Spring in Yosemite Valley

Big Sur

McWay Falls
Pfeiffer Beach

California Coast

Point Dume State Beach
Montana De Oro State Park
Morro Rock
Ant on a cactus blossom

Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve

"This State Reserve, nestled in the Antelope Buttes 15 miles west of Lancaster, California, is located on California's most consistent poppy-bearing land. Other wildflowers: owl's clover, lupine, goldfield, cream cups, and coreopsis, to name a few, share the desert grassland to produce a mosaic of color and fragrance each spring. As unpredictable as nature - the intensity and duration of the wildflower bloom varies yearly."

The poppies are approximately at peak bloom the weekend of April 19/20, but should be worth visiting for a couple more weeks at least.

Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve

Tehachapi Mountains Wildflowers

I was on my way to Antelope Poppy Reserve and stumbled upon these steep slopes covered with wildflowers off of highway 5 near the highway 138 exit towards Lancaster.

Wildflowers in Placer County

I went out exploring this morning in the Roseville to Auburn area. There are some scattered patches of lupine, poppies and vetch along Hwy 193 and Sierra College Blvd. This very nice patch of wildflowers is in Loomis, north on Sierra College Blvd. about a mile or two, at Clover Valley Road. Best in morning, as it's probably in shade in the afternoon. I was there 9-9:30am, and the poppies were just opening up for the day.

I returned a few days later shortly before sunset, and caught the flowers in shade under the blue light of a clear blue sky.

Bowling Ball Beach and the Mendocino Coast

I've been visiting California's North Coast for decades to go abalone diving, fishing, and for weddings, but I recently decided to try a dedicated photography trip to the area. My main objective was Bowling Ball Beach, where a minus tide is recommended to reach and photograph some unique round rocks that are covered at high tide. The minus tides tend to be in Winter and Spring, so I targeted dome of thelowest tides of the year in Early April when the low tide would coincide with sunrise.

I arrived early enough the day before to scout the area and catch a few nice sunset and dusk shots.

This is a 30 second exposure, which is long enough to abstract the motion of the waves into a misty flat surface. This version of the shot also boosts the saturation of the blue in the ocean and the sunset colors in the sky (Adobe Lightroom allows saturation adjustment of individual colors). Using 30 second exposures, each scene takes over 3 minutes: 30 seconds for the exposure, 30 seconds for the camera's noise reduction, then two more minutes for bracketed exposures. Then add any time for repositioning your tripod and framing the new shot. Sunset passes quickly at this rate, so pick your shots carefully but quickly. This sort of continuous use also drains batteries quickly, so have a spare on hand and consider how you're going to recharge before you go back out at dawn (I use an in-car charger).

The next morning I woke at 5am, well before my alarm, which would have allowed me to sleep in until 5:30. I often sleep in the back of my vehicle so there's no dew-soaked tent to pack. I pulled on some warm clothes and threw enough gear out of the driver's seat to enable me to drive off. I was staying at Manchester State Beach, one of the 48 parks that the State of California plans on closing this Summer due to poor fiscal management, so I only had an 8 mile, 15 minute drive to reach the beach.

When I arrived temperatures were chilly in the 40s with a light wind already blowing, so I bundled up in layers plus a windbreaker, a warm hat and fingerless gloves that convert to mittens so I can operate my camera and stay warm. To handle any shooting angle along the shore, including on slippery wet rocks or partway into the surf, I wore my fishing waders with high traction felt sole boots with steel-cleats. I made the short hike to the beach before sunrise, but there was no sunrise color to speak of, and the light remained uninteresting until sunlight started filtering through the blufftop trees.

There were some nice shots to be found among the rocks, as long as you avoided full sunlight.

Unfortunately one of the best shots showing the "bowling balls" on the leading lines in the bedrock happened to be in full sun, so it was a bit washed out at this tie of day. It will be worthwhile to return some day in the late afternoon to get better lighting.

I'll also want to return to try some very long exposures during a moonlit low tide, when the waves can be even more completely abstracted and star trails can add detail to the sky.

