Eloquent Images by Gary Hart
Insight, information, and inspiration for the inquisitive nature photographer
Fall into winter
Posted on November 14, 2012
First Snow, El Capitan, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
.4 seconds
F/16
ISO 100
24 mm
Probably the number one question I’m asked about Yosemite is, “What’s the best season for photography?” My response always sounds like it was crafted by a waffling politician, but I swear I just don’t have the absolute answer everyone wants: Yosemite in spring is all about the water, a time when the vertical granite can’t seem to shed the winter snowpack fast enough; summer offers High Sierra splendor (Glacier Point, Tuolumne Meadows, the backcountry), with wildflowers, exposed granite, and gem-like lakes inaccessible most of the year; autumn is when trees of yellow and red mingle in mirror-reflections and carpet the forest floor with color; and winter is the sunset fire of Horsetail Fall and the possibility (fingers crossed) of a glistening winter cathedral of white.
But surpassing all of this is the rare opportunity to combine the best of two seasons. For example, a few years ago, while in Yosemite Valley to photograph the fall color, I survived twenty-four hours of nonstop downpour, six inches of rain that sent Yosemite Valley into spring flood mode, giving me an opportunity photograph the fall color with the waterfalls at their spring peak. And last year, extreme drought conditions kept the high country open into January, providing access to High Sierra terrain in ice and snow conditions usually the exclusive domain of hardy wildlife.
And then there was last Saturday, when I was in Yosemite Valley to photograph this year’s fall color “peak” (always a moving target), only to encounter an early winter storm that deposited six inches of fresh snow in Yosemite Valley. Seriously folks, there are simply no words to describe Yosemite Valley with fresh snow, and adding an explosion of yellow and red is just off the charts. But rather than sink further into hyperbole, I’ll just submit this image, one of many from this trip that will surely require many hours to wade through.
(In addition to the snow and color, I also witnessed classic Yosemite clearing storm conditions, but that’s a story for another day.)
A few words about this image
I’ve been doing this photography thing long enough to have learned how to separate my experience from my camera’s, to appreciate what I’m seeing without forgetting that my camera “sees” it differently. On this autumn morning I wanted capture the best of everything going on—fresh snow (duh), fall color, and reflection—easy for stereoscopic eyes embedded in a swiveling head, but not so easy to capture in a single, two-dimensional frame. With some ideas of how I might accomplish this, I beelined to this hidden spot along the Merced River, a little downstream from Bridalveil Meadow.
Once there I had to move around until all the elements—snow-covered rocks, floating leaves, reflection, and El Capitan—fell into a coherent relationship: Too far to the right and I’d lose El Capitan’s reflection behind the rocks; too far to the left and I’d be in the frigid river (not that there’s anything wrong with that). As it was, I was balanced on an icy rock with my tripod in two feet of water (and thanking the photography gods for live-view).
All of the “action” in the scene was along a line starting at my feet and terminating at El Capitan, so the decision to go vertical was easy—including everything on my line in a horizontal composition would have introduced all kinds of superfluous real estate on the left and right, and required me to compose so wide that El Capitan would have shrunk to virtual insignificance. I really liked the large, submerged leaf right in front of me and used it to anchor the bottom of my frame. And since the sky above El Capitan was mostly gray clouds, I composed as tightly as possible above El Capitan.
Top and bottom decided, I moved back as far as I could to increase my focal length and maximize El Capitan’s size as much as possible. Wanting sharpness throughout my frame, I stopped down to f16 and focused on the leaf frozen to the rock in the lower center, about five feet away. (An experience-based guess—my iPhone, with its hyperfocal app, was buried in a pocket several layers deep, and I was reluctant to disturb my precarious balance on the slippery rocks.) I was extremely careful orienting my polarizer, turning it slowly, multiple times, until I was confident I’d found the ideal balance between removing sheen on the leaves without erasing the reflection in the river. A three-stop soft graduated neutral density filter held down the brightness in the sky. Click.
In Lightroom I warmed the image a little to remove a blue cast in the snow, and applied standard exposure adjustments to subdue highlights and open shadows. In Photoshop I dodged and burned to hide (minimal) unwanted shading introduced by my GND, to further darken the clouds, and to bring out the reflection somewhat. And I gave all but the scene’s brightest and darkest areas a slight wiggle in curves for contrast.
