Planning Sunset and Sunrise Landscape Photography with TPE 3.3

Sunrise at Topaz Lake on the California / Nevada Border

Planning landscape photography has traditionally been a process of considering a combination of location and weather.  If you have a general understanding of the geography of a region, you could look at weather forecasts a few days ahead of time and anticipate where and when the best photographic opportunities might present themselves.  During the course of a day you could modify your plan even further, and decide where to be for sunset based on where you see the best cloud formations developing, and where enough breaks in the clouds might let light through.

In recent years the availability of maps and satellite imagery online in programs like +Google Maps made the location planning easier.  The availability of fairly detailed weather forecasts days in advance through the National Weather Service made the choice of where to go in a region a little easier.  Apps like   +The Photographer's Ephemeris added lines to show the direction of the sun and moon at any time of day or night, so you could anticipate the exact sun rise and set time, general sunlight illumination during the "golden hour" before sunset and after sunrise, as well as anticipate the location of the moon.

Forecast for August 2, 2015

The latest version 3.3 of The Photographer's Ephemeris uses the SkyFire service to check weather forecasts to predict sunrise and sunset color, and show a color-coded overlay on a map of the region your're in.  The more red the color, the higher the probability of sunset color,  The mroe blue to clear it is, the lower the probability. You can see the forecast two to four days in advance depending upon what level of service you'e enrolled to receive.

Another handy feature of SkyFire is to compare forecasts for a list of favorite locations that you've saved, so you can decide between locations to drive to, in order to have the best odds of a nice sunset.

I've tested these features a number of times now, and they do well at predicting when there will or won't be sunset color.  Weather forecasting is notoriously imprecise, so of course you can't predict the direction or extent of the color, but so far the correlation between the SkyFire forecast and the outcome is impressive.

Here's the sunset that actually occurred with the forecast shown to the right for August 2:

Multi-day SkyFire forecast on TPE

The multi-day SkyFire forecast format is shown to the right. The bright red box showed a potentially vivid sunrise opportunity at Lake Tahoe.

The SkyFire service is an optional in-app purchase for TPE, with prices as follows:

Top In-App Purchases

1. Location Synch (1 year)$0.99
2. Skyfire Plus (3-months)$14.99
3. Skyfire (3-months)$9.99

There is also a new location synchronization feature, which finally enabled me to sync my iPhone TPE with my Windows TPE.  There was a procedure to do it before that I had not been able to complete.  With this new method it was quick and simple.

If you don't already have TPE, here's a link that you can use to find it in the Apple iStore:

The Photographer's Ephemeris - Crookneck Consulting LLC

Crookneck Consulting also offers a Photo Transit app which enables you to anticipate what focal length you'll need to capture a certain field of view to get the shot that you want:

The Photographer's Transit - Crookneck Consulting LLC

I'm also testing TPE 3.4, so I'll probably have some details on that for you shortly!

Another sunset accurately predicted by SunFire

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

In late July I positioned myself to catch the full moon rising at Mono Lake. It had rained during the day, but as I sat on the porch of the lcoal coffee shop waiting to see how the weather woudl turn out, it was clearing up nicely for sunset, and hopefully the moonrise. One of the nice things about photography is that the people really into it are a pretty relaxed and sociable bunch. I ran into filmmaker Tom Lowe at a coffee shop in Lee Vining, and he was heading out to Mono Lake as well. A young woman with an accent had shared the table and power for her laptop, and not knowing the area, when she heard we were going to a nice sunset location, she decided to follow along in her car.

We drove south out of town, and as I turned left onto a shortcut, Tom missed the turn and kept going towards the standard highway 395 to highway 120 route towards South Tufa. The woman, Rotem Retter from Israel who had come to the U.S. after serving in the Israeli Defense Force, made the turn. By now a large rainbow was forming in the remaining showers over the Mono Basin, so I stopped at a turnout near another photographer's car. This turned out to be Ron Wolf. We had seen each other's work on Flickr, but had never met.