For more examples of images from this area, check out shots like this one and this. See also Jughandle State Park, Kibasilla Creek, Caspar Point / Jackass Creek, and so on.

Yosemite Valley with Snow

Aspen trees in Ahwahnee Meadow
Half Dome over Sentinel Bridge
Upstream from El Capitan Bridge
Cathedral Beach
El Capitan

Horsetail Falls Backlit at Sunset

Horsetail Fall in Yosemite Valley is backlit by the setting sun for roughly two weeks each year. As the sun falls behind the vertical face of El Capitan, it selectively lights this waterfall with its orange sunset glow.

This was an amazing spectacle to witness. Lasting only from 30 to 15 minutes before the sun goes down, the lighting gradually grows in intensity and color for the last 5 minutes or so. On the nights I watched, it was like seeing a narrow strip of lava flowing down the face of El Capitan.

The weather and the water flows often don't cooperate, I was shut out by back to back blizzards last year, so I was fortunate to see this on two consecutive evenings in 2008.


There are two good shooting locations:

1) Along the bank of the Merced River near the turnout just East of the Cathedral Beach picnic area (which is closed for Winter). This location is described on page 24 of my 320-page guidebook "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South".

2) In the vicinity of the Cathedral picnic area on Northside Road in the valley, 1/2 mile East of the El Capitan bridge. That North road is closed for maintenance, so it's a 1 mile walk each way from where the El Captan bridge road hits Southside Road. This location is also described in "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South".

#1 is a 75 foot walk on top of the snow from where you park, while #2 is a 2 mile round trip on closed roads (including a couple of hundred yards over snow at the closed picnic area), with the return half after dark. Make sure you're at one of them 45 minutes before sunset, because the best show is roughly from 30 to 15 minutes before sundown, but that could change as the sun moves each day. To get a good selection of where to place your tripod for the "easy" spot #1, consider arriving 1.5 hours ahead of sunset.

Spring Wildflowers in California

Here are some field trip ideas, with links to sites where you can check for updates on wildflower timing and intensity this year:

Joshua Tree National Park:
"Wildflower season usually begins with the large, cream-colored blooms of the Joshua trees in late February, followed by colorful annuals at the lower elevations around the south boundary of the park. Sometime in March, the bloom will follow rising temperatures into the higher elevations of the park. Cacti usually wait until April or May to produce their bright, waxy flowers."

Mojave Desert National Preserve:
"In general, spring flowering begins as temperatures rise -- first at lower elevations in February and later at higher elevations in March and April. On mountain tops above 5,000 feet blooms are as late as June. Some believe that spectacular desert blooms occur on an average about once every twenty years and others say that an ideal year comes once every three or four decades."

Added attraction:
"At about 600 feet in height, Kelso Dunes in Mojave National Preserve are the third tallest in North America. "

Daffodill Hill, Amador County:
"Each spring, from mid-March through mid-April, Daffodil Hill explodes with thousands of blooms, attracting visitors from around the world. It is estimated that today, Daffodil Hill is carpeted with over 300,000 bulbs. Daffodil Hill is in a beautiful alpine setting at an elevation of over 3,000 feet. With pine trees, an old barn, wagon wheels, and rusting mining equipment and farming tools, it appeals to anyone with a love of nature. Flowers are everywhere, with pea-fowl, chickens, pigeons and lambs making themselves at home."

Anza Borrego Desert State Park, San Diego County:
"Park botanists estimate the peak of the bloom this year will be the first two weeks of March"

Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve:
This State Reserve, nestled in the Antelope Buttes 15 miles west of Lancaster, California, is located on California's most consistent poppy-bearing land. Other wildflowers: owl's clover, lupine, goldfield, cream cups, and coreopsis, to name a few, share the desert grassland to produce a mosaic of color and fragrance each spring. As unpredictable as nature - the intensity and duration of the wildflower bloom varies yearly.

Death Valley National Park:
"The peak bloom is variable depending on temperatures and rainfall, but can be expected around mid to late March."

