or any of the other luxuries available in today’s tent trailers). These vacations usually took advantage of the mountain scenery within a few hours of our California home (we were just as close to the ocean, but our vacations were always in the mountains), but every few years we (Dad, Mom, my two brothers, and I) hit the road for a longer camping trip. Especially memorable were the full month we camped all the way across the United States and back, and a multi-week camping adventure into and around the Canadian Rockies.
Of our more frequently visited destinations, Yosemite was the clear favorite. Marveling at the Firefall from Camp Curry and Glacier Point, waiting in lawn chairs with hundreds of fellow tourists at the Yosemite garbage dump for the bears to arrive for their evening meal (really), rising in the dark for a fishing expedition to Tuolumne Meadows, family hikes up the Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada Falls, are just a few of the memories that I realize in hindsight formed the bedrock of my Yosemite connection.
Here’s my dad’s Half Dome Rainbow, captured on a summer afternoon in the mid-sixties.
My favorite Dad photography story happened when I was about ten. It involves an electrical storm atop Sentinel Dome, and his desire to photograph a lightning bolt, a desire so great that it trumped common sense. As his ignorant but trusting assistant, to keep his camera dry I stretched high to extend an umbrella above Dad’s head. (In his defense, as Californians, the novelty of lightning obscured a full comprehension of its dangers.) We didn’t get the lightning, and more importantly, it didn’t get us. But that’s not the end of the story.
After risking our lives on Sentinel Dome, the family ended up at Glacier Point, just down the road. Dad had returned to tourist mode as we browsed the shop at Glacier Point Lodge, no doubt seeking souvenirs that would fit our meager budget. But when a vivid rainbow appeared out of nowhere to arc across the face of Half Dome, Dad was ready with his camera still draped around his neck. Watching Dad’s excitement, better than any souvenir, this felt as if God was giving him a much deserved, “I got your back.”
I love you, Dad.
About this image
Comet NEOWISE and the Big Dipper Over El Capitan, Taft Point, Yosemite
I’ve written recently about my love of astronomy that dates back to when I was 10 years old. While my memory isn’t complete, I do know that not long after I expressed an interest in something astronomical (which could have been as simple as asking a question at dinner), my dad presented me with a used telescope gifted to him by a Kiwanis friend who was a serious amateur astronomer. I have no knowledge of the specifics, but I know my dad well enough to know that my simple query was enough to prod him to ask his astronomer friend for guidance that might fuel my interest, which no doubt led to the gift of this mothballed telescope that became the catalyst for my relationship with the night sky.
Of course photographing celestial objects requires some cooperation from Mother Nature. But one of the things photographer friends seem to resent me for is my good photography luck: the clouds that part just as the moon rises, the snowstorm that arrives just as a workshop starts (that’s good if you’re a photographer), the rainbow that appears out of nowhere.
My brother Jay and I take many photo trips together, and he seems blessed with similar luck. On our photo trips, sometimes we talk about Dad, and sometimes we don’t, but he’s always with us. Often it feels to Jay and I that Dad is watching over us, pulling whatever strings he can to deliver something special.
In the last ten days, Jay and I have made two trips to Yosemite to photograph Comet NEOWISE. On the first trip we were surprised by how visible NEOWISE was to the naked eye, as if its brightness had been cranked up a couple of magnitudes for our visit to Glacier Point. And Venus’s proximity to Half Dome was another an unexpected gift.
On our trip to Yosemite last Thursday afternoon, I had one eye on the road and another eye on the clouds obscuring the entire Sierra range. Would we be shut out entirely? I needn’t have worried. When we pulled into the trailhead parking area the clouds had started to clear, and by the time we’d finished the one-mile hike out to Taft Point, they had all but vanished.
Like the proverbial elephant that can’t be fully seen up close, El Capitan is so massive that from Yosemite Valley it looks completely different depending on where you view it from. One of the things I like most about Taft Point is its elevated, more distant view that offers a more complete perspective of the world’s largest granite monolith. So as I waited for the darkness to reveal the comet, I took some time to drink in the view and appreciate El Capitan.
About 30 minutes after sunset I started getting serious about locating Comet NEOWISE. I knew this shoot would pose some problems I hadn’t had to deal with for the Glacier Point NEOWISE shoot a week earlier. First, the comet was more faint, but I didn’t know how much: would we still be able to see it without aid, or would it only appear in our images? And second, there would be no moon to illuminate El Capitan and Yosemite Valley.
Again, there was no need to worry because things always seem to work out for me (thanks, Dad). NEOWISE, though noticeably fainter, was still clearly visible. Not only that, it had developed a magnificent ion tail (the faint spike above the fanned out primary tail). And the extra darkness? The several stops of exposure it forced me to add, while introducing a fair amount of noise, only made the comet stand out more against the dark sky.
As with the Glacier Point shoot, I worked two bodies. I quickly found that a vertical composition with my new Sony 20mm f/1.8 G lens was wide enough to include all of El Capitan, Comet NEOWISE, and the Big Dipper. Pretty cool. By the time the night was over, I’d used every one of the five lenses I packed.
Jay and I stayed until about 11 p.m., then made the walk back in the moonless darkness, most grateful for bright flashlights and perfectly spaced reflectors mounted on trees lining the trail. After a four hour drive, I finally made it to bed at about 4:30 a.m. and managed to sleep for five hours, visions of comets dancing in my head.
Such a spectacular night. Thanks, Dad.
