Oregon Photography Tour: Wine Country to the Oregon Coast

Waking up in Roseburg, I was at a loss as to what to go photograph at dawn. I decided to sleep in and go wine tasting instead. I found a number of interesting wines, particularly at Abacela Winery. Eventually my focus returned to photography and I headed for the coast.

I reached the Oregon Coast near Bandon, in time to check a few viewpoints to find a good spot for sunset. The Face Rock Wayside provided a stirway for beach access, scenic rock offshore, and plenty of flat, wet sand on which to catch the sky's reflection.
This was my first sunset on the Oregon Coast, and it looked like there would be too much cloud cover and nothing happening. Then suddenly a hole started appearing, and I loaded up my gear, grabbed the tripod, and rushed down the stairway and onto the sand.

I caught some nice shots of the hole opening up in the clouds. I believe the rock to the left is referred to as "wizard hat."


However before coming down to the beach I had moved things around between a backpack and my fanny pack. I was in such a hurry that somehow I ended up on the beach with no filters. I should have used a graduated neutral density filter for most of my shots, but using a tripod and brackeint exposures I was able to use HDR processing and have the results turn out OK. That was fortunate, because it ended up being one of my favorite sunsets of the trip!

Here are a few of my other shots from the Bandon area.

Oregon Photography Tour: Crater Lake and Rogue River Waterfalls

After a stop in the Klamath Marsh to catch sunset, I arrived in the Crater Lake area late at night and camped by Diamond Lake. Dawn could bring an excellent view of Mt. Thielsen across the lake. Dawn actually arrived late and gray, so I caught up on some much-needed sleep.

My first few stops along the road circling Crater Lake's caldera were gray and very windy, but by the time I reached the visitor center, the clouds had broken somewhat and I could see that Crater Lake's 1,943 feet deep waters take on the most amazing turquoise blue tones under the influence of a blue sky.

My most recent Internet access had revealed a weather forecast for partly cloudy skies on the Oregon Coast with a fair amount of sun for the next few days, so I headed down Highway 138 along the Rogue River. I stopped at a visitor center near Diamond Lake and determined that I could stop at several waterfalls along the way. I'd simply see how far I could get by nightfall.

One of my stops was Whitehorse Falls, a small cascade into a punchbowl plunge pool.

Another stop was Tokatee Falls on the Rogue River, a dramatic three stage plunge over substantial basalt columns.

In the narrow canyon above Tokatee Falls, this fallen log was resisting the full force of the river. I used a polarizing filter to cut light and slow the shutter speed so the shot would show the motion.

I continued down to Roseburg for dinner and a motel.

Oregon Photography Tour: Fossil Lake Sand Dunes

After a night in a campground near the Painted Hills, with rain still forecast for the Oregon Coast, I set my sights for a large area on my Oregon map marked "sand dunes" out by the dry Fossil Lake, near Fort Rock and the town of Christmas Valley. What could be a safer place, I thought, than sand dunes near a dry lake, for a photographer spending a rainy week in Oregon?

Although the woman in the BLM office I visited to get maps said that she had never heard of people visiting the dunes to hike and take pictures (why do we ignore warning signs like that until we remember them later with 20/20 hindsight?), the dunes appeared to be oriented east to west, so I envisioned a sea of dunes that would be warmly lit by the sun at dusk and dawn.

It was going to be a 3-4 hour drive, so partway into the trip to stretch my legs I stopped at Newberry National Volcanic Monument in the Deschutes National Forest. One of the attractions there is the Lava River Cave, a lava tube which extends over a mile underground. Upon reaching one long, straight section, I tried some 30 second exposures. I determined that the gas lanterns rented by the entrance booth were a bit too bright, so I carried a flashlight (red end, white light shining on the floor) and triggered my camera flash multiple timestowards the walls as I rushed out 15 seconds and and then back for 15 seconds.

Having distracted myself from the long drive, I continued on towards the dunes. The drive seemed endless. Although I had a detailed BLM map and the road out to the dunes had been designated a "Scenic Byway" by the State of Oregon, The turns didn't seem to match my maps and the Scenic Byway was very poorly marked.

When I finally arrived at the primitive campground by the dunes, there was a group of maybe a dozen children riding around on tiny ATVs. It gave me the impression of a sort of miniature version of Mad Max. The parents were sitting by their pickup trucks drinking beers and watching approvingly.


Unfortunately the nearby dunes were sparse and widely spaced, overrun with ATV tracks, not particularly photogenic. I hiked out onto the dunes for a variety of sand pattern shots, but it didn't look good for dawn, so I decided to drive a couple of hours more to move on to Crater Lake.


I plotted the course on the map, and tooka a route that might get me to the Klamath Marsh for sunset.