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Yosemite seasons
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Encore!
Posted on November 11, 2012
Twilight Fog, Tunnel View, Yosemite
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
1.6 seconds
F/7.1
ISO 200
48 mm
Yesterday I spent an incredible day in Yosemite, guiding a group of photographers from the Sacramento area. When I schedule these trips, I do my best to time them for nice conditions, but of course there’s no guarantee things will work out. Yesterday they worked out. Big time. Not only did we catch Yosemite Valley at its fall color peak (it’s late this year), we found everything blanketed with fresh snow that continued to fall lightly, and intermittently, throughout the day. I have lots of images I can’t wait to get to, but until then I offer this one from a few years ago, chosen because it’s quite similar to the scene with which we wrapped up the day yesterday.
Much like last night, the view on this 2005 evening was a classic Yosemite clearing storm. My brother Jay and I arrived at Tunnel View to find El Capitan and Half Dome, partially obscured by swirling clouds, teasing the audience like exotic fan dancers; a carpet of plush fog cushioned the valley floor. With sunlit clouds and granite above a shaded valley, the light was tricky, but as the sun dropped, so did the contrast, making metering simpler. Eventually the direct sunlight left Half Dome entirely, but small, shifting patches spotlighted El Capitan right up until sunset. While the clouds never achieved brilliant sunset pinks and reds, they radiated an ethereal gold that intensified over several minutes before fading.
When the sunlight left entirely, as if on cue, the fog hugging the valley floor expanded, slowly obscuring the scene like a curtain signaling the show’s end. With the view gone, the crowd packed up and headed to wherever they needed to be; suddenly we were alone. But I’ve photographed Yosemite enough to know that it’s a mistake to try to predict the conditions in five minutes based on the conditions now, so I stayed, hoping for an encore.
As quickly as the scene had closed, the foggy curtain pulled back, unveiling Yosemite Valley once more, this time illuminated by the magnificent pink and blue pastels of the Earth’s shadow and belt of Venus. By now the sky was fairly dark, but the remaining faint, shadowless light was enough to reveal the most beautiful view on Earth.
Though this image adds to the seemingly infinite number of Yosemite Tunnel View pictures in my portfolio it remains one of my personal favorites. It’s one of the images I think about every time I consider leaving a scene, and it’s what I showed the group last night when some suggested leaving. So we stayed and were among the very few rewarded with memories of Yosemite Valley’s sweet encore for the drive home.
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A Gallery of Yosemite Weather
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An unexpected treat (and a good lesson)
Posted on November 7, 2012
Sunrise, ‘Ohe’o Gulch, Maui
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The drive to Hana is an adventure of crowded, winding, narrow roads. The drive to the Seven Sacred Pools of ‘Ohe’o Gulch, Maui, about twelve miles beyond Hana, is even more unnerving—the road narrows further and the crowds are replaced by miles of empty road interrupted infrequently and abruptly by careening locals in vehicles just slightly too large for the blacktop.
On my latest Maui visit I rose in the Hana darkness and headed to the Seven Sacred Pools for sunrise. Doing this drive in the pre-dawn dark only adds to the tension, but I arrived unscathed to find the parking lot empty. Perfect! Following my headlamp along the quarter-mile trail, I continued mulling compositions I’d been plotting since my last visit (when light and crowds didn’t permit anything particularly creative). So imagine my surprise to find a padlocked gate blocking the stairs down to the pools. Hmmm. After a few minutes of reconnaissance, I decided they really, really didn’t want me down there and set out in search of other opportunities.
‘Ohe’o Gulch empties into the Pacific, draining rain that falls on the slopes of Haleakala high above. In addition to the main trail along the gulch are a number of smaller, less defined trails that trend out toward the surf. I followed one of these and soon found myself making my own path along broken lava toward the waves. The sky had brightened just enough to render my headlamp unnecessary, but footing was treacherous and I had to step carefully—a fall likely wouldn’t have resulted in death or even severe injury, but the rocks would have sliced me pretty good, not to mention what it would have done to my camera, so my focus was more on the ground at my feet than the larger scene.