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The Many Views of El Capitan
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
Breathtaking Comet NEOWISE
Posted on July 12, 2020
Comet NEOWISE and Venus, Half Dome from Glacier Point, Yosemite
Sony a7RIV
Sony 24-105 G
10 seconds
F/5.6
ISO 3200
When I was ten, my best friend Rob and I spent most of our daylight hours preparing for our spy careers—crafting and exchanging coded messages, surreptitiously monitoring classmates, and identifying “secret passages” that would allow us to navigate our neighborhood without being observed. But after dark our attention turned skyward. That’s when we’d set up my telescope (a castoff generously gifted by an astronomer friend of my dad) on Rob’s front lawn to scan the heavens in the hope that we might discover something: a supernova, comet, black hole, UFO—it didn’t really matter.
Our celestial discoveries, while not Earth-changing, were personally significant. Through that telescope we saw Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, and the changing phases of Venus. We also learned to appreciate the vastness of the universe with the insight that, despite their immense size, stars never appeared larger than a pinpoint, no matter how much magnification we threw at them.
Here I am with the fifth grade science project that started it all. (This is only half of the creative team—somewhere there’s a picture that includes Rob.)
To better understand what we saw, Rob and I turned to astronomy books. Pictures of planets, galaxies, and nebula amazed us, but we were particularly drawn to the comets: Arend-Roland, Ikeya–Seki, and of course the patriarch of comets, Halley’s Comet (which wouldn’t return until 1986, an impossible wait that might as well have been infinity). With their brilliant comas and sweeping tails, it was difficult to imagine that anything that beautiful could be real. When the opportunity came to do a project to enter in our school’s Science Fair, comets were an easy choice. And while we didn’t set the world on fire with our project presentation, Rob and I were awarded a yellow ribbon, good enough to land us a spot in the San Joaquin County Fair.
The next milestone in my comet obsession occurred a few years later, after my family had moved to Berkeley and baseball had taken over my life. One chilly winter morning my dad woke me and urged me outside to view what I now know was Comet Bennett. Mesmerized, my smoldering comet fascination flamed instantly, expanding to include all things celestial, and stayed with me through high school (when I wasn’t playing baseball).
I can trace my decision to enter college with an astronomy major all the way back to my early interest in the night sky in general, and comets in particular. I stuck with the astronomy major for several semesters, until the (unavoidable) quantification of magnificent concepts sapped the joy from me.
Though I went on to pursue other interests, my affinity for astronomy hadn’t been dashed, and comets in particular remained special. Of course with affection comes disappointment: In 1973 Comet Kohoutek broke my heart, a failure that somewhat prepared me for Halley’s anticlimax in 1986. By the time Halley’s arrived, word had come down that it was poorly positioned for its typical display (“the worst viewing conditions in 2,000 years”), that it would be barely visible this time around (but just wait until 2061!). Nevertheless, venturing far from the city lights one moonless January night, I found great pleasure locating (with much effort) Halley’s faint smudge in Aquarius.
After many years with no naked-eye comets of note, 1996 arrived with the promise of two great comets. While cautiously optimistic, Kohoutek’s scars prevented me from getting sucked in by the media frenzy. So imagine my excitement when, in early 1996, Comet Hyakutake briefly approached the brightness of Saturn, with a tail stretching more than twenty degrees (forty times the apparent width of a full moon). But as beautiful as it was, Hyakutake proved to be a mere warm-up for Comet Hale-Bopp, which became visible to the naked eye in mid-1996 and remained visible until December 1997—an unprecedented eighteen months. By spring of 1997 Hale-Bopp had become brighter than Sirius (the brightest star in the sky), its tail approaching 50 degrees. I was in comet heaven.
Things quieted considerably comet-wise after Hale-Bopp. Then, in 2007, Comet McNaught caught everyone off-guard, intensifying unexpectedly to briefly outshine Sirius, trailing a thirty-five degree, fan-shaped tail. But because of its proximity to the sun, Comet McNaught had a very small window of visibility in the Northern Hemisphere and was easily lost in the bright twilight—it didn’t become anywhere near the media event Hale-Bopp did. I only learned about it on the last day it would be easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere. With little time to prepare, I grabbed my camera and headed to the foothills east of Sacramento, where I managed to capture a few faint images and barely pick the comet out of the twilight with my unaided eyes. McNaught saved its best show for the Southern Hemisphere, where it became one of the most beautiful comets ever to grace our skies (google Comet McNaught and you’ll see what I mean).
After several years of comet crickets, in 2013 we were promised two spectacular comets, PanSTARRS and ISON. A fortuitous convergence of circumstances allowed me to photograph PanSTARRS from the summit of Haleakala on Maui—just 3 degrees from a setting crescent moon, it was invisible to my eye, but beautiful to my camera. Comet ISON on the other hand, heralded as the most promising comet since Hale-Bopp, pulled an Icarus and and disintegrated after flying too close to the sun.
Since 2013 Earth has been in a naked-eye comet slump. Every once in a while one will tease us, then fizzle. In fact, 2020 has already seen two promising comets flop: Comets Atlas and Swan. So when Comet NEOWISE was discovered in March of this year, no one got too excited. But by June I started hearing rumblings that NEOWISE might just sneak into the the naked-eye realm. Then we all held our breath while it passed behind the sun on July 2.
Shortly after NEOWISE’s perihelion, astronomers confirmed that it had survived, and images started popping up online. The first reports were that NEOWISE was around magnitude 2 (about as bright as Polaris, the North Star) and showing up nicely in binoculars and photos. Unfortunately, NEOWISE was so close to the horizon that it was washed-out to the naked eye by the pre-sunrise twilight glow.
Based on my experience with PanSTARRS, a comet I’d captured wonderfully when I couldn’t see it in the twilight glow, I started making plans to photograph Comet NEOWISE. But I needed to find a vantage point with a good view of the northeast horizon, not real easy in Sacramento, where we’re in the shadow of the Sierra just east of town. After doing a little plotting, I decided my best bet would be to break my stay-away-from-Yosemite-in-summer vow and try it from Glacier Point. Glacier Point is elevated enough to offer a pretty clear view of the northeast horizon, and from there Half Dome and the comet would align well enough to easily include both in my frame.