As I continued on, I decided that the clouds would obscure the moonrise, but they were well posisioned for shooting sunset at South Tufa. I called Tom with the update, but by now he was already set up elsewhere, and decided to stay put.

The clouds were fine for sunset, but as i had suspected, they were too thick to allow the rising moon to show through. This is why it's critical to try to shoot as many sunset full moon rises as possible in a given year... there are only a dozen or so to start with, and weather will obscure many of those!

No problem... I could still catch the moon set at dawn. After having the June 26 partially eclipsed moon set at Olmstead Point behind a nearby ridge before it woud have set on the horizon, I decided to shoot this moonset there as well, so I could find a better shooting position that would enable the sunrise to proceed further as the full moon set.

It turned out even better than I could have planned. The sun was sending light rays over the Eastern horizon, while the moon acted as a gaint reflector, sending more of the sun's rays radiating back from the Western horizon.

I had high expectations for this sunrise, or at least high hopes. After all, I had looked up the moonset and sunrise times a week or two in advance, checked sun and moon angles for various locations in The Photographer's Ephemeris to select my shooting location, gotten up at 3:55 over by Mono Lake to make it here in time, and to place the foreground hill out of the way for the moonset I decided to hike up the granite slope across the road instead of down to Olmstead Point. To do this landscape photography thing right, it's a far cry from just arrive, point and shoot!

"A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy."
- Galen Rowell

I continued to shoot as the clouds and light changed, and there were some majestic juniper trees on the hill which added nice foreground subjects. But I was done by 7am or so, with no plans for the day.

As with the prior sunset Rotem had decided to check out my shooting location, and having hiked Mt Dana the day before, she was eyeing Mt. Hoffman today. I had no plans for the "boring" mid-day light, and the trailhead was only a couple of miles away, so this time I tagged along.

After we moved food and scented items fomr our cars to bear boxes, we got an early enough start to reach May Lake while I could still catch a reflection with minimal wind.

The entire hike is only a 6 mile round trip, but the trailhead is at 8710 feet and you end up at approximately 10,850, so it's a healthy climb. I'm never particularly fast lugging 10-12 pounds of camera gear plus 3 liters (another 6 pounds) of water, but it's an enjoyable hike with a nice view.

Unfortunately there was a fire somewhere which cast a haze in the air. With the distinct possiblility of afternoon thunderstorms, after some rest and chatting with other hikers on top, while protecting day packs from persistent marmots wanting to steal food, it was time to make a hasty descent.

Dawn of Opportunity

Dawn of Opportunity, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

My memory gets a bit hazy on the details as I dragged myself through a sequence of relatively sleepless days, but eventually I woke up early enough to shoot a timelapse sequence of the sun rising over the Bodie Hills off towards the horizon.

The Bodie Hills are among 14 areas being considered for National Monument status. Many of them are rarely-used areas of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, which enables you to go use them to your heart's content with minimal restriction. National Monument status could close them to maost use, except in developed campgrounds. You'll then be charged for the "improvements" (the sound of adjacent generators and drunken rednecks blasting country western music... sorry, just my recent experience in campgrounds during the past 2 weeks...), they'll probably charge National Monument/National Park $20-25 fees instead of the BLM's mroe typical $2-3 (when there's a fee at all), and the added attention will ensure that the lands get far more trampelled and whatever endangered wildlife allegedly needs "protection" there will be more challenged and endangered than ever before.

Don't worry though, there's a group of people in Washington who believe that their sole purpose in life is to obstruct anything that the President does (never mind that meeting in the middle is often the healthiest approach for citizens of the country), so eleven lawmakers have introduced a bill to block the administration's ability to create monuments. I'm clearly no knee-jerk supporter of converting these lands to monuments, but I have huge reservations about blocking the ability to create them when appropriate (and when that symbolic move won't actually cause worse problems). Isn't the two-party system supposed to result in rational, middle-of-the-road compromises which actually make sense? Why do we seem to have a recent rise in extreme polarization and rampant dysfunction? Is it simply a case of "because it works" (to make politicians bribe-rich), combined with a gradual erosion of adequate controls to punish people when there's excess?