When I made it out to where the surf met the rocks (I can’t call it a beach), I was quite pleased to find several reflective pools nestled in the lava, guarded by a prominent lava outcrop. The rising sun had already started to color the sky, so I set up quickly, finding various compositions that balanced the largest pool with the rising sun and outcrop. Working the scene, I was treated to a sunrise palette of magenta, red, and gold punctuated by an explosion of crepuscular rays as the sun crested the horizon. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d probably have missed it all had I concentrated on the shots I’d planned for that morning—a gentle reminder not to get so locked into my agenda that I lose sight of the larger world around me.
On the drive out of the parking lot I encountered the park ranger opening the entrance station. I asked her about the locked gate at the pools and she explained the flash flood risk forces them to restrict access when the weather forecast calls for heavy rain on Haleakala.
Missing the tree for the forest
Posted on November 2, 2012
Fall Color, Yosemite Valley
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One of my favorite Yosemite autumn destinations is Fern Spring. It’s usually my first stop after entering Yosemite Valley because the leaves here give me a pretty good handle on the status of the fall color: If I can still see lots of water on the spring’s pond, I know I’m a little early; lots of brown leaves and I’m late.
I haven’t actually photographed the spring itself in years; instead I cross the road and explore the half-mile stretch of trail that parallels the river, downstream to the Pohono Bridge, upstream to Bridalveil Meadow. When I brought my fall workshop group here last week, we found so much to photograph that we had to come back. Some of the group stayed at the spring and crafted compositions featuring the stairstep cascade descending from the small reflecting pool. Others followed me to the river and quickly scattered in search of larger scenes.
When I’m leading a group my priority isn’t my own photography, so that afternoon I stayed in the vicinity of the spring to help people with exposures and compositions. But this was fairly far into the workshop, and as is usually the case, everyone had become pretty comfortable with what they were doing—suddenly I felt pretty inessential.
(Rather than pout) I set my sights on the nearby possibilities. My goal is always to find something new, pretty easy when photographing small scenes featuring ephemeral leaves (in contrast to the relative permanence of Yosemite’s granite). But uniqueness is just the start: To set themselves apart, most scenes, large and small, need (among other things) photography’s often overlooked third dimension, depth. So I’m never content with simply finding a photogenic primary subject—regardless of my subject, if it’s distant I want a complementary foreground; close and I want a complementary background.
I’d been to Fern Spring so much, I was pretty sure I’d pretty thoroughly mined the possibilities here. So imagine my surprise to spy a heretofore overlooked tree with a sturdy trunk and arcing branch, a wealth of untapped compositional possibilities, right across the road from Fern Spring. How could I have missed this in my hundreds of visits here? I can only imagine the number of times I’d rushed past this beautiful specimen in my haste to probe the forest’s more private depths. Shame on me.
But anyway, no time for self-flagellation…. I studied the tree and its surroundings, looking for leaves to isolate. My eyes quickly landed on a solitary branch sporting several leaves in varying stages of fall transition—in a perfect world the leaves would have been backlit (for that fall color glow I so love), but that would have put me on the wrong side of the scene, and the world is rarely perfect anyway.
My lens of choice in these autumn leaves scenes is a telephoto, most often my 70-200 f4 because I almost always prefer its sharpness, speed, and ease of use over the extra reach of the 100-400. So, with 70-200 in place, I circled the leaves until I thought they aligned properly with the tree in the background. Removing my camera from my tripod, I framed the scene through the viewfinder, searching for the best relationship between the yellow leaves and brooding tree. I found that by dropping to the ground I could eliminate the less interesting foreground and frame my leaves with the curved branch.
And on the ground I stayed, for I don’t know how long. I tweaked the composition until I had it “just right,” then (with the composition locked in on my tripod) went to work on the exposure, depth, and focus point. Dense shade makes the area around Fern Spring dark on even the brightest day, but this was late afternoon in autumn, so the sun’s fading light had been further extinguished by Yosemite Valley’s steep walls. As if that wasn’t enough, a bright sheen on the leaves made a polarizer an absolute necessity, subtracting two more stops of precious light. And while it wasn’t windy, neither was the air perfectly still, a problem compounded by my proximity to a road teaming with rushing vehicles.