While Yosemite is currently under COVID restrictions that require reservations (sold out weeks in advance) to enter, I have a CUA (Commercial Use Authorization that allows me to guide photo workshops) that gives me access to the park if I follow certain guidelines. So, after checking with my NPS Yosemite CUA contact to make sure all my permit boxes were checked, my brother Jay and I drove to the park on Thursday afternoon, got a room just outside the park, and went to bed early.
The alarm went off at 2:45 the next morning, and by 2:55 we were on the road to Glacier Point. After narrowly averting one self-inflicted catastrophe (in the absolute darkness, I missed a turn I’ve been taking for more than 40 years), by 4:00 we were less than a mile from Glacier Point and approaching Washburn Point, the first view of Half Dome on Glacier Point Road. Unable to resist the urge to peek (but with no expectation of success), I quickly glanced in that direction and instantly saw through my windshield Comet NEOWISE hanging above Mt. Watkins, directly opposite Tenaya Canyon from Half Dome. I knew there’d be a chance NEOWISE would be naked-eye visible, but I never dreamed it would be this bright.
Everything after that is a blur (except my images, thankfully). Jay and I rushed out to the railed vista at the far end of Glacier Point and were thrilled to find it completely empty. We found Half Dome beautifully bookended by Comet NEOWISE on the left, and brilliant Venus on the right. I set up two tripods, one for my Sony a7RIV and 24-105 G lens, and one for my Sony a7RIII and Sony 100-400 GM lens. Shut out of all the locations I love to photograph by COVID-19, I hadn’t taken a serious picture since March, so I composed and focused carefully to avoid screwing something up. The image I share here is one of the first of the morning, taken with my a7RIV and 24-105.
By 4:30 or so (about 80 minutes before sunrise) the horizon was starting to brighten, but the comet stayed very prominent and photogenic until at about 4:50 (about an hour before sunrise). When we wrapped up at around 5:00, NEOWISE was nearly washed out to the unaided eye; while our cameras were still picking it up, we knew that the best part of the show was over.
It’s these experiences that so clearly define for me the reason I’m a photographer. Because I’ve always felt that photography, more than anything else, needs to make the photographer happy (however he or she defines happiness), many years ago I promised myself that I’d only photograph what I want to photograph, that I’d never take a picture just because I thought it would earn me money or acclaim. My own photographic happiness comes from nature because I grew up outdoors (okay, not literally, but outdoors is where my best memories have been made) and have always been drawn to the natural world—not merely its sights, but the natural processes and forces that, completely independent of human intervention and influence, shape our physical world.
I think that explains why, rather than settle for pretty scenes, I try to capture the interaction of dynamic natural processes with those scenes. The moon and stars, the northern lights, sunrise and sunset color, weather events like rainbows and lightning—all of these phenomena absolutely fascinate me, and the images I capture are just a small part of my relationship with them. I can’t imagine photographing something that doesn’t move me enough to understand it as thoroughly as I can, and enjoy learning about my subjects as much as I enjoy photographing them.
The converse of that need to know my subjects is a need to photograph those things that drive me to understand them. Most of the subjects that draw me are relatively easy to capture with basic preparation, some effort, and a little patience. But the relative rarity of a few phenomena make photographing them a challenge. This is especially true of certain astronomical events. I’m thinking specifically about the total solar eclipse that I finally managed to photograph in 2017, and the northern lights, which finally found my sensor last year. But comets have proven even more elusive, and while I’ve seen a few in my life, and even photographed a couple, I’ve never had what I’d label an “epic” comet experience that allowed me to combine a beautiful comet with a worthy foreground. Until this week. And I’m one happy dude.
Comet Class
Comets in General
I want to tell you how to photograph Comet NEOWISE, but first I’m going to impose my personal paradigm and explain comets.
A comet is a ball of ice and dust a few miles across (more or less), typically orbiting the sun in an eccentric elliptical orbit: Imagine a circle stretched way out of shape by grabbing one end and pulling–that’s what a comet’s orbit looks like. Looking down on the entire orbit, you’d see the sun tucked just inside one extreme end of the ellipse. (Actually, some comets’ orbits are parabolic, which means they pass by once and then move on to ultimately exit our solar system.)
The farther a comet is from the sun the slower it moves, so a comet spends the vast majority of its life in the frozen extremities of the solar system. Some periodic comets take thousands or millions of years to complete a single orbit; others complete their trip in just a few years.
As a comet approaches the sun, stuff starts happening. It accelerates in response to the sun’s increased gravitational pull (but just like the planets, the moon, or the hour hand on a clock, a comet will never move so fast that we’re able to visually discern its motion). And more significantly, increasing solar heat starts melting the comet’s frozen nucleus. Initially this just-released material expands to create a mini-atmosphere surrounding the nucleus; at this point the comet looks like a fuzzy ball when viewed from Earth. As the heat increases, some of the shedding material is set free and dragged away by the solar wind (charged particles) to form a tail that glows with reflected sunlight (a comet doesn’t emit its own light) and always points away from the sun. The composition and amount of material freed by the sun, combined with the comet’s proximity to Earth, determines the brilliance of the display we see. While a comet’s tail gives the impression to some that it’s visibly moving across the sky, a comet is actually about as stationary against the stellar background as the moon and planets—it will remain in one place relative to the stars all night, then appear in a slightly different place the next night.