Oregon Photography Tour: Mt. Hood to Painted Hills

On the morning of my second day, before leaving Mt. Hood, for old times' sake I had to have breakfast in Timberline Lodge. Timberline Lodge is a massive timber structure built as a Work Projects Administration (WPA) project to help employ people following the Great Depression. The lodge is filled with handmade furniture, rugs, and other items made by unskilled workers, under the guidance of skilled craftsmen. One of the most impressive parts of Timberline Lodge is the Great Room, featuring an octagonal, 3 hearth stone fireplace that rises several stories to the timber-framed roof above.

The breakfast was great, perhaps in part because my alternative had been to cook on a campstove on a wet table in the rain!

As a side note, if you've seen The Shining, you may recognize Timberline Lodge, as it was used for many of the exterior shots.

A trip to nearby Trillium Lake to catch Mt. Hood's reflection was fruitless due to cloud cover, so I got back on the road. After an overcast and rainy morning on Mt. Hood (picking ripe wild huckleberries was great, but not what I was in the state to do), I knew that I had to head further out towards Oregon's dry interior. I'd head first towards the Bend/Redmond area and let the weather steer me from there.

By Madras I could see threatening storm clouds hovering over the Cascades in the Mt. Jeferson to Bend/Mt. Bachelor area. I knew that the John Day Mountains reached heights in the 9000 foot range and I had never gotten out there while I lived in Oregon, so I aimed for the center of the state. I had seen a picture of the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds, and it seemed to be a reachable goal for sunset.


I explored the hills under overcast skies for a while in late afternoon, then the clouds broke up as sunset appoached. I used a circular polarizer on my wide angle lens to help capture definition in the clouds, also bracketing exposures so I could use HDR processing

There wasn't much happening in the sky until I reached a ridge that gave me a great eastward view of the bare hills, with a massive thundercloud on the horizon behind them. The range of light from the brightest sun-lit clouds to the hills they were shadowing on the ground was enormous. I'd need a long exposure for the detail on the hills, a graduated neutral density filter to bring the sky closer to the hills in exposure, three exposure bracketing to allow for additional HDR processing if needed. I also used various combinations of a Tiffen Enhancing filter and a Cokin Sunset filter to help the clouds hold color for the shots I would send through HDR processing. As it turned out, the exposures were too long and the clouds were moving too fast to use a typical 3 shot HDR sequence. For this result I tried every combination of two shots to identify the best one, then further noise-reduced and color-corrected the HDR result in Photoshop Elements. To think that some people think that all landscape photographers do is show up and trip a shutter!

To further enhance the realism of my shots I often perform the best possible edit that I can muster on the best single exposure, then blend that in with my most realistic HDR result. The HDR version contributes shadow and highlight detail, while the single exposure helps enforce natural color tone and light intensities.

As the setting sun started painting the cloud orange and touching the broken clouds above, to the west the sun shot rays of orange between mountaintops and onto the underside of the clouds above there as well. Not wanting to miss either spectacle, I was running back and forth across the ridge alternating a couple of shots in each direction, capturing vertical and horizontal compositions while bracketing exposures and varying filters and combinations.

After a night in a campground near the Painted Hills, with rain still forecast for the Oregon Coast, I set my sights for a large area on my Oregon map marked "sand dunes" out by the dry Fossil Lake, near Fort Rock and the town of Christmas Valley. What could be a safer place, I thought, than sand dunes near a dry lake, for a photographer spending a rainy week in Oregon?

Oregon Photography Tour: Columbia Gorge

My trip started with the 600 mile drive to Portland, OR. With rain forecast for the next week, it didn't make sense to visit the Hoh Rain Forest and the beaches on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Having lived in Portland for 3 years in the 1980s, I knew that if I set mysights inland towards the dry Eastern side of the Cascades, I'd probably be able to avoid the worst of the rain.

The Columbia River Gorge was a logical way to head out of town, but it was raining and even having brought a giant golf umbrella and towel for frequent drying, most of my shots have some degree of water drops on the lense. The drizzle stopped briefly during my hike into Oneonta Gorge, so I was able to capture this shot of Oneonta Falls.



My first night out of Portland, after a dinner stop at the Full Sail Brewery in the town of Hood River, I headed towards the rian shadow of Mt. Hood. I still had a Forest Service map from when I lived in Portland years ago, and I tried to find a campsite that would have a sunset and sunrise view of the mountain.

This site, "Clouds Rest" had a promising name, and while it seemed to take foreever to reach up a decaying dirt road, my effort was rewarded with this sunset view of the breaking storm, over a sea of wildflowers.



It was raining and gray when I woke up, so it was fortunate that I made it to the campsite in time for sunset!