Fortunately my goal was a soft background, which required a large aperture—had I needed to go to f16 I probably would have been out of luck. Nevertheless, even at f4 I had to go to ISO 800 to expose at 1/12 second, a pretty marginal shutter speed in these conditions. I used live view magnified ten times to ensure precise focus, targeting the veins on the closest leaf, and carefully timing exposures for lulls in the wind.
As I usually do when I have a composition so heavily dependent on depth of field, I bracketed my f-stops, stopping down to f8 in one-stop increments, bumping my ISO even further to ensure a reasonable shutter speed. But at home on my large monitor I wasn’t crazy about the busyness in the leaves introduced as the depth of field increased, and decided f4 was best.
Also on my large screen I was thrilled to see how perfectly sharp the images were (I love that lens), and how noise free they are at ISO 800 (I love my new camera). It’s one of those images that stands up to even the closest scrutiny—the more I examine it, the more I see: small holes, dirt smudges and mote, and even miniscule particles of debris suspended by a delicate spider web, the “imperfections” that underscore nature’s perfection.
I have no illusions that this image will make me rich—most people are drawn to far more dramatic captures. But when I decided to photograph nature for a living, I promised myself to only photograph what I want to photograph, and never to base my choices on what will sell. I can’t even begin to express how much I enjoyed photographing this scene, and how much pleasure this image (and others like it) bring me. It’s a reminder of why I do what I do, and why success should never be measured in dollars alone.
Fern Spring, Yosemite: Each spring I gauge the progress of the fall color in Yosemite Valley by the leaves around Fern Spring.
I love it when things work out
Posted on October 29, 2012
Autumn Moon, El Capitan and Half Dome, Yosemite
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
190mm
.8 seconds
F/11
ISO 100
October 29, 2012
My Yosemite autumn workshop wrapped up last night with a spectacular moonrise above Half Dome at sunset. That my group was there to photograph it was both a source of pride, and great personal satisfaction—I doubt few things on Earth are more beautiful than a full moon rising above Half Dome at sunset, and I love being able to share it.
Some lunar perspective
Imagine a line connecting the sun and moon—the half of the moon skewered by that line is always fully lit. Because the moon orbits Earth, our position relative to that line changes daily. Once every 29 days Earth is on that line too, aligned with (and between) the sun and the moon, perfectly positioned to see all of the moon’s sunlit side during our night (in other words, the side of Earth facing the moon is the side facing away from the sun). Because this alignment is the only time the moon’s fully lit face is visible all night, a full moon always rises at sunset and sets at sunrise.
Why do we rarely see the moon rise exactly as the sun sets? There are a couple of reasons: First, local terrain usually gets in the way—if the moon has to rise above mountains, or the sun sets behind mountains, their rise and set times will be skewed. And second, the moon, sun, and Earth are only perfectly aligned for an instant—we see the moon as full on the day it’s most closely aligned with the sun and Earth, but we’ll only see the rising full moon precisely at sunset when sunset for our location coincides with the instant of perfect alignment, and no mountains are in the way. (There are other orbital and positioning factors, but sometimes technical minutia can clutter understanding, so I’ll just leave it here.)
Targeting Yosemite’s autumn moon
For most Yosemite visitors, viewing a glowing lunar disk above Yosemite Valley doesn’t require much more than being outside and looking up at the right time. But photographers have to be much more precise than that—the camera’s constrained view means anything but a tight composition reduces the moon to small accent (albeit a very beautiful one) to a very large scene. And the camera’s relatively limited ability to simultaneously capture shadows and highlights makes for an extremely narrow time window to photograph a full moon—too early and the moon is lost in still-bright sky (not enough contrast); too late and the dynamic range separating the rising (daylight bright) moon and (rapidly dimming) shadowed foreground terrain is to great for a camera to capture (too much contrast).