With millions of comets in our Solar System, it would be natural to wonder why they’re not regular visitors to our night sky. Actually, they are, though most comets are so small, and/or have made so many passes by the sun, that their nucleus has been stripped of reflective material and they just don’t have enough material left to put on much of a show. And many comets don’t get close enough to the sun to be profoundly affected by its heat, or close enough to Earth to stand out.
Most of the periodic comets that are already well known to astronomers have lost so much of their material that they’re too faint to be seen without a telescope. One notable exception is Halley’s Comet, perhaps the most famous comet of all. Halley’s Comet returns every 75 years or so and usually puts on a memorable display. Unfortunately, Halley’s last visit, in 1986, was kind of a dud; not because it didn’t perform, but because it passed so far from Earth that we didn’t have a good view of its performance on that pass.
Comet NEOWISE in particular (and some tips for photographing it)
Comet NEOWISE is a periodic comet with an elliptical orbit that will send it back our way in about 6700+ years. On it’s current iteration, NEOWISE zipped by the sun on July 2 and is on its way back out to the nether reaches of our solar system. The good news is that NEOWISE survived the most dangerous part of its visit, its encounter with the sun. The bad news is that NEOWISE’s intrinsic brightness decreases as it moves away from the sun. But if all goes well, we’ll be able to see it without a telescope, camera, or binoculars for at least a few more weeks. And it doesn’t hurt that until perigee on July 22, NEOWISE is still moving closer to Earth.
Because a comet’s tail always points away from the sun, and NEOWISE is now moving away from the sun, it’s actually following its tail. If you track the comet’s position each night, you’ll see that it rises in the northeast sky before sunrise, which makes it a Northern Hemisphere object (the Southern Hemisphere has gotten the best 21st century comets, so it’s definitely our turn). Each morning NEOWISE will rise a little earlier, placing it farther from the advancing daylight than the prior day, so even if its intrinsic brightness is waning, it should stand out better because it’s in a darker part of the sky. And as a bonus, the moon is waning, so until the new moon on July 21, there will be no moonlight to compete with NEOWISE.
Until now, Comet NEOWISE has been an exclusively early morning object, but that’s about to change as it climbs a little higher each day. Starting tonight (July 12), you might be able to see it shortly after sunset near the northwest horizon, and each night thereafter it will be a little higher in the northwest sky. Your best chance to view Comet NEOWISE in the evening is to find an open view of the northwest sky, far from city lights.
Photographing Comet NEOWISE will require some night photography skill. Since the moon is waning, you won’t have the benefit of moonlight that I had when I photographed the comet in Yosemite on the morning of July 10, when the moon was about 75% full. This won’t be a huge problem if you just want to photograph NEOWISE against the stars, but if you want to include some landscape with it, your best bet may be to stick to silhouettes, or stack multiple exposures, one for the comet and one or more for the foreground.
To photograph it against the starry sky, I recommend a long telephoto to fill the frame as much as possible. If you want to include some landscape, go as wide as necessary, but don’t forget that the wider you go, the smaller the comet becomes. Whatever method you use to focus (even if you autofocus on the comet itself), I strongly recommend that you verify your focus each time you change your focal length. If you choose the multi-exposure blend approach, please, please, please, whatever you do, don’t blend a telephoto NEOWISE image with a wide angle image of the landscape (because I’ll know and will judge you for it).
Camera or not, I strongly encourage you to make an effort to see this rare and beautiful object, because you just don’t know when the next opportunity will arise—it could be next month, or it might not happen again in your lifetime.
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Gifts From Heaven
In Defense of the Tripod
Posted on July 5, 2020
Spring Sunrise, Rowena Crest, Columbia River Gorge
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
Canon 70-200 f/4L
1/10 second
F/8
ISO 800
This is another 6-year-old “brand new” image, just excavated from the depths of my 2014 folder
Photography without compromise
If you think the main reason to use a tripod is to avoid camera-shake, you’re mistaken. In this day of phenomenal high ISO performance and stabilized bodies and lenses, acceptable hand-held sharpness is possible in the vast majority of images. But here’s a reality that’s tough to deny: The steadiest hand-held image will never be sharper than it would have been if it had been properly executed using a sturdy tripod. And that’s not even the best reason to use a tripod.
Each camera has an ideal ISO—the quality of any image that doesn’t use it is compromised, sometimes just slightly, other times a lot. So if hand-holding an images forces you out of your camera’s ideal f-stop to reduce camera shake, you’ve made an unnecessary compromise. “Photographer’s light” (such as sunrise, sunset, and stormy or cloudy weather) only compounds the problem. While most of these compromises can be more or less remedied in post-processing, and many may not show up at all on a fifteen-inch laptop screen or in an 8×10 print, most serious photographers like the option to print their images large—and nothing reveals flaws more than a large print.
Let’s imagine you just got a request for a 24×36 print of the pride of your portfolio—a (hand-held) Yosemite Valley moonrise telephoto, captured at ISO 800 (it looks great in your Flickr gallery)—for the reception area of your mother-in-law’s law firm (a real coup after that whole llama-farm investment fiasco). So what do you tell her when you go to hang it and she asks why it looks “so mushy,” and what’s with all that “sludge in the shadows”? Oops—looks like another Thanksgiving at the kids’ table.
Not only does every camera have an ideal ISO, every scene has an ideal f-stop. Anyone with a camera can snap the lateral (left/right, up/down) dimensions of a scene, but artistic photographers understand that the key to rendering our three-dimensional world in photography’s two-dimensional medium is creating the illusion of the missing dimension, depth, by composing elements throughout the frame, from near to far. Since depth of field is controlled by the f-stop, of all the exposure variables at a landscape photographer’s disposal, f-stop is the least negotiable. In a static scene (as most landscape images are), the tripod removes motion (camera shake) from the equation, allowing you to select the ideal f-stop at your camera’s best ISO.
