November 7, 2009
Each autumn when Trail Ridge closes for the season, the Rocky Mountain National park begins to take on a much different personality. Gone are the crowds of tourists arriving by the hundreds to drive on the “highest paved through road in America”. In their place comes open space and silent serenity sprinkled with the intense regulars of the “quiet season”.
Early this morning I made a trip up to the Park with the intention of capturing a sunrise image of Trail Ridge, from below, at Moraine Park. Moraine Park is a mystical location this time of year. Even if the morning light evades, I’m always graced with the company and sounds of the large elk herds at the early hours of shooting.
For quite some time now I have been studying the patterns of light on the North Face of Longs Peak in an attempt to catch the perfect isolation of light on the face of The Diamond. With a little luck at the hands of good planning, I finally got my opportunity.
November 14, 2009
A light dusting of snow came to the valley levels of the Park yesterday afternoon. That small storm coupled with the approaching larger storm due to hit this afternoon, I made a trip up to the park hoping for some dynamic clouds and light. During the morning, as I had hoped for, I noticed some interesting light events happening upon me. As I stopped at a pullout along Deer Ridge with the intention of creating a telephoto image of Longs Peak across the valleys, I noticed a unique blending of light on the southwestern slopes of Deer Mountain created by the shadow of Deer Mountain contrasting with the warm sunrise light coming in from the southeast. The pullout was along a short stretch of highway 36 between the highway 34 junction and the Bear Lake turnoff where the road is oriented in a NE/SW manner for just a few hundred yards before descending down into the Beaver Brook valley.
As I came upon this scene, I immediately thought back to a recently re-read words by Galen Rowell’s from his book, Mountain Light. The chapter titled Magic Hour contained an image, Dawn, Death Valley, California in which Galen clearly displayed one of his favorite methods of photography:
The most interesting parts of the natural world are the edges, places where ocean meets land, meadow meets forest, timerline touches the heights. These geographical edges excite scientists in much the same way that edges of light fascinate me. Near the end of the day, transmitted light becomes ever warmer, reflected light ever colder. I look for the visual edge, especially where it is emphasized against clouds and other light backgrounds. In fact, my favorite way to photograph a geographical edge is to make it converge with a visual edge of light that will underscore the difference between the two zones.
- Galen Rowell
While this particular location was not on any sort of geographical fringe, there certainly was a fringe of light in this scene at the time of capture. The orientation of Deer Mountain in correlation with the sunlight coming from the southeast at an azimuth of 133.8 degrees east of north at 8:40 AM (altitude of 17.1), rendered a unique fringe of light and shadow on the small rogue cloud pushing upslope after breaking away from the downslope inversion layer. Some warm sunrise light was making it just around the south ridge to a portion of the southwestern slopes, but the southwestern slopes were not completely lit yet at this point. While the slopes themselves might have displayed the light fringe to some degree, the cloud served as a much better canvas for the light to project itself upon for this desired effect.
Outside of a contrast adjustment, no additional hue or saturation color adjustments were applied to this image, as it’s purpose is to display the unique natural color phenomenon of shadows.
October 24, 2009
Technical Notes on image capture:
As we pulled up to Panorama Point, just after 4:30 PM, I was fairly convinced that the scene before me was my best opportunity to capture an image that fully communicated the essence of my developing vision. I had told myself (and others) countless times the entire weekend that I was particulary interested in creating images that captured an essence of the “life” of Arches National Park, rather than being once again distracted by the landscape and landmarks. The life in the environment of Arches is such an amazing display of gritty and tough, yet beautiful and delicate. It is life finding it’s way, somehow, someway to survive another day amidst the harsh conditions. Low and behold, the landscape was once again proved too irresistible.
My highest priority at the time of image capture on this set of exposures was to preserve every fine detail that I could within the lenticular clouds hovering over the La Sal Mountains. Lenticular clouds were not something that I was familiar with until we moved out to Colorado from Indiana in 2004, outside of one I had blindly observed over Mount Shasta in 2002. Since my first observation of this phenomena, I had been drawn to capture the mystique of these wind-shaped clouds.