So what we want is a moon that rises in very close proximity to Half Dome, at just the right time. When I started planning my 2012 workshops more than a year in advance, I circled October 28 as the date for my favorite Yosemite full moon rise of the year. That was when the moon, 99 percent full, would rise above the steep granite walls of Yosemite Valley, in the general direction of Half Dome as viewed from the valley, at just the right time. I usually choose the famous Tunnel View vista, just east of the Wawona Tunnel, for the autumn moonrise, but my calculations told me that from Tunnel View the moon would rise a little farther to the right of Half Dome than I like, and just a little later than ideal (difficult to expose for anyone without rock-solid understanding of metering and exposure)—still a nice shot, and doable if you’re careful, but I thought there might be something better.
Wanting to be at a higher elevation than, and a little farther north of, my Tunnel View vantage point, I soon realized that the less heralded vista just west of the Wawona Tunnel would be just about right. Not only would this perspective better align the moon with Half Dome, it’s about a mile farther back and over 400 feet higher than Tunnel View (for a slightly earlier moonrise). And being farther back also meant we could use a longer focal length to maximize the distant moon’s size relative to the closer Half Dome. This vantage point doesn’t offer a view of Bridalveil Fall (it wouldn’t be in a telephoto image that includes Half Dome anyway), but that late in the afternoon in autumn Bridalveil is in full shade, and an extremely dry year had reduced it to a mere trickle anyway.
There are lots of apps and software that plot moonrise relative to terrain (Photographer’s Ephemeris being the most popular among photographers), but my moonrise (and set) workflow was in place long before they were available, so I still do it my “old fashioned” way. My technique involves getting the phase, rise/set time, altitude, and azimuth from a website or app (Focalware gives me everything I need), then plotting the moon’s direction with my (now obsolete) National Geographic Topo! software. Topo! gives me the horizontal and vertical distance separating my location and target feature (Half Dome). Plugging that info into my HP11C (scientific calculator) app, I compute the horizon’s altitude in degrees. I plot this altitude and the moon’s azimuth on my Topo! map to pinpoint when and where the moon will appear (or disappear) from any location I choose. I like my approach because I can do everything I need to without Internet or cell service, but for most people it’s probably just simpler to use Photographer’s Ephemeris or PhotoPills before leaving home.
So anyway, I was able to determine that on October 28, from the vista west of the Wawona Tunnel, the moon would rise behind Half Dome’s Ahwiyah Point at around 5:45, and would be directly above (basically, appearing to sit on top of) Half Dome at around 5:50. With a 6:05 sunset, this was just about as perfect as could be.
The moon arrives
I got my group in position at around 5:30 and we just watched and waited. By the end of any workshop everybody has gotten to know each other quite well and idle time is an excuse for fun. This group was no exception. Though I’ve done this enough to be pretty confident the moon would deliver as promised, I couldn’t help feeling secretly anxious that a miscalculation would somehow render my promised workshop grand finale a flop (despite the fact that I’d checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and then checked some more). But a little after 5:40, just as the joviality peaked, a white arc started to glow behind Ahwiyah Point (below) and we were instantly down to business. With foreground for perspective you can really get a sense for how quickly the moon rises—fortunately, everyone was ready with their exposure and composition, so the clicking was pretty much instantaneous and I don’t think anyone missed anything.
As we shot, I encouraged the group to vary their compositions—while it was mostly a telephoto scene, there were wider and tighter versions, as well as horizontal and vertical orientations. I also frequently reminded everyone to monitor the moon’s highlights—as the moon rises, the foreground darkens but the moon remains daylight bright, making exposure increasingly difficult.
My favorite time of evening is the ten or fifteen minutes after sunset, when the shadows have left the landscape and the east horizon is layered with pink and blue pastels. As Earth’s shadow rises from the eastern horizon, the sky’s glow deepens to a rich magenta that and paints entire landscape. The image at the top of the post was one of the last of the evening, several minutes after sunset. If you look closely, you can see the sky’s pink glow bathing Half Dome’s reflective granite (my camera actually picked more of this color than you see here, but I desaturated it slightly in Photoshop).
(I’d love to say that this was the highlight of my day, but as beautiful as the moonrise was, it was trumped by listening to my Giants World Series victory on the drive home.)