But what about a scene that’s all on the same plane, where depth isn’t a factor? The f-stop still matters because every lens has a single f-stop that renders the sharpest result. For some lenses the sharpness difference between f-stops is small, for others it’s significant. But it’s always there. So even when DOF isn’t a consideration, I choose my lens’s sharpest f-stop, usually f/5.6-f/11. Some photographers put each lens through extensive testing to determine its sweet spot; I usually go with f/8 or f/11 unless I see clear evidence that a lens is sharper at a different f-stop. I also try to avoid f-stops smaller than f/11 unless the scene requires extra depth—not only do lenses tend to be less sharp at their extreme f-stops, at f-stops smaller than f/11, diffraction starts to rear its ugly head.
The bottom line: By removing camera shake from the equation, a tripod frees you to choose the best f-stop for your composition, without compromise.
An image is not a snap, it’s a process
Still not convinced? Consider also the control a tripod gives to your composition process. Managing the relationship of elements in the frame is usually the single most important compositional decision a photographer can make. Relationships are especially important when you’ve included the front-to-back objects so essential to enhancing the illusion of depth. Photographing on a tripod gives you the time to consider each element in your frame and its relationship to other elements and eliminate distractions, and the flexibility to evaluate and refine until everything’s perfect.
When setting up an image, I try to achieve a sense of visual balance throughout my frame. I think about the path for my viewers’ eyes to follow, and where I want them to pause or land. I consider the elements that will move or stop the eye, and potential distractions that might pull the eye away, and merged elements that rob the scene of depth. With these things in mind, I position myself and frame my composition, identifying the focus point and f-stop for the ideal depth of field. Having my composition frozen in place atop my tripod enables me to make these adjustments deliberately and methodically, and helps me ensure that one tweak here didn’t break something else over there.
After each click, I step back and study the image on the LCD, imagine it framed large and hanging on a wall. I scrutinize my composition for possible composition and depth of field improvements, and check the histogram for exposure problems. With a tripod I can do all this at my pace, taking as much time as necessary, knowing that when I’m ready to make adjustments, the image I just reviewed will be waiting right there in my viewfinder atop my tripod, exactly as I captured it, ready for me to enhance.
And finally
Other benefits of a tripod I’ve almost come to take for granted. For example, I sometimes use graduated neutral density filters but find the holders that screw onto the end of my lens awkward. With a tripod, it’s easy to position my GND and hold it with my fingers during exposure (I don’t even own a filter holder). During long exposures I’ll sometimes move the GND up and down slightly to disguise the transition—also easy on a tripod.
A tripod also makes it easy to use a polarizer to reduce color-robbing glare, something I can do on virtually every daylight shot because unless something in my scene is moving, the two stops of light I lose to a polarizer are irrelevant when I’m on a tripod.
And advanced digital techniques such as image stitching (for panoramas or high resolution capture), HDR (high dynamic range blending of multiple images for exposure management), or focus blending to increase depth of field are all easier on a tripod. As is old-fashioned mirror lock-up to reduce mirror-slap induced vibration. And live-view focusing, the best way to ensure precise focus, is a snap on a tripod (and pretty much impossible hand-held).
For example
Spring Sunrise, Rowena Crest, Columbia River Gorge
There was a lot going on in this scene. I had wildflowers everywhere, the Columbia River, clouds, a freeway, railroad tracks, power lines, and lots of other photographers and wildflower peepers. Organizing all this into a coherent image, including the good stuff and eliminating the distractions, required no small measure of planning and execution.
I’d been wandering the hillsides of the Tom McCall Preserve on the Rowena Crest in the Columbia River Gorge for about an hour, playing with compositions and identifying potential subjects. I could see the potential for a colorful sunrise and wanted to be ready when (if) it happened. I wanted a foreground subject to anchor my frame, and needed to eliminate the freeway, tracks, wires, and people, and finally landed on this spot about 15 minutes before sunrise.
Rather than wait for the color to arrive, I started working on my composition immediately, choosing a height about two feet above the ground—any higher and the power lines would come into view; any lower and the flowers and near cliff (on the left) would merge with the opposite bank. To compress the foreground/background distance, I moved back a little and chose my 70-200 lens, putting the bottom of the frame a few inches below the yellow balsam root to frame the flowers with a little green, and taking care not to cut off any of the large, ear-shaped leaves.
The clouds weren’t very interesting, but I knew that if they colored up they’d add an important layer to my frame, so I made sure to include a strong stripe of clouds across the top of my frame. I liked the nearby sprinkling of lupine and other wildflowers, so I went wide enough to include a few without diluting my primary clump of wildflowers.
The final step was to determine depth of field and focus. To make the flowers’ sharpness stand out even more, I slightly softened the background by dialing to f/8 and choosing a focus point closer than the hyperfocal distance.
Each of these framing decisions were part of an iterative process that took more than a dozen clicks before everything was just as I wanted it. Because I was working on a tripod, I was able to click a frame, evaluate all of the variables, and make small refinements. The tripod also gave me the luxury of straightening to unkink my back between clicks. When I was sure everything was right, I stood and waited (fingers crossed) for the color. When the sky did finally color-up, an intermittent breeze came with it, forcing me to compromise my ISO (ISO 800) to freeze the flowers’ movement. But because I was on a tripod, I was able to stand and watch the scene confident in the knowledge that my composition was fixed, and click my remote release whenever there was a lull.