We didn't venture into the Bodie Hills on this trip though. Instead we stuck along highway 395, heading up to Big Meadow near the town of Bridgeport to meet with Tom Lowe of www.Timescapes.org. We found a nice patch of iris growing in an irrigated pasture (replacing the ubiquitous sagebrush in the area), we explored some side roads where I shot some "sundog" rainbows in the sky, and we watched some large young hawks sitting in a nest on a power pole, while "Mama hawk" circled overhead, watching us.
We finished the day back in the iris field, with Tom filming my daughter walking in the warm light of the setting sun.

Breaking Sunrise Storm in the Owens Valley

Vanishing Water, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Truckee today).

The Summer "monsoon season" can be a very productive time to shoot in the Eastern Sierra, as small thunderstorms build and then break as warm, moist air crosses the mountains.

Storm over Mono

Storm over Mono, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Truckee today).

There have been great clouds in the Mono Basin over the past couple of days. Now that the lake is warming, there's also a lot of algae growing, but the brine shrimp and alkali fly larvae aren't present in large enough numbers to keep up with it, so the water is a very interesting emerald color.

My day started near Mammoth Lakes in the Owens Valley. I was exploring some salt falts and enjoying the sunrise color on the Sierra Nevada.

An area of dried, cracked mud provided nice foreground detail for some vertical images.
At this point I had been working straight for minutes, so I decided that I needed a break, which I took in a nearby hot spring (it's a tough job, but someone has to do it).

While the morning air remained still, I stopped by some nearby vernal pools to see if I could catch a reflection of the Sierras. At one of the bigger ones was lined with a reddish algae, which contrasted particularly well with the blue sky and white clouds and snow-capped mountains.

Later in the morning I met landscape photographer Bill Wight to share a few of my "secret spots" in the Eastern Sierra with him, and to try to scout out a few new ones for the landscape photography workshop we'll be leading here June 3-6. Many sagebrush stripes and undercarriage drags later (my minivan doesn't have the clearance of his pickup truck, but that rarely stops me from trying), we had made our way up to Mono Lake and explored several of the less visited and lesser known sites.

First we focused on the exotic "sand tufa" limestone formations which form as calcium-laden water runs through sand.








The sand tufa structures look like intricate and delicate sand castles rising as much as 3 feet out of the ground, up to several feet across.
By this point clouds were building in the sky, so I suggested an area which would provide many opportunities to catch reflections. I experimented with my circular polarizer, using it on some shots to maximize water color and minimize reflections, then rotating it to still help with cloud contrast and definition with minimal interference on cloud reflections (as shown here).

Some of the reflections were found in side pools featuring salt-crusted, cracked mud... a great foreground!

The wind was still up as susnet approached, so I selected a site that would be fairly protected by the wind but still have a decent view of any remaining clouds to the East that might catch color as the sun set. The color show to the East wasn't as intense as I had hoped, but we had completed a long productive day of exploration and photography, so I couldn't complain.

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Penumbral Lunar Eclipse While the Full Moon Sets

With the middle of the eclipse forecast for 6:38am, the exact full moon time at 6:50 and sunrise time of 7:03, this was promising to be one of the easiest and most colorful eclipses to cover in a long time. The only challenge was the weather. Rain the night before caused me to give up trying to catch the moonrise or moonset in the Bay Area, and when I looked outside at 6:30am it looked like gray clouds were still dominating the skies in Auburn as well.

I decided to head to a nearby viewpoint anyway in case by some miracle there was a hole in the clouds that I could catch the moon through, and there it was, fully visible! More often than not when I take a chance on weather, it pays off handsomely.

Return to Whitney Portal

Mt. Whitney at Dawn, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (www.MyPhotoGuides.com).