This is the moon when it first appeared, about 20 minutes before sunset. As you can see, the contrast is pretty good, but the light isn’t nearly as nice as it was shortly after sunset.
A Yosemite Autumn Moon Gallery
Land before time
Posted on October 22, 2012
Deep Forest Cascade, Russian Gulch Fall, Mendocino Coast
Canon EOS-5D Mark III
28 mm
2.5 seconds
F/16
ISO 400
Near the top of the canyon, on late-spring mornings electric-pink rhododendrons bask in splashes of early sunlight. Follow the trail a short distance and it seems that you’re witnessing a competition for light, the rhododendrons spreading and stretching to get their share, but within a few hundred yards your route descends into old-growth redwoods benefiting from a multi-century head-start. The redwoods here tower over everything, intercepting all but a few of the sun’s rays, and the rhododendrons are gone.
At some point down the trail you stop. You hear nothing but a breeze-induced swish from the trees and maybe a bird warning the forest of your approach. Further down the trail there’s a new sound, at first subtle and difficult to disconnect from the wind in the branches—you’re dropping fast now; as the breeze subsides the new sound separates into rushing water. Soon the trail levels and a creek appears at your feet. With the creek comes 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 out, but the light is subdued, dusk-like. The water’s music builds with each step, the way a movie soundtrack prepares you for what’s in store. One more bend and there it is, a glistening cataract tumbling over mossy logs and rocks, framed with ferns.
You’ve found Russian Gulch Fall, deep in the perpetually damp redwoods east of Mendocino. For someone like me, who likes to imagine a world untouched by the hand of man, this is heaven. The trail down to the fall is carved into the hillside and almost invisible; the weathered redwood bridge crossing the creek just downstream makes a perfect platform from which observe and descend without conscious thought into 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 now, alone and with other photographers. I try to make it to the fall by midmorning, before the sun rises high enough to penetrate the dense redwood canopy and create too much contrast for my camera to capture.
On my latest visit I stayed until the sun climbed into the treetops. Most of my time there was spent with my telephoto lens, isolating aspects of the scene (like this). But shortly before leaving I put on a wide lens and framed the entire scene. Rather than compose the sun out (as I usually would), I added it to the top of my frame, using the trees to block all but a small sliver of the brilliant disk and dialing in a small aperture (f16) to create a sunburst. A polarizer eliminated subtle but pervasive glare on the rocks, water, and foliage, allowing the rich green to stand out. There was absolutely no wind, so I was comfortable with a 2 1/2 second exposure (but still verified the sharpness by magnifying the image on my LCD).
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Waterfalls
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Dark and early
Posted on October 16, 2012
Daybreak, South Tufa, Mono Lake
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The key to successful sunrise photography is arriving early. How early? My rule of thumb is, if you can navigate without a flashlight, you’re too late. I know, I know, you’re sleepy and it’s cold, but it shouldn’t take more than one or two mad sprints beneath crimson skies to get you to pull back those covers just a few minutes earlier. And guess what—when you arrive early enough to savor the sunrise rather than rush through it, you’ll soon recognize a purity of air, sound, and light that just can’t be found at any other time of day.
At popular spots like Mono Lake, arriving at least forty-five minutes before sunrise has the added advantage of beating most of the people with whom you’ll be competing for choice real estate. The air here is often graveyard-still this early, the lake a perfect mirror. While the landscape is dark to my eyes, a gold-blue band on the horizon hints at the approaching day, and I know it’s not too early for long exposures that will reveal color and detail my eyes can’t see yet.
The image here was captured about a week and a half ago, on the penultimate sunrise of this year’s Eastern Sierra photo workshop, over 40 minutes before sunrise. Experience has shown me that people don’t always realize how well today’s digital SLR cameras perform in low light; when it’s this dark I sometimes need to prod workshop students to start shooting. Often the best way to do that is to fire off a couple of frames of my own to show them what’s there.
It was dark enough that stars were visible overhead (take a look at the exposure settings to get an idea of how dark it was). I spot-metered the brightest part of the sky, dialing in an exposure that was two stops above a middle tone—just bright enough to bring out foreground detail without washing out the color in the sky.