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Think Fast
Posted on June 21, 2020
Almost Heaven, Big Dipper Above the Clouds, Big Sur
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
Canon 24-105 f/4L
25 seconds
F/4
ISO 400
In virtually all aspects of my life, “think fast” is rarely my default response. Rather, given a choice, I prefer evaluation and analysis to instant reaction. This think-first mindset might also explain why my favorite sport is baseball (which many consider “too slow”), and why I prefer chess and Scrabble to video games (the last video game I played was Pong). So I guess it should be no surprise that, as a landscape photographer, my subjects don’t move. I’m much happier working a scene comfortable in the knowledge that when I’m finally ready, it will still be there.
But nature isn’t truly static, and sometimes I don’t have the luxury of analysis. A few years ago while helping Don Smith with his summer Big Sur workshop, we’d spent most of an afternoon and evening working in the fog (it was billed as a fog workshop). Driving home after a gray sunset, the fog showed no signs of clearing so Don and scrapped the group’s night shoot plans. But climbing toward Hurricane Point, the car suddenly broke through the fog and the world completely changed. We were above the clouds, whose undulating tops seemed to stretch to the horizon where a fading stripe of orange was the only evidence of the retreating day. In the darkening blue sky, the stars had just started to pop into view, with more seeming to appear with every passing second.
Change of plans: Screeching to a halt at the Hurricane Point vista, everyone piled out and raced to set up their gear. As much as I like to take my time when I arrive at a scene, something told me to hurry and once I got to the edge of the overlook and peered over, I saw why. The fog that looked so static and serene from a distance was in fact a roiling soup charging up the steep slope. With a few advance fragments of cloud scooting across my view, I frantically loaded my camera onto my tripod. To save time, I stuck with the lens that was already mounted on my body, pointed in the direction of the Big Dipper, and quickly focused on the stars. This was pre-mirrorless, so without the pre-capture histogram, I just guessed on the exposure. Fortunately my focus and exposure choices were right-on because this was the only shot I got before that foreground fog bank engulfed the world in clouds—score one for instant reaction.
The value of some images can transcend their aesthetic appeal—sometimes they offer lessons as well. For me, this is one of those images. In my workshops I see photographers who are deliberate like me, and others who are constantly in motion. What I’ve come to realize is, wherever we might naturally fall on the deliberate<->reactive continuum, it benefits our photography to sometimes shake things up and come at a scene from a different place than we usually do. I learned from this night’s experience, and others like it, to trust my instincts more. I know I’ll never not be one to take time to pause and consider a scene because that’s how I’m wired. But now when I arrive at a scene, I try to start with the more instinctive shot—even if that turns out not to be exactly the image I end up with, that alternate perspective often sends me down a completely different path than I’d have otherwise taken.
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In a Fog
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
Random Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon
Posted on June 14, 2020
Sunset Accent, Crescent Moon and Oaks, Sierra Foothills
Sony a7R
Sony/Zeiss 24-70
1/3 second
F/9
ISO 100
Here’s a brand new image that’s nearly six years old. Brand new because I processed it for the first time just yesterday; six years old because I found it after loading my pre-Lightroom raw files from 2014 into Lightroom, something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and I finally ran out of reasons not to do it. Before 2015 I did all my raw processing in Adobe Camera Raw, which worked fine as far as individual image processing was concerned, but also made it pretty easy for things to get out of control on my hard-disk because there was no underlying organization to my import process. Want proof? I’m actually missing about a month’s worth of images from 2013—I know because I have several processed jpegs from that span for which I have no originals. Sigh.
This is also just my 282nd image after switching to Sony mirrorless in the fall of 2014. While I have no specific memories of this evening (there have been many, many like this, as you’ll see in the gallery), I imagine that I was still struggling with the Sony interface—partly because mirrorless was a new trick for this old dog, and partly because the original a7R’s interface pretty much sucked (a problem that has been incrementally, and now completely, addressed in succeeding models). But it was fun processing this “old” image and recalling why I was able to forgive the lousy interface and abysmal battery life (also addressed) of the a7R: man, even right out of the gate that Sony dynamic range just doesn’t quit.
Skeptics might might look at this image and think I added the moon because it appears to be in front of the clouds. Anyone who has been in one of my workshops, or who knows me even just a little, knows I don’t do that. But for the skeptics in the audience, let me assure you that it is indeed possible for clouds to catch sunset color while still being translucent enough for the moon to shine through (you can actually see other examples below).
It saddens me that photography has reached a point where every beautiful, or interesting, or revealing image is (often justifiably, I’m afraid) scrutinized with a cynical eye. Photographers have brought this on themselves with their never-ending quest for more social media Likes, or to make a case for something for which they have no evidence (as we’ve seen in some of the recent news reporting).
After spending a good chunk of my photography life as a color transparency (slides) shooter who was pretty much stuck with whatever came back from the lab, I appreciate the ability to process my images as much as the next photographer. But there’s a continuum with basic processing on one end (there’s no such thing as an unprocessed image, whether you do it yourself or leave the processing to your camera) and Frankenstein hybrids on the other. To me the decision about where to draw the line on the processing continuum is similar to the decision between wearing nice clothes and putting on makeup and resorting to cosmetic surgery (yes, I understand that there are in fact many valid reasons for cosmetic surgery, and that this is not a flawless analogy).
So it really comes down to honesty—a commitment not to deceive. I love nature and want to share my love by portraying my subjects at their absolute best, but I want people’s first thought when they see one of my images to be, “Wow, I need to get out in nature more,” and not, “Wow, what a great photographer, or, “Wow, that’s impossible.” The scene you see in this image really happened, and there’s a photo of it because I put myself in position for the (very predictable) confluence of a new moon hanging above rolling hills dotted with statuesque oaks, plus the fortuitous addition of thin clouds that lingered just long enough to catch sunset color. It helped that I had a camera that could easily handle the difference between the brilliant sky and darkening hills, and enough photographic skill to properly frame and expose the scene. The image itself was remarkably easy to process and required very little digital help. This image is a success if it first helps you realize how beautiful even the simplest foothill scenes are, without being distracted by my skill as a photographer (good or bad), or the processing decisions I made.
