Aftger popping into Starbucks in Coursegold for some Internet time, I continued on to Yosemite Valley just in time for sunset.
This is when the sunset light should have been striking Horsetail Falls as it spilled off or El Capitan, but the waterfall didn't seem to be flowing, and the light didn't reach that spot anyway. The sunset light selectively falling on Horsetail Falls is a rare annual event, so unless the weather forecast for this weekend clears up enough for me to make the trek to check it out, it looks like next Winter may be my next opportunity to catch this incredible natural light show.
Friday, February 27, 2009
In Search of Sunset Light on El Capitan
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Return to Joshua Tree National Park
After a luck break with the weather at the Grand Canyon the evening before, I decided to see if I could get lucky again at Joshua Tree National Park. Obviously, I was not disappointed.
You have to be careful when shooting under these conditions. People often discover the arms from these cacti hitching a ride on their clothes, resulting in the name "Jumping Cholla". It's almost as if they jump up onto you!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Grand Canyon Sunset
I couldn't make it to the Grand Canyon from the Page, Arizona area the night before; I had to pull over at a "truck safety" turnout, apparently a resta rea without restrooms. Fortunately someone pulled up behnind me at something like 4am, shining their headlights to fill the van with light. I bolted upright, thinking that I had slept in. No such luck.
I did notice however that I might be able to make it to the Grand Canyon in time for sunrise. A couple of hours later I was racing the rising sun to the turnouts and viewpoints along the Canyon rim. The clouds started to show some nice red color before I made it to one of the better views, but I hopped out and snapped a few shots because I knew I'd most likely lose the light befoer the next stop.
At the next stop I noticed that my camera was telling me that I ahd no CompactFlash installed. It had been happily pretending to capture images, even displaying them on the back LCD like everything was normal. Apparently it saw how excited I was and didn't want to ruin the moment to break any bad news to me. What a nice "feature"! Thank you, Canon!
Anyway, I had a couple of minutes with the last glimpse of color, then there was literally seconds where the sun broke through and lit the canyon. I think this was captured during the last few moments of that light.
That pattern played out several times during the day. You saw a great shot, and If you didn't act immediately, it was gone. Forget setting up a tripod or changing lenses. You had to be anticipating where the moving light would hit next, and have a long lnes ready to grab the moment when it happened.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Grand Canyon Dawn
The day arrived mostly cloudy, and progressed to deliver a lot of rain in the afternoon, but a few moments came where the sun broke through and revealed the canyon's color and depth. I'm glad I stuck it out though... I'm looking outside, and the sun may break free for a few moments at sunset yet!
Bryce Canyon with Snow
I successfully missed an elk driving in the night before, and got up early enough for a mostly cloudy dawn, The light stayed flat most of the morning, but a few occasional spots of sun enabled me to catch a few shots with decent contrast and color. The snow offered some interesting opportunities.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Golden Light in Zion National Park
Whenever I'm posting photos from Zion I feel like I should be making some kind of clever reference to The Matrix, but at the moment my metaphor glass is empty... Well, now it is.
ZZYZX!
"The last word in health"... a former health spa, now a desert research station in the Mojave Desert.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Join Me in Yosemite Feb 28
Given current economic concerns, I'm going to try a novel concept for an upcoming workshop on Feb 28... attendee-specified pricing. We'll shoot Winter scenes around Yosemite Saturday 1-6pm, and hopefull catch Horsetail Falls backlit by the setting sun. Afterwards, you decide if it was valuable to you and consider a voluntary contribution proportional to what you felt you received.
For full details, to RSVP and to arrange carpools, see the event listing on Meetup.com.
Representative shots of Yosemite Valley and Horsetail Falls that we might find are included in my Yosemite gallery here.
I hope this concept works out. I'd love to offer a series of seminars like this as I travel around the Western United States this Spring, Summer and Fall!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco
This is one of my first shots taken with my new camera, the Canon 5D mark II. I was running around shooting in San Francisco at night without a flash, with the camera set at ISO 6400 and my lens set at f/4.0. I was also exposure bracketing, which sometimes resulted in surprisingly fast exposures. This one was 1/800th of a second!
The Chinese New Year parade crosses a cable car line in San Francisco. The shiny metal in the foreground leading to the parade is the metal cover over the cable moving under the street. The rails the cars run on are the thinner shiny lines leading into the picture.
For this shot to reveal the motion and brighten up the scene I boosted exposure compensation to +2/3 EV and dropped ISO sensitivity from 6400 to 1600, resulting in longer exposure times (1/3 second here).
Mono Lake Sunset
I couldn't resist planning my return to place me at Mono Lake for sunset... my fourth visit in December and January. When they're consistently this good, can you blame me?
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Return to Whitney Portal
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.
Return to Death Valley
There are at least 7 sand dune complexes in the Death Valley area, and only the Mesquite Flat dunes at Stovepipe Wells is overrun with photographers and other visitors. Ironically, the dunes at Stovepipe Wells are also probably the smallest (only about 200 feet tall) and take the most effort to reach (a 2 mile walk over sand, probably with high heat to cope with on at least one direction).
I have a new favorite dune shooting location... it's remote and it takes a bit of a walk, but there wasn't a single footprint on this entire dune complex. I won't broadcast the location on the Internet, but join one of my workshops to the area and I'll take you there!
Thursday, January 29, 2009
A Day in Mojave National Preserve
I had just enough time after the tour for a quick stop to wee the Ring Trail at Hole in the Wall, then move back towards Kelso to catch the the local Mojave Joshua Trees (a distinct subspecies) at sunset.