A good general site to check is:
Desert USA's Desert Wildflower Watch

Tame HDR to Produce More Realistic Images

For about a year now I’ve been bracketing exposure on most shots so I have the option of using high dynamic range (HDR) software to increase highlight and shadow detail in my shots.

As noted in this article at NatureScapes.net, digital cameras can capture a range of about 8 stops of light, while film cameras cover about eleven, and your eye covers 14, while an actual outdoor scene may cover 17. HDR software can help you restore some of that range of light and color that your film camera could capture, or that your eye might see.

Many people are now experimenting with or using HDR software, but it can be difficult to produce natural-looking results. By now the majority of my images on this site have some degree of HDR postprocessing involved. In the interest of timely posting, many are first pass edits that I'm not fully satisfied with or done fien tuning yet, but you can decide for yourself whether or not I'm on the right track and my experience might offer some value for you.

Here are some techniques and tricks I've learned to better control my HDR results in an attempt to produce more natural results. I consider this to be a list of basic to intermediate tips. I'm working on a list of more advanced advice on tips and tradeoffs to consider when handling some of your more challenging shooting and postprocessing situations.

Shoot RAW and work only from file formats that preserve maximum tonality data
- Compared to JPEG which has 8 bits of color information, my RAW files have 12 bits, and the extra 4 bits provide 16X more shades of each primary color. In simple terms the HDR software works with 4096 levels of each color instead of 256. The difference can be very noticeable in the results, especially in areas with subtle shading such as blue sky and orange sunsets. Working with JPEG files frankly produced crappy results for many of my shots. Some new cameras just starting to ship now produce RAW files with 14 bit color depth, so the HDR software will have over 8000 levels of each primary color to work with in RAW files instead of 256 in JPEG.

Consider your brightest and darkest shots from any HDR sequence. Using JPEG you're settling for 256 color shades instead of 4096 in 12 bit RAW, dramatically reducing subtle shades by a factor of 16X in exactly those darkest and lightest areas that you're trying to salvage. Assuming 2 stop spacing of shots, perhaps the results where I've noticed a clear difference occurred with colors and brightness values occurring in the 4 ev stops beyond all of the other exposures (the more detailed color data two stops above and two stops below all other shots, no matter what total range you're covering).

- RAW also enables you to change the white balance setting. Want to better preserve the color in your sunset? If your first HDR run on a shot reduces the color too much, try running HDR processing again using the shade or cloudy white balance setting for a warmer (more orange/yellow) tone. You don’t have that option, and can’t achieve the same results, working from JPEG files.

- As noted by the NatureScapes.net article:
Further, the camera applies a tone curve, compressing shadow tones in order to favor highlights. Since I personally find that shadow tones contribute a lot to my HDR work, I would not like to sacrifice them. Finally, introducing JPEG compression artifacts (however slight) into the HDR process may degrade image quality.
I understand there are arguments in favor of shooting JPEG. Typically the benefits raised are to get more continuous frames, more storage capacity, and potentially minimize subsequent workflow effort in RAW conversion. However, in my opinion, these factors are not particularly relevant for HDR work, especially landscape photography as discussed here.

- If you ever intend to "go pro" and submit to stock photography agencies, you'll be happy that you saved the original 16 bit TIFF output from your HDR runs (retaining your full 12 or 14 bit RAW quality, further expanded via HDR into the 16 bit TIFF color space), and don't have to re-run HDR interactively on thousands of archived RAW files to retain value from your shots. (I'm not talking about "microstock" agencies, which are fine with you spending hours to produce and manage high quality JPEG images that can be sold for pennies for online work.)

Use a Tripod and Use Auto Exposure Bracketing
- The less you touch your camera, the more likely your shots will overlay well and produce a sharp image. HDR software such as Photomatix may have the functionality to attempt to get misaligned shots to register well, but don’t count on it; it seems almost as likely to further misalign your shots. Having the camera take the shots as fast as possible also reduces any movement within the scene (leaves, clouds, etc.) that might turn into distracting ghost images in the result... better to prevent the problem and spend any postprocessing time doing something creative rather than trying to repair or salvage a shot with motion artifacts.

