Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn't going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.



I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here's the best edit I've produced so far:

Stunning Sunset Mono Lake Moon Rise Coming December 24

Mono Lake moon rise November 16, 2013

A few times each year, the moon rises at just the right time to be visible during sunset, while there's enough light on the landscape to capture that in the photo as well.  That will happen this month on December 24, Christmas Eve.  I'm not suggesting that you ditch the family to go chase the moon, just step outside at sunset, look to the east, and you'll have one more reason for the night to be a particularly memorable one.

If you might also want to photograph the moon, I've collected some notes on this blog post that I started in 2006:

How to Plan Great Full Mooon Rise and Set Shots
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2006/11/plan-ahead-for-great-full-moon-rise-and.html

I'm not sure if we'll head down to Mono Lake.  I've been going there for decades and my kids have been going there for all of their lives, so it holds a lot of sentimental value for us. It's pretty close by, so if the weather is nice, we may head down there.  The light could be particularly nice around: 4:35 - 4:55 pm.  Ping me on social media if your'e down there, in case we're standing a few feet down the shore from each other!

Mono Lake moon rise November 2010. How to plan great full moon rise and set photos: https://t.co/yKX1p2lNvt #Canon pic.twitter.com/taLY0bi1qv

— DSLR astronomer (@DSLRastronomy) December 11, 2015

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

Full Moon Rise at Mono Lake in January

When I arrived to shoot the full moon rise over Mono Lake in January, there were 4-5 carloads of photographers capturing the sunset, but none of them were there for the moon rise.  Having planned the shot in advance using +The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE), I told them to stick around for another 10 minutes. 
It was fun hanging out with +Amy Heiden +Tran Mai and +Lori Hibbett in the Mono Basin for the day.  There was fog on the lake all the way through 3 pm, but fortunately it cleared just in time for the moon rise.  When we arrived at the Old Marina site +Blair Pountney joined us.  He had seen my notes on the coming moon rise last week and drove up from Bishop.  Then we ran into +Travis Theune and +Schmoo Theune of Smugmug, so we had a fun little group of photographers gathered, from various parts of the state!

I captured about 400 images, enough for this time-lapse video.  I had problems with a light tripod in the intermittent gusty wind which developed, so the result is pretty funny.  After the moon rise, Amy, Tran, Lori and I went on to shoot into the night by the light of the full moon, so check their streams in the coming days for night snowy landscape shots. I decided that meeting Travis and Schmoo was a great reminder to update my Mono Lake gallery on +SmugMug (I'm not as diligent about that as I should be), so if you're curious to see more of my work from Mono Lake, here's the link to that gallery, where you can see a larger copy of this image.

Mono Lake moon rise January 2013.  See a larger copy (or buy prints) on SmugMug.

If you'd like to plan your own sunset full moon rise shots, here's my blog post on planning to shoot sunset moon rise events using TPE:

Put Sunset Full Moon Rise Dates on your Calendar
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2010/12/09/put-sunset-full-moon-rise-dates-on-your-2011-calendar/

Here's one of my blog posts on creating time-lapse videos:

Create a Timelapse Video on Your Digital Camera
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/08/01/create-a-timelapse-video-on-your-digital-camera/

Thanks to astronomer +Philip Plait for blogging about my moon rise coverage on his +Bad Astronomy blog on +Slate magazine.  He provides a nice diagram explaining this "Belt of Venus" pink over blue light that you get at Mono lake after sunset: Moon Rise over an Arsenic Lake.

In the past he featured the sunset thunderstorm I caught in early 2012, as well as my lunar eclipse timelapse video on his Bad Astronomy blog on +Discover Magazine.

He also featured the Perseid meteor shower in 2008 shot in California's Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest:
The Perseids, Writ Large
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/08/25/perseids-writ-large/

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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.

Don't Tread On Me

Don't Tread On Me, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I was on my way down from shooting a sunset on Monitor Pass in when I came across a rattlesnake in the road. I rarely see rattlesnakes in the Sierra Nevada, but they're vital to helping control rodent populations and reducing the risk of bubonic plague and hantavirus, so I helped ths one off the road. Sadly, it was injured, perhaps by some ignorant motorist who would prefer a slow, painful death from black plague? I've never had a rattlesnake strike at me or act offensive in any way.

Instead, they warn me of their presence, and move in the opposite direction at the earliest convenience. They're shy, reclusive creatures and avoid us whenever possible. I always feel priveleged at having seen one.