My “rule” (I hate that word) for the horizon is to place it relative to the aesthetic appeal of the foreground versus the sky: If the sky is a lot better than the foreground, the sky gets most of the frame; if the foreground is a lot better than the sky, the majority of the frame goes to the foreground; when it’s a tossup, the horizon line goes in the middle.
This was just the beginning of what turned out to be an amazing sunrise, the kind a workshop leader prays he can give his group. By the time it was over everyone had shots facing east, north, and west. About fifteen minutes after I took this the sky turned an impossible crimson that reflected in the lake, making it appear to be on fire. I have images of that too, but there’s just something about the tranquility of these earliest images that really resonates with me.
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I’ll try to reprise this morning next year, in my 2013 Eastern Sierra Fall Color photo workshop. (As I write this, nearly a year out, it’s already half full.)
My favorite season
Posted on October 12, 2012
Reflection, Half Dome in the Merced River, Yosemite
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted something from Yosemite. The truth is, while I lose track of the number of times I visit Yosemite each year, Yosemite’s crowds and blue skies for the most part keep me away in summer. Not only that, by summer’s end (and sometimes much sooner), Yosemite’s waterfalls, which just a few months earlier appeared to explode from solid granite, have vanished. Even booming Yosemite Falls, the valley’s spring centerpiece and continuous soundtrack, by September has vanished, its demise reduced to a dark outline on the light granite, like the negative of a crime scene chalkline.
Enter October. The vacation crowds have returned to work and school, and California’s weather has started its trend toward winter, brushing Northern California with clouds that inject a little character into our skies. By the end of the month, the oak, cottonwood, maple, and dogwood trees have fired up, warming Yosemite Valley with shades of yellow and red. But my favorite part of autumn in Yosemite is the now relaxed Merced River, its once churning surface subdued to a meandering ribbon of glass.
Yosemite is never as spectacular as it is with a fresh coat of winter snow, or more dramatic than when it echoes with the roar of spring runoff, but for just plain creative photography, I don’t think I’m ever happier in Yosemite than I am in autumn.
About this image
I have many go-to autumn reflection locations in Yosemite Valley. A particular favorite is this bend in the Merced River near Yosemite Village, just east of Sentinel Bridge. I arrived this evening to find cottonwood upstream had already shed most of their leaves, their white skeletons reflecting in the slow water. In shadowless light only possible when the sun is several minutes below the horizon, I juxtaposed Half Dome’s reflection against the trees’ reflection. Concerned that patches of drifting white foam drifting would distract from the scene, I chose small aperture and low ISO settings that would require a multi-second shutter speed. The resulting thirty-second exposure revealed more detail in the low light than my eyes could register, and reduced the foam to faint white streaks on the river’s surface.
It’s not a click, it’s a process
Posted on October 3, 2012
Aspen in Autumn, Bishop Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
1/13 second
F/7.1
ISO 84
36 mm
A landscape image isn’t just a click, it’s a process that starts with an idea, a plan for the best way to organize and emphasize the scene’s significant elements, then improves with each subsequent click until the photographer is satisfied. The first click is like a writer’s draft, and subsequent clicks are the revisions. After each click, a photographer should stand back and evaluate the image on the LCD (I love the large LCDs on today’s DSLRs), refine (exposure, composition, depth of field, focus point), then click again. Repeat as necessary.
This approach is particularly valuable in macro and close-focus images, intimate scenes where even the slightest adjustment in composition, depth of field, and focus point can dramatically alter the result. It’s a prime reason I’m such a strong tripod advocate (evangelist)—when I’m done evaluating, the shot I just evaluated is sitting right there on my tripod, waiting for me to apply the adjustments I deem necessary.
When photographing fall color, I look for a leaf, or group of leaves, to isolate from the rest of the scene. In the above image, captured in an aspen stand just down the hill from North Lake, west of Bishop, I started with this collection of four vertically stacked leaves, positioning myself so leaves were suspended in front of a receding line of bleached aspen (they’d have been lost against the background foliage). I wanted the background soft but recognizable.