Foregrounds in high desert environments, while beautiful to our eye, can often be incredibly busy and lack continuity when flattened into 2-dimensions, due to the large spaces and gaps between bundles of vegetation. While I was able to create a few images that I do believe could be successful, reducing the effects of the foreground and placing the focus on the clouds and high peaks in the distance were my top priority. In the end, it was one of those “why write a paragraph, when I can say all that I need to say in a sentence” type of situations. Less was certainly more, in this instance. I captured about 45 bracketed exposures of this scene, exploring variance in focal lengths, subjects, apertures and other aspects of composition. In the end, the composition shown in this image was my favorite, ultimately due to minimal distractions from the busy desert environment towards the subject. Depth of field was my primary challenge. An aperture of 5.6 was chosen for a couple of reasons. One, it had returned pleasing results in a similar (yet very different) situation on a past occasion in the Verde Lakes Basin. Secondly, the nearest object to my position that I chose to include in the image were the bluffs overlooking Salt Wash Rapids in the Colorado River Canyon, roughly 3-4 miles away. So, depth of field or hyperfocal distance issues weren’t something I had to put a lot of consideration into for this situation in comparison to a wide-angle situation that might have included a pinon pine in the foreground 20 or 30 feet away. Due to the fact that I was focusing essentially at infinity and the foreground of my scene was several thousand feet beyond the 143 foot hyperfocal distance for f5.6 at 70mm (I always have a cheat sheet with me), that entire decision on hyperfocal sharpness was not applicable. Rather, I opted to focus on the lower edge of the lenticular cloud (it appeared to be slightly further east than the crest of the La Sal Mountains) with extreme care being taken to preserve as much detail in the cloud as possible, with less concern over losing a small amount of detail in the busy foreground bluffs. In aperture priority mode, the shutter speed came in at 1/180 with the ISO set at 100 for fine detail. In hindsight, I probably should have bracketed an exposure at f8 for sweet spot comparisons, but the results were pleasing to me at 5.6. A circular polarizer and UV filter were utilized at the time of capture.
Technical Notes on Post Processing:
This image did not require any blending of exposures in its current form. A curves layer was added with unique curves added to each of the Red, Green and Blue channels. The Red channel contained points at (Input/Output) 0/0, 92/39, 180/191 and 218/254. The Green channel contained points at 0/0, 64/63, 182/214 and 255/255. The blue channel contained points only at 0/27 and 255/227. The lower 1/3rd of the image was lightly masked in the foreground areas with a 30% brush and the layer as a whole had an opacity of 72%. A channel mixer layer is the layer responsible for the black and white conversion. Within the channel mixer, red was set to 106 with blue and green both at -2 in the monochrome setting. A dodge/burn layer was also implemented with dodging in most of the sun-exposed aspects, in particular, the mountain tops, for highlight boost. Burning was applied lightly in portions of the sky and clouds, in particular the upper right corner of the image to increase focus on the lenticular clouds without venturing up into the corner where the less attractive clouds rested. A soft layer of 15.3 pixel gaussian blur was applied at an opacity of 33% to all areas of the image outside of the lenticular cloud. The foreground areas with the rough rocky edges and busy vegetation benefitted the most from this layer, taking the emphasis away from their edges and on to that of the clouds and peaks as desired. Due to this being a black and white image, a color noise reduction layer was added by creating a new layer, setting its blending mode to Color and adding a gaussian blur. The sharpness of the image is not sacrificed by this blur layer at 100% because the color itself is the only thing being affected (and this is a monochrome image). A high pass contast layer was added in order to put the finishing touches on the contrast of the scene. The settings for the layer were overlay mode, 20% opacity, with the “Blend if Gray” settings bracketed at 50/70 for the black and 185/215 for the white. The high pass filter was run at 53.5% for the desired contrast. No sharpening has been applied. The final step was to shore up the composition by removing 395 pixels of space from the top, 96 pixels from the bottom, 234 pixels from the right and 226 pixels from the left edge of the image, leaving the final file dimensions at 3812×2357.