"I recollected that her eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids—She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.—She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.—As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shewn and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal:—Conscious of this, she never wounds till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.—Was I wrong, Sir, in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America?"
- Benjamin Franklin

Gem on the John Muir Trail

Early Morning Light at Garnet Lake, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Next on the itinerary was Garnet Lake. Following the John Muir Trail from Thousand Island Lake to Garnet Lake was an easy two miles and change, so I had time to shoot a few pictures at Ruby Lake along the way, and to catch some Brook Trout for dinner once I arrived. Fortuantely a guide-led tour of hikers arrived to help finish dinner so I could run off to catch sunset.

It wasn't clear whether or not sunset color would punch through the clouds, but in the nick of time the sun came through and the skies really lit up. I had a few short minutes to run around and see how many compositions I could capture. There were far more than I could do justice to, but I knew that I was bound to have a couple of keepers.

I returned to camp to enjoy some nice "blue hour" light, with a faint echo of sunset light from the distant horizon still painting the bottoms of the clouds.

For sunrise I moved further west along the northern shore of the lake, enjoying the changing light on Banner Peak and on the lake's islands.

Eastern Sierra Light Rocks Again

Avocets at Sunset, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

I've been pursuing great light in the Eastern Sierra for many years. But it's only occasionally that you find an interesting wildlife subject willing to let you capture a few frames during that great light. So when I came across these American avocets feeding in brilliant orange sunset light, and they let me approach within a reasonable shooting distance, I had to shift focus from landscape to wildlife, or at least make the wildlife a key component in any landscape images I shot. So I focused on the avocets until the light faded signifcantly and their movements started to blur.

I was shooting with only one camera, so I didn't have much time or flexibility to switch between 200-400mm zoomed shots and much wider sunset landscape shots. So I chose to shoot the birds towards the sunset light, I did miss some incredible color on the clouds overhead and behind me.
Fortunately after the main light show subsided, there was still a lot of nice saturated blue light, and a subtle echo of sunset light re-emerged as well. I was able to productively shoot until nearly an hour after the "official" sunset time. All in all it was a great evening!

Sunset Trees Reflection

Sunset Trees Reflection II, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

Sometimes the simple, minimalist shots resonate with us. This scene was found on one of the reservoirs not far From Truckee, California. The particularly wet/humid Spring we've been having has been great for broken couds at sunset, while moderate temperatures have minimized wind.

BACK UP YOUR PHOTO DATA NOW!

BACK UP YOUR PHOTO DATA NOW!, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Columbia River Gorge tonight).

It looks like my new 1.5 TB disk drive may be damaged beyond repair. It was the primary storage for images form my most recent trips, and on the road I rarely have access to three power plugs for several hours to perform the backups that I should have been performing, so I may have lost months of work, including the first 9 days of my current trip to national parks with my kids.

I was just about to back it up...

I'll try a data recover service when I determine which ones are most likely to be able to work on physically damaged drives, but the drive was dropped, so it's most likely damaged beyond repair.

I'll only know the extent of the loss when I swing back by Northern California and see what data I have on my next most recent backup drive (I have another 1TB with me, but it contains mostly older files up to 2007).

Don't assume that you can back up your files tomorrow or on your next stop in a trip. They could be lost if you don't duplicate them immediately.

Dogwood Season in Yosemite Valley

Yosemite Dogwood, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (Truckee today).

The dogwood are in full boom in Yosemite Valley, with no new buds apparent. The trees have most of their leaves showing, which can obscure the flowers somewhat (for photography it's best to catch them a little on the early side).

Up at higher elevations the dogwoods are just starting to bloom, with a few early ones showing up in the 5000 to 6000 foot elevations as you leave the Valley South through the Wawona Tunnel and on both sides of Crane Flat. I'd give those areas another week or so.

The redbud trees are also blooming. For this shot I chose somewhat of a reverse composition, where the framing element is the subject, and what normally would be a strong subject (Lower Yosemite Falls) is a background element to show context.





Yosemite National Park's Glacier Point road is open, so I headed up to Sentinel Dome for sunset. Tioga Pass is targeted to open Friday, May 22.







Not the best of my photos, but I thought it was a cool thing to see, so I'm sharing it anyway.
I counted at least 9 climbing parties camping out, although their lights were not all visible at once.
I understand that it generally takes at least 2 to 4 days to climb El Capitan. The camps do seem pretty well divided into three levels that a four day, three night climb might require.

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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