Whitney Portal in the Alabama Hills offers arches, boulders, and stunning views of the Sierra Nevada range, including Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States. The light is particularly good at dawn.

Joshua Tree National Park

Dawn in Joshua Tree, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (in Death Valley NP).

As my alarm went off in the Hidden Valley Campground in Joshua Tree National Park, it looked like it was going to be completely overcast, so I almost didn't get up. I figured that I might still get some decent cloud reflection shots at Barker Dam, so I got up anyway and headed the short distance to the trailhead. It's a good thing that I did go, because the clouds started breaking up rapidly, just in time for a decent sunrise show.

After catching some nice sunrise cloud shots at the trailhead, I headed down the trail towards Barker Dam. A short way down the trial the sun came out briefly, illuminating the rocks and offering tree silhouettes.

When I arrived at the reservoir, there were some stunning cloud reflections that I could quickly capture by moving around the edge of the water.

A Day in the Life of a Landscape Photographer

Lake Tahoe Sunrise, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (just back from Death Vly).

Knowing that there would be a full moon over the weekend, I looked up the moon rise time and confirmed that it was 98% full, and rising about a dozen minutes before sunset, so it would be high enough in the sky to be in sunset shots. I needed a low, distant horizon so local hills wouldn't block the moon. I also wanted a subject about 1000 feet away so I could zoom in to 200mm or more to get the moon large in the frame, and have the other subject present and in focus as well.

I chose Mono Lake, but decided to start the day in Truckee so I could catch sunrise at Lake Tahoe. I drove to Sand Harbor State Park on the Nevada side, but it doesn't open until 8am, so I used another turnout not far away. The moon was just setting across the lake. The sunrise came on gradually over the next 20 minutes, and I tried to move around over the icy, snowy shoreline rocks to get some good perspectives (sample result above).

Next stop was Starbucks in Minden to check out my dawn results. After appeasing my coffee cravings while performing a few quick edits, I was back on the road. While passing Topaz Lake in Nevada, I noticed that the valley was full of smoke, which gave the light an interesting dreamy quality.

Then it was on to Travertine Hot Springs in Bridgeport to soak in a hot spring, sip a beer, and contemplate the upcoming sunset shoot. (A photographer can never be too prepared.) A nice family dropped by with their 85 year old grandma, who kept threatening to skinny dip. It seemed like a good time to move on...

Upon arriving in the mono Lake area, I first took a walk a the County Park access point, which was convenient and had some interesting reflections and lighting as the shadows of the Sierras reached out into the lake.

I arrived at my target site on Mono Lake with minutes to spare. My DeLorme GPS has a Sun/Moon feature that confirmed the moon rise time, but it also shows a compass with the Sun and moon on it, so I could point the sun symbol towards the setting sun and there was an arrow pointing to the approximate place on the horizon where the moon would come up. I walked a couple of hundred yards until I could line that forecasted rise spot up with the tufa limestone structures that I wanted to shoot. By the way, you can get a Java program for cell phones that support Java that will do the same thing (most phones know your approximate location info from the position of local cell towers, some provide location based services using a GPS signal).

The moon started to peek out over the hills right on time, and I adjusted my tripod position maybe 6-12 feet to place the moon where I wanted it in the scene. I started with a 70-200mm lense and gradually worked my way up to a wide angle lens as the sunset darkened and spread across the sky.



























With sunset occurring so early in the Winter, you have plenty of time to capture it then change locations for some night shots. On the way back to Truckee I stopped at Lake Tahoe again to shoot a few frames under the full moon.


Join me June 3-6, 2009 to catch the full moon rise at Mono Lake and to pursue other stunning images in the dramatic Eastern Sierra landscape, with classroom sessions on photographic technique and digital imaging postprocessing. I'll also be offering an optional extension into Yosemite National Park on Sunday, June 7:
www.mountainhighworkshops.com

I'll also offer a Fall Colors tour of the Eastern Sierra in October (dates TBD). Contact me for details, or to get on my announcement list for future workshops.