I heard a couple of days later that the Washington coast received record rain on the days that I had planned to visit, so having the flexibility to head for a drier part of Oregon really paid off!

Yosemite in Winter!

This was quite an experience! I'm uploading photos, then I'll tell you about it shortly...

Fall Photography Contest Winner

In 2006 the Sierra Sun newspaper in Truckee, California ran a Fall photo contest. Places were not awarded but I believe this was the only shot given a full page spread. It's an honor for me to do well in a Fall colors contest among local photographers in the Lake Tahoe area, given the wealth of shooting opportunities and the experience and local knowledge of the people living there.

This shot was taken on an outing to the Mono Lake area, not far from Yosemite's eastern entrance. I was in the Mill Creek drainage, which I had shot before, so I was looking for something different. This spring seemed like a great opportunity to put some motion and bring an element of time into the genre.

You can find basic Fall colors shooting tips in articles all over the Internet: use a polarizing filter to cut glare, underexpose by 1/3 stop to increase saturation, shoot at calm hours of the day, avoid mottled sunlight. What I never see mentioned, but you can notice in a high percentage of Fall colors still life shots (stop reading here if you don't want to notice soemthing quirky about these shots from now on) is that in photos, leaves have only fallen with the bright sides facing up! Surely gravity does not act differently in the Fall, but rather photographers eager to make their shots "just right" are at least arranging leaves, possibly collecting and carrying the best ones around and adding them to their shots. With a little searching you could probably find celebrity leaves, which make a cameo appearance in many different settings. This was one of my experiments with leaf arranging. In fact, I was collecting and carrying leaves for a few dozen yards before I finally found a good setting to photograph them in. To appease my own preference for realism I left a few token leaves "upside down," with their least colorful side up. It's realistic without being a simple stenographic copy of a time and place.

Death Valley to Bristecone Pines: 10,000 Vertical Feet!

When a blizzard hits you at over 10,000 feet, run for the desert! (Details to follow shortly...)

The Wave: Medusa's Sandbox!

Story under development... check back soon!

From Yosemite Towards Las Vegas

Fall in Yosemite Valley

How To Plan for Great Full Moon Rise and Set Shots!

As a general rule of thumb the full moon rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. This is very convenient because you can get the moon illuminated by the orange glow of the sun, with its color and size magnified by the atmosphere, low enough to place it near some of your favorite subjects on the ground (such as reflected in your favorite lake or fountain). Turn in any other direction, and you also have the sunrise/sunset itself to shoot, as well as subjects side-lit by the warm, low-angled light!

In practice however the actual moon set and rise times, and how they relate to sunset and sunrise, will depend upon the time of year, your position on the earth, and your position towards the east or west side of your time zone. Fortunately you can simply look up the time for your town. I'll get to that in a moment.

First I'd like to point out that you often don't want to shoot on the exact full moon date. The moon's brightness can be too great unless the sun is still lighting the ground with enough intensity. Fortunately the moon rise and set times move a little later each day, so a day or two before the "official" full moon it will be rising while the foreground is still lit, or if you have mountains on the horizon it will be high enough to clear than the horizon while the sun sets. Similarly, the day or two after "full moon" is often best for dawn moon set shots, since after the full moon date it remains in the sky above the horizon as the sun rises and lights the scene.

For example, in November where I live the sun is rising around 7am and setting around 4:46 (it changes a minute or so each day), so the November 24 moon rise at 4:24pm should be lit by the setting sun. Also that morning's moon set at 7:15am will be right after the rising sun has started to light up the landscape around 7am.

In the past I used the U.S. Naval Observatory to produce charts of sun and moon rise and set times.  Here are examples of the rise and set times (in 24 hour military time) for October, November and December, with the link you can use to look up times for your location (assuming no mountains on your horizon of course):

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
Rise and Set for the Moon for 2007
Pacific Standard Time

Oct..........Nov..........Dec......
Rise Set Rise Set Rise Set
h m h m h m h m h m h m
24 1615 0432 1642 0719 1738 0818
25 1645 0550 1742 0835 1853 0906
26 1721 0710 1851 0941 2005 0943
27 1806 0831 2004 1034 2114 1014
28 1900 0949 2117 1115 2219 1039

If you have a calendar in your cell phone or PDA you can program rise and set times in, even months ahead of time, and don't forget to add an alarm 45 to 60 minutes ahead of time to remind you to get to the site 30-45 minutes early to plan and set up for your shots.

Today I mainly use a free app on my PC, "The Photographer's Ephemeris" (TPE) to plan for the moon position in more detail on a +Google Earth satellite image:

Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments

http://activesole.blogspot.com/2010/03/anticipating-sun-and-moon-position.html

Using TPE you can check the moon's altitude in the sky at any moment, so with a little extra math to check the geometry, you can set up your camera in advance to line the moon up with just about any land-based object.