As I was driving from Kelso towards the town of Baker, the crescent moon was setting, adding a nice end to a long, productive day of shooting.
Joshua Tree National Park
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.
On the Road Again
To prepare for wildflower season in the deserts of Southern California, I decided to take a trip to Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave National Preserve, Red Rocks State Park, and Death Valley National Park.
The first leg of the trip would be the drive down of about 550 miles. To break up the drive and get a few shots on the way, I decided to try to catch the current storm breaking up in Yosemite National Park. This shot of sun rays was taken in the foothills near Oakdale in California's Central Valley, on my way to hopefully catch sunset in Yosemite.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Why Would Anyone Use HDR? It's Unreal!
Tree on Fire, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.
I see that question a lot posed online, in discussion groups, even under photos. To me liking Photoshop but not liking HDR would be analogous to liking wrenches but not liking hammers. Sure, many people wield HDR poorly, but many carpenters wield a hammer poorly too... what could that have to do with hammers? In other words, what does a poor result have to do with the (value of or utility of) the tool?
Many people vilify HDR; I don't get it. Most people play guitar poorly, but that won't keep me from enjoying the work of many talented guitarists. Of course everyone's entitled to their opinion and their own tastes. If classical music fans want to say, "Ugh, I think I hear a guitar in that piece!", or photography fans want to say "Ugh, Galen Rowell used graduated neutral density filters!", that's their privilege. Surely HDR software will get better and better at expanding dynamic range while producing unobtrusive results, and as that value is delivered for more and more shots, I'll have terabytes of exposure-bracketed images to draw upon.
I find HDR a useful tool about 80% of the time, with maybe 5-10% of all shots I choose to keep being simply not possible without it.
Many people vilify HDR; I don't get it. Most people play guitar poorly, but that won't keep me from enjoying the work of many talented guitarists. Of course everyone's entitled to their opinion and their own tastes. If classical music fans want to say, "Ugh, I think I hear a guitar in that piece!", or photography fans want to say "Ugh, Galen Rowell used graduated neutral density filters!", that's their privilege. Surely HDR software will get better and better at expanding dynamic range while producing unobtrusive results, and as that value is delivered for more and more shots, I'll have terabytes of exposure-bracketed images to draw upon.
I find HDR a useful tool about 80% of the time, with maybe 5-10% of all shots I choose to keep being simply not possible without it.
My example above is pretty obvious, and results like that may be an acquired taste, but can you identify which of the following photos was processed with HDR software and which were not?
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| Sunset at Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra, California |
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| Fall colors reflectig in the Merced River, Yosemite National Park |
) |
| Half Dome and fall double rainbow around sunburst in Yosemite Valley |
Perhaps more to the point, which do you like better? If you can't tell how an image was produced, does the process or tool used matter? As I browse folders of processed results, I often can't tell how my images were produced until I look at the file name. Those images where the processing does not speak louder than the subject, those are the successes.
As for whether or not a result matches an original scene, no photograph does (unless the entire scene is pure white or pure black).
Consider the scene's brightness. An original scene contains light in a range of up to 17 stops, our eyes can handle 13 stops, a film camera can handle about 11 stops, the best full frame digital cameras at most 8-9 stops. Most of the digital cameras with small format sensors that most people shoot with are probably closer to 4-5 stops. How do you restore some fraction of the shadow and highlight detail in those 8-9 lost stops of light, if not with High Dynamic Range techniques?
Then consider the color. The CCD sensor has one range of colors that it can sense. The RAW format it saves the file in has another range of colors that it can store. The monitor you display it on has yet another. Eventually the image gets converted to 8 bit JPEG format for printing, trying to represent the infinite shades of natural color while preserving only 256 levels of color for red, green, and blue. Then the printer, which uses a subtractive CMYK color scheme of Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and blacK (which doesn't match or directly overlap any of the other color spaces used along the way).
Then consider human perception. Our brains try to assign the brightest thing in a scene to be white. That's we have to have our cameras and software adjust images to a certain "white balance" (strictly a human perceptual distortion). The ambient light available when viewing an image (outdoors in sun, shade, under incandescent light, flourescent, etc) seriously affects our perception of the result as well.
Our eyes and brains are not carbon copies from person to person. Some people report noticeably different perception even from eye to eye. There's truly no such thing as "reality" when it comes to white balance and human color perception.
So given the essentially insurmountable issues at every step of the process, how can anyone claim to produce an accurate copy of a given moment? What would that even mean... accurate to an electronic device, to one person, or to which subset of people, and under which ambient lighting conditions for viewing?
Must we "go with the flow" and pretend with the charlatans that accuracy is possible (or even a desireable goal), or is it safe to observe that the "just as it happened" emperor truly has no clothes?
To each his own though... everyone is entitled to like or not like something for any reason or for no reason. HDR simply happens to be one tool that I find not just extremly useful, but indispensible. I'd sooner part with even basics like UV filters and circular polarizers.
If photographers aspire to be some sort of sterile recording device, then they can be replaced by webcams nailed to trees or doorjambs. The very definition of art requires human involvement and influence... a departure from sterile reality. Exercise your human side, your artistic side... any departure from the fruitless pursuit of perfection will set you free.
If you decide to buy Photomatix HDR software, I do recommend the version with an interface to Lightroom and Photoshop, to give you the most control. 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
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