Creative Notes:
The entire afternoon, I had been waiting and wondering. As the lenticular clouds slowly assembled little by little over the La Sal Mountains into their final masterpiece, my mind (as it does whenever I spot long lenticular clouds and snowcapped peaks) immediately lept to the vision of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico image. While on several occasions I had thought it would be interesting to try to re-create similar scenes of several of Adams’ images in the most similar setting that I could find in Colorado, on this occasion, my mind immediately began considering all of the things I might need to do to avoid such comparisons. I really wanted to avoid that reaction from anyone familiar with Adams from saying to themself “lenticular clouds, snowcapped peaks in the distance…just another Moonrise ripoff…”.
From familiarity with the area as well as some research performed on the moonrise/moonset times, I at least knew that the situation would not be fully re-creating itself on that evening. There was no moon rising over the La Sal Mountains to extend the scene and provide additional depth, nor were there any towns or cemetaries, outside of the abandoned Wolfe Ranch, for at least 17 miles in any direction. At 4:30 PM on 10/23/2009 in Moab, UT the moon was indeed setting. But, it was setting at a 246 degrees from North azimuth at moonset, nearly 100 degrees off from my line of vision towards roughly 135 degrees from North in the direction of the La Sal Mountains from Panorama Point. Secondly, unlike the Sangre de Cristo (the mountains shown in Moonrise and one of the longest mountain chains on earth, running for 242 miles through Colorado and New Mexico), the La Sal Mountains are a very small chain of mountains, spanning only about 18 miles from one end to the other, suited for much different compositions. From my vantage point, I initially composed the scene with my wide angle 17-40L lens, simply to see if it was worth my time to even attempt to compose the scene similar to Moonrise, but the scene simply was not set up for it due to a lack of continuity in the mountains beneath a focal length of 40mm. Ideally, from that vantage point, a focal length of about 50-60mm would have been ideal for a panorama of the entire range through the viewfinder, but I only had my 17-40mm and 70-300mm lenses available (all focal lengths mentioned do not include the crop factor of the Canon Digital Rebel XSi…these are simply the values of the lens out of the box).
On the mention of focal length comparisons, I will venture off into a couple of brief tangents regarding the subject in theory, as well as the subject from a creative standpoint. The field of view crop factor (focal length multiplier) of my current digital body, the Canon Digital Rebel XSi is 1.6x that of a 35mm “full-frame” camera. So, the moment that my 17-40mm lens is placed on my camera, it immediately becomes a 28-65mm lens and the moment my 70-300mm lens is placed on my camera, it becomes a 114-487mm lens due to that focal length multiplier. From another angle, if one looks at the specs from Ansel Adams’ Moonrise image, shown in his original notes you will find that his focal lenth is shown in his notes to be 600mm. However, this is not 600mm focal length in a 35mm format camera range; it is 600mm in an 8×10 view camera format. A rough value to get a general idea between the two is that the 35mm format focal length is roughly .1495x the focal length of an 8×10 view camera. So, the 600mm focal length Adams created that image at is roughly equivalent to a focal length of 90mm in 35mm format or roughly a 56mm focal length in my camera (90 divided by the 1.6 crop factor). Additionally worth noting is that the town of Hernandez, NM is roughly 40 miles west of the crest of the Sangre de Cristo, with an elevation variance of 5800′ at Hernandez to 13102′ at the top of Truchas Peak. In comparison, my distance from my tripod at Panorama Point to the crest of the La Sal Mountains was roughly 25 miles with an elevational variance of 4800′ at Panorama Point to 12,721′ at the summit of Mount Peale. While ththe extra 500′ feet of elevation was largely insignificant, the difference of 15 miles between the two scenes ends up affecting the contents of the composition more than you might think. In composition, at 70mm (the closest focal length that I could attain to the 56mm equivalent of Moonrise), my composition with a strong foreground element in close proximity (as Adams did with the actual town of Hernandez in Moonrise), was rendered with roughly 2/3rds of the image non-sky and 1/3rd of the image as sky. Moonrise on the other hand rendered as roughly 1/3rd of the image as non-sky and 2/3rds of the image as sky, but the presence of the moon itself in that image was able to offset that ratio to almost 1/2 and 1/2.