Use Interactive Mode, not Batch
- The default settings for Photomatix software for example seem to desaturate and overexpose many images and leave them with unrealistic halos of light around dark objects. HDR processing can reduce noise in some cases, enhance it in others. If you care about the quality of your results, all of these challenges are best faced in interactive mode.

Tame Halos: Set Light Smoothing to High or Very High
- This is your #1 tool to fight distracting light halos that may flag your results as HDR output, what some people might refer to as "overcooked." I set it "very high" at first, then back off a notch or two to see how much HDR the scene can handle.

Tame Noise: Adjust Micro Smoothing
- On some sequences HDR can cancel out noise, for others it might interpret severe noise as valid data and enhance it! Increase the Micro Smoothing setting to smooth out HDR-enhanced noise.

Restore Color: Postprocess in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements
- Since your HDR software shifted light intensities and color tones, something as simple as Auto Contrast and/or Auto Color Correction can make a lot of difference when trying to restore natural-looking lighting and color. Noise reduction can be needed too.

Restore a Natural Look: Layer and Blend HDR Result with a Single Exposure
- Sometimes my best results with HDR software are not acceptable, but neither are my results trying my best to balance the exposure and color in one of my single exposures for the same shot. Consider blending both your best single edit in with your HDR result! The single edit will most likely have better color and shading and the HDR result will have more shadow and highlight detail. A 50/50 or 60/40 blend may still not be a perfect result, but it may be better than either of the two results before you blended them!

I'd be curious to know what other techniques people have found useful, specifically when their intention is to create realistic-looking results.

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

(I'm still tuning the focus of this site. If you like my inclusion of experience and technique tips in this blog, drop me a line to let me know in my guestbook. Thanks!)

Up In Smoke

My first attempt at editing a couple of smoke shots together, using layers and basic Photoshop Elements tools like dodge, burn, eraser.

To get this result I shot incense smoke from about 3 feet away. I used an external flash mounted on my camera (head rotated to mainly bounced off a wall to the side), manually set f/8 and 1/200 sec. (ISO 100), and had a dark background (black $2 disposable table cloth from a party store) a few feet behind.

I then edited a couple of shots together, using layers and basic Photoshop Elements tools like dodge, burn, eraser. The blue was in the smoke but I saturated it.

For more examples and technique ideas such as false coloring and mirroring, see: www.flickr.com/groups/artsmoke/

Monterey Bay Aquarium

Natural Bridges State Beach, California

San Francisco Zoo

Night Photography with Meetup.com Photographers

Here are a few photos from tonight's outing with the Northern California Photography group, which organizes frequent outings through Meetup.com.

I used my Canon's Auto Exposure Bracketing function to take exposures darker and lighter than the automatic exposure recommendation, and I adjusted that recommended center exposure darker to reduce overexposure of the neon signs. I found that one to two stops underexposure seemed to produce the best results.

To spice things up a bit I decided to try some special effects. I had such good interesting results with zoom blur that I stuck with that for the evening. My best results seemed to be at ISO 100, f/16 or f/22, yielding an automatic exposure (after exposure compensation to make it a stop or two darker than the default camera recommendation) of 2 to 8 seconds, giving me plenty of time to make a slow, smooth zoom. For these shots I eventually tightened the bracketing to its small increments of 1/3 to 2/3 of one stop, not really doing much with exposure, just ensuring that I had multiple attempts at a given shot so I would have one with a smooth zoom and minimal vibration.

For night "cityscape" photos I processed my exposure bracketed files with Photomatix HDR (High Dynamic Range) software to extend the limited dynamic range of my digital camera and get better shadow and hightlight detail. Next time I want to use light sources (spotlight, flash), and try some handheld shots.

To get yourself out shooting more often, in a variety of environments and under a variety of conditions, in a productive learning environment sharing ideas and tips with other photographers, I highly recommend that you look into local groups through Meetup.com!