A Foothills Gallery
Click an image for a closer look, and to view a slide show.
The View from Space
Posted on June 3, 2020
Let There Be Light, Planet Earth, Solar System, Milky Way (August 21, 2017)
If you follow me on social media, you know that I don’t get political online. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have political opinions, but photography needs to make you happy, and there are already too many unhappy photographers to inject politics into the mix. I’ve also learned, and I have the people I’ve met in my workshops to thank for this, that individuals with completely different social and political beliefs are not idiots, uncaring, morons, crazy, or whatever other pejorative you might be inclined to hurl. They’re good people who arrived at their values and beliefs through a completely different combination of family history, opportunities, life experiences, good/bad fortune, and present circumstances, than you and I have.
But I’m writing this post because yesterday, like millions of others, I shared a completely black image on my Instagram page to show my support for BLM. Not only did I feel like solidarity on the issue of police not killing innocent people is important right now, I also thought, wow, here’s something everyone can agree on. And for the most part I was right—I was thrilled to see the truly diverse support this simple act received, crossing traditional political and social boundaries.
On the other hand, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that this support wasn’t universal. I got a little pushback on my Facebook page (swiftly dealt with—to borrow from the late, great Tom Petty, it’s good to be king), and noticed that the number of followers of my Instagram page, which goes up every day, declined yesterday—from that I can only infer that some people were reflexively unfollowing anyone who posted a black image. To those people, I say good riddance.
Call me an optimist (or naive), but I’m hopeful that the United States has finally reached a tipping point, and real change is in store. So to pivot from politics to photography, I’m sharing this image from the 2017 total eclipse, because nothing in my portfolio expresses my hope better than the instant of sunlight’s return after a total solar eclipse. For those who haven’t had the privilege to witness one (mark your calendars for April 8, 2024), a total solar eclipse is one of those transcendent moments in nature where humans’ insignificance is impossible to deny. I don’t think I’ve ever felt smaller than I did at the instant I clicked this picture.
Because I can’t help but think that so much of our planet’s divisiveness would evaporate if we all had a clearer picture of our place in the Universe, I’m going to close with a few quotes from astronauts, who are uniquely qualified to speak on the subject:
- Anousheh Ansari, the first Iranian in space: “The actual experience exceeds all expectations and is something that’s hard to put to words… It sort of reduces things to a size that you think everything is manageable, all these things that may seem big and impossible… We can do this. Peace on Earth — No problem. It gives people that type of energy, that type of power…”
- Neil Armstrong: “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
- Ron Garan, Shuttle and International Space Station astronaut: “When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile.”
- Edward Gibson, Skylab astronaut: “You see how diminutive your life and concerns are compared to other things In the universe.”
- Jeff Hoffman, Space Shuttle astronaut: “You do, from that perspective, see the Earth as a planet. You see the sun as a star – we see the sun in a blue sky, but up there, you see the sun in a black sky. So, yeah, you are seeing it from the cosmic perspective.”
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
- Nicole Stott, Space Shuttle and ISS astronaut: “We have this connection to Earth. I mean, it’s our home. And I don’t know how you can come back and not, in some way, be changed. It may be subtle. You see differences in different people in their general response when they come back from space. But I think, collectively, everybody has that emblazoned on their memories, the way the planet looks. You can’t take that lightly.”
The View From Earth
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Something new
Posted on May 31, 2020
For many years my website has featured my workshops, while my social media pages (WordPress blog, Instagram, and Facebook) have been where I’ve shared my latest photography. While I originally kept galleries on my Eloquent Images website, I rarely updated them and after a while the website galleries ceased being a reliable reflection of my current work.
About three years ago I redesigned my website, completely changing the interface and removed the galleries entirely, doubling-down on my blog galleries. But when I started hearing from people that they couldn’t find my latest images online, I realized that, even though they’re really easy to find in the galleries right here on my blog, many people don’t take the trouble to look for them—if they don’t see a Galleries option on the website, they just move on. I made a mental note that I need to bring my website galleries back, but between workshops and travel, I never found the time.
Well guess what—suddenly I have time! So a few weeks ago I asked my webmaster to add galleries to my website, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks populating them, and having far more fun than I could have imagined. My webmaster labeled my six galleries Gallery 1, Gallery 2, …, Gallery 6. Hmmm, surely I can do better than that. I thought long and hard about more descriptive names, trying on locations and other similarly prosaic labels, before deciding I need themes to describe my motivations for clicking my shutter.
Backstory
You may or may not know that when I decided to make photography my profession, I promised myself that I’d only photograph what I want to photograph, that I would never take a picture just because I thought it would earn me money. I’d just seen too many miserable photographers earning a living but hating what they do. But since all I want to photograph is nature (which, while universally loved, is not universally purchased), I needed to come up with a way to earn money. I landed on photo workshops, which perfectly leveraged my prior career in technical communications (tech writing, training, and support) and my love for both photography and nature. Not only did this enable me to photograph only what I love, my images turned out to be the perfect intro and marketing tools for my workshops: if you like my images, you’ll probably like my workshops; if you don’t like my images, you probably won’t be happy with my workshops. (Of course I do sell images too, but image sales isn’t an essential part of my business and never motivates me to take a picture.)