Using my 70-200 lens with a 25 mm extension tube, and a neutral polarizer to help the color come through the leaves’ waxy sheen, I settled on the general framing fairly quickly—vertical orientation, fairly tightly composed. Exposure was pretty straightforward in the soft overcast, though an intermittent breeze meant I had some decisions to make. Since the breeze ranged from light to completely still, I used ISO 400 to enable a faster shutter speed, and timed my click for the brief pauses.
Though I don’t always catch balance, relationship, and border problems through the viewfinder, after two or three click/evaluate/refine cycles, I had the composition nailed. But I was far from finished—in fact, I’d just started. I don’t trust critical DOF decisions made through my viewfinder or even on my LCD, so when a composition I like a lot makes significant use of DOF and focus point, I always take a series of frames, bracketing DOF (f-stop) around the DOF I think is best. Sometimes I’ll range all the way from f2.8 to f22. In this case I tried frames ranging from f4 (my 70-200’s fastest aperture) to f16 (at f16 I increased my ISO to 800), in (more or less) one-stop increments. Since I thought f8 would give me about the right combination of sharp foreground and soft background, I even took a couple of extra frames in 1/3 stop increments around f8. Back home on my large monitor I scrutinized each frame closely and ended up choosing this one at f7.1.
In Lightroom I warmed the image slightly to remove a blue cast on the white trunks. Because I intentionally underexposed the scene at capture (to ensure that I didn’t clip any of the red channel, where most of the yellow is), in Photoshop I dodged the trunks to remove the dinginess introduced by my underexposure. Otherwise my processing was pretty much standard stuff—a subtle wiggle in Curves to add contrast, Topaz noise reduction, and selective sharpening of everything in focus with Unsharp Mask.
Join me for the next Eastern Sierra photo workshop
A gallery of nature intimates
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Beneath the stars
Posted on October 1, 2012
Bristlecone Star Trails, Schulman Grove, White Mountains, California
Canon 1Ds Mark II
36mm
22 minutes
F/4
ISO 200
October 2012
I lead photo workshops in lots of beautiful, exotic places, but I particularly look forward to the Eastern Sierra workshop for the variety we get to photograph. Mt. Whitney and the Alabama Hills, Mono Lake and Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows, lots of fall color in the mountains west of Bishop and Lone Pine, and the ancient bristlecones in the White Mountains, east of Bishop.
It’s the opportunities to photograph the mountains surrounding Bishop that most stimulate my creative juices. Each fall the small lakes, sparkling streams, and steep canyons west of Bishop are lined with aspen decked out in their vivid autumn yellow. Contrast that with the arid White Mountains east of Bishop, where virtually nothing thrives except the amazing bristlecone pines. The bristlecones are among the oldest living things on Earth, and they look it. The character they’ve earned by enduring up to 5,000 years of cold, wind, thin air, and water deprivation makes them ideal photographic subjects. There’s wonderful texture in the bristlecone’s twisting trunk and branches, but sometimes I like to turn off the texture with a silhouette that emphasizes the gnarled shape.
The bristlecone here clung to a steep hillside in the Schulman Grove of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. I was there with three friends on a moonless, late September night in 2007. They wanted to light-paint the tree, but I wanted something that just emphasized the tree’s shape against the stars. With our shots set up, I delayed my exposure for a few seconds while they hit the tree with a bright flashlight, clicking as soon the world went dark. Then we just sat and waited in the chilly air, enjoying the sky, laughing quite a bit, but sometimes just appreciating a silence that’s impossible to duplicate anywhere in our “normal” (flatland) lives.
As we waited we scanned the sky, thick with stars, for a rogue airplane that might threaten to soil our frames. Only one appeared, and when it did I held my hat in front of my lens, holding it there for about fifteen seconds, until the plane moved on. (If you look closely you can actually see a small gap in the same place on the otherwise continuous star trails.)
We had long exposure noise reduction turned on, so we couldn’t see our results until our cameras finished their processing. The pictures didn’t pop up on to our LCDs until we were halfway back to Bishop, but I was driving and had to wait until we got back to town. We pulled into Bishop, tired and hungry, so late that we had a hard time finding anything open, but everyone was so pleased with their images that even Denny’s tasted good.
An Eastern Sierra Gallery
(Click an image for a closer look, and to enjoy the slide show)
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 