As an example, here's the moon during a lunar eclipse, which I planned to capture as it passed right through the tip of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco.  Since I was shooting images to create a time-lapse video, I had to put the tripod in the exact right place at least 15 - 20 minutes ahead of time:


It's amazing the tools photographers have at their fingertips these days!

Shooting tips:

Set your camera on manual focus and focus it a little behind the closest object you want in focus (depth of field only comes a short way forward, longer towards the distance). Use a small aperture if you have a tripod and are taking a wide shot, but if the exposure gets long and your zoomed in on something, remember that the moon is constantly moving and it will blur, so consider widening to f/8 or more (best to bracket f-stop settings and get the shot than to wish the next day that you had done something different).

The lighting will change rapidly in the course of a few minutes, so bracket your exposures ligher and darker, and consider using your camera's exposure compensation to darken most shots (you can combine it with automated exposure bracketing in many cameras) so the moon won't be a blurry, washed out mess. Plan ahead to have a foreground subject, a scene that the moon and possibly sunrise/sunset simply adds another dimension to (the moon itself has been done once or twice before). If the exposure range is too great between the bright moon and your darker foreground subjects, you can expose differently for the two and combine the shots later. You used to have to spend a lot of time in Photoshop to combine differently exposed shots, but now specialized "HDR" software will do the work for you automatically (best to use 2 or 3 exposures AT LEAST 1.5 to 2 stops apart in exposure from each other). See my experience tip on HDR and download trial Photomatix software at HRDsoft.com, but you can do that later as long as you bracket shots and use a steady tripod (and best to use automated exposure bracketing) so multiple exposures will line up and can be automatically processed.  Search this blog for "HDR" for more information on the technique.  If you decide to buy Photomatix, you can get a 15% discount by using the coupon code JeffSullivan when you by it from its publisher HDRsoft: http://www.hdrsoft.com/order.php

Consider trying some shots using fill flash if your foreground subject is within the appropriate range (about 8-20 feet for most cameras). Dawn and dusk are also prime times for using graduated neutral density filters to darken the bright sky and bring out what's on the ground, enabling the camera to see what our eyes can see onsite.

If you'll be travelling during the prime full moon days, the equator is 25,000 miles in diameter and completes a revolution in 24 hours, so it's moving at over 1000 miles/hour, so a rough estimate would be that every 100 miles you move east will be a 6 minute earlier change to the rise and set times, and 100 miles west will be 6 minutes later... more or less.

You don't want to fumble around in the dark, so don't forget your tripod, flashlight, jacket, hat and gloves, bug repellent in the summer, and maybe a folding chair for long moonlit night or star trail shots.

Now go look up the moon rise and set times for your area, and plan ahead to go nail some great shots in the 3-5 great shooting days that the moon gives us each month!

Bodie State Historic Park, California

On the Eastern side of California's Sierra Nevada range, about a dozen miles north of Mono Lake lies Bodie State Historic Park. A ghost town from the 1880s that is kept in a state of “arrested decay,” it is one of the most complete and best preserved ghost towns in the West. The best access to Bodie is a turnoff from Highway 395 a few miles north of Conway Summit and a few miles south of Bridgeport. This route is paved for the first 10 miles or so, gravel for the last few miles.

The biggest challenge faced by photographers at Bodie may be the limited hours when people are allowed to be in the park. Ranger supervision is critical to preserve artifacts, so the park is normally only open from 8am to 7pm in the summer, and from 9am to 4pm in the winter. Obviously the park’s normal open hours won’t enable you to take any photos during the “golden hours” of light within one hour of sunrise and sunset. However, there’s a large hill directly east of the town, so you won’t get direct light from the sun striking the town until at least 90 minutes after scheduled sunrise anyway. There’s also a set of slightly smaller hills to the west, so any soft golden light you experience in town is more likely to come from the sun peeking through afternoon thunderclouds than it is to be coming from the glow of sunrise or sunset.

Two opportunities to visit Bodie outside of normal operating hours include a walking tour that runs from 5 to 7pm on summer weekends (currently $15), and “Photographers Days” allowing extended access hours from 30 minutes before sunrise until 30 minutes after sunset. Photographers Days are currently offered by the Bodie Historic Society on the 3rd Saturday of the month from May to October, in exchange for a donation to the society (currently $30). Since Bodie is at an elevation of over 8000 feet, it is likely to be very cold in the morning (temperatures and/or wind chill below freezing) in October, possibly May and September as well.

Eastern Sierra Fall Colors Tour: Hope Valley

Eastern Sierra Fall Colors Tour: Lee Vining Creek and Mill Creek

I didn't want to withhold these from you while I caught up on writing the stories!