Rabbit hole
So I guess it should have been no surprise that thinking about what my gallery themes should be would lead me down this rabbit hole of introspection. Many photographers create spectacular images that reveal the damage humans are doing to our natural world, but I seem to simply be driven to share nature’s beauty, both the obvious and the overlooked. Rather than a conscious choice, this is more an organic outcome of a life spent seeking and finding happiness in the natural world, combined with regular old human nature that causes most of us to find pleasure sharing the things we love most: “Here’s something that makes me happy—I hope it makes you happy too.” Here’s where the rabbit hole led me—I can’t think of a clearer distillation of the things in nature that move me:
- Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
- Color and Light: Sunlight’s interplay with air, land, and water
- Water Like Glass: A Time for Reflection
- It Came from the Sky: Unexpected gifts from above
- In the Flow: Water on the move: Waves, waterfalls, and whitewater
- Celestial Carousel: Sun, Moon, and Stars
These galleries are a work in progress. Assembling them, I quickly realized that many of my images would work in more than one gallery, but I decided not to duplicate any image. Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, my new galleries are more of a summary of my own favorites. But I’m still adding to them, so feel free to suggest additions you think I’ve overlooked. Or simply browse and enjoy.
Gallery Highlights
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Out of this World
Posted on May 25, 2020
Fern Cascade, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino Coast (2012)
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
Canon 70-200 f/4 L
1 second
F/11
ISO 400
On a quiet spring morning you step from the car and are greeted by electric-pink rhododendrons basking in splashes of early sunlight. Your arms prickle at the morning chill, but you wisely decide to leave the sweater behind, closing the door as softly as possible to preserve the peace. At a mostly overgrown gap in the foliage, you part the branches and step onto a dirt track that leads into the forest.
Following the trail a short distance, you realize you’re witnessing a competition for sunlight, each rhododendron spreading and stretching to get its share, but within a few hundred yards your route descends into old-growth redwoods benefiting from a multi-century head-start. These trees tower above everything, intercepting all but a handful of the sun’s rays, and the rhododendrons have surrendered.
As the trail descends further, you feel like you’re moving back in time. Ducking a spider web that spans the trail, you privately celebrate that you’re the first to pass this way today. Down here, the sunlight has to work harder to penetrate the canopy so the chill remains, but now its invigorating tingle propels you forward.
Before rounding a hairpin bend you pause, inhale, and listen. Gradually, what seemed like absolute silence reveals itself to be breeze-induced swish from swaying redwood boughs. Shortly after your steps resume, a bird’s cry warns the forest of your approach. You’re dropping faster now, but the tap-tap of your feet is dampened by the trail’s powdery surface.
Soon there’s a new sound, subtle and difficult to separate from the wind in the branches. As the trail’s decline moderates, the rhythm of your footfall slows and the new sound finally separates from wind’s gentle swish: rushing water. The creek is nearby but not yet visible. You follow the trail around fallen redwood that nature has repurposed as a giant fern garden and there it is, springing from the dense understory. With the creek comes more ferns and few flying insects, and a smell that’s pleasantly, paradoxically musty and fresh.
Your path parallels the creek now, spongy beneath your feet. You know the sun is well up, but the morning light is subdued, dusk-like. The creek’s music builds with each step, a soundtrack preparing you for something significant. One more bend and you’re facing your goal, a glistening cataract tumbling thirty vertical feet over mossy logs and rocks, framed by ferns.
You’ve arrived at Russian Gulch Fall, deep in the perpetually damp, green hills east of Mendocino on California’s north coast. Down here it’s easy to imagine a world untouched by humans, and finding this eden empty is heaven. The staircase down to the fall is carved into the hillside and almost invisible; the weathered redwood bridge crossing the creek, just downstream, blends with the surroundings to form the ideal platform from which to imagine a prehistoric reality. Even if you’re not so inclined, it’s difficult to be down here without lapsing into something akin to meditation.
About this image
I’ve been to Russian Gulch Fall a number of times, alone and with other photographers. I try to make it to the fall before midmorning, before the sun rises high enough to penetrate the dense redwood canopy and create too much contrast for my camera to capture.
Deep Forest Cascade, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino Coast
On this morning I arrived early enough to work the scene for a full two hours before tiny patches of sunlight blighted the forest floor and sent me packing. And work it I did, starting wide and trending tighter as I became more familiar with the scene.
I started by orienting my polarizer, an often overlooked component in a forest water scene like this. Many people think the polarizer’s purpose is to make the sky more blue, but I think its greatest benefit is removing the sheen from foliage and rocks, especially (but not exclusively) when they’re wet. Between the two stops of light lost to the polarizer, and the dense forest dark, achieving a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the water without severely compromising my ISO and f-stop was impossible, so I just went with extreme blur in the water.
The morning air seemed perfectly still, but to guard against an imperceptible breeze nudging the ferns during my exposure, I bumped my ISO to 400. I selected f/11 to ensure front-to-back sharpness, which gave me a one second exposure that created extreme motion blur that I thought made the delicate strands of plummeting water quite nice.
A handful of people came through while I was down there, pausing briefly to savor the scene before continuing on or turning back, but for the most part I had the fall to myself. I photographed until the sun climbed into the treetops, paused a few minutes to bask in the quiet, then started the trudge back to the present.
Keeping the world out
Even when I’m surrounded by people, or signs of human influence, I try to photograph the world as if I’m the only one who has ever been here. It’s not that I don’t like people (I love and need people, as this pandemic has confirmed for me), it’s that I recharge in their absence, and my photography is an extension of that part of me. Whether I’m photographing at a location where I am indeed completely alone, as I was that morning at Russian Gulch Fall, or in the midst of a workshop group, or rubbing elbows with hundreds of gawking tourists (I’m looking at you, Antelope Canyon), I frame my scenes to convey a feeling of solitude.
Many of the images in the gallery below were captured in the presence of others, but the feeling I get from viewing them now is no different than it would be had I been completely alone. While many of my images feature the sky, for this gallery I selected smaller, more intimate scenes that soothe.
Alone in the World
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Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 