So, while we were both standing at valley level in the high deserts of the American Southwest with desert brush foregrounds benath broad, long lenticular clouds hovering perfectly above 12000′ snowcapped peaks, the images that each of us were able to create out of that situation are vastly different. The question that I will always ask myself is whether or not this was indeed the best image that I could create in my situation. I am certain that the answer is “yes” in Adams’ case. Moreover though, the moral of the story is that sometimes knowing a vast amount of details about a well-known photograph doesn’t just allow an avid fan the opportunity to try to re-create a similar version of that image – it also allows a photographer with a vision the ability to avoid re-creating a well-known scene and facing the ever harsh comparisons bound to prevent that image from ever succeeding.
October 7, 2007
Technical Notes on image capture:
At the time of capture, the first thing that my eye noticed as we came upon this scene was not the expansive display of color in the aspen groves (our primary reason for being in this location) and not the majesty of the Elk Mountains in the background, but rather the pureness and comfort in the sky and the clouds. The clouds were peaceful, comfortable and inviting. The sky was soft, pure and free of haze or dust. Knowing generally when a dynamic range will exceed my camera’s abilities, my initial instinct was to use a hard edge grad ND filter to account for the dynamic range present. There was a relatively well defined edge of brightness, due to the snow, that would allow for the use of a grad filter with minimal dodging/burning required in the post-processing stage. However, I wanted to explore all of my options. Without a grad filter on an open test exposure, the sky was rendering perfect and pure in digital capture, but the foreground areas that our eyes were seeing so clearly were largely shadowed due to the high dynamic range present. Outside of the few small pockets of light finding their way to the aspen groves of Elk Mountain’s eastern face, much of the foreground was rendered very dark and imperceptible. At that point, I knew that either a grad filter assisted image or a double exposure blend was going to be necessary in order to render all of the details in the scene as my vision required. I placed a 2-stop, hard edged grad ND filter on the lens and bracketed a few exposures of the scene, only to be incredibly disappointed that the beautiful pure natural tones and natural contrast in the sky were being compromised by the filter. The “blue”, simply wasn’t as “blue” (maybe because the white wasn’t as white or for another reason). I did not yet own a polarizer for, at that point, my brand new camera kit so I was left with only one option: bracket exposures and blend in photoshop. My final exposures utilized to create this image were executed at an aperture of f9.0 with a shutter speed of 1/60 , ISO 100 and a fully zoomed out focal length of 17mm with the focal point being the back edge of the pocket of spruce trees on the right 1/3rd of the foreground. Why did I choose f9.0 and not f13 or f16 for increased depth of field, both of which are capable of producing relatively good sharpness on a 17-40L?
The reason is actually an interesting story. A few months prior to this trip, I was sitting in the airport waiting on my flight to board, people watching as usual. While scanning the scene before me, I noticed something on one of the vertical columns in the waiting area and spent a few minutes trying to read its details from afar. It was just outside of my vision being able to easily piece it together, so it took me several minutes to find its message. Low and behold, as soon as I took my eyes off of it, just to the side, I noticed an insecure fella giving me a dirty, arrogant scowl and then placing his arm in territorial fashion around the woman by his side. Low and behold, I believe he was concerned that I was staring in their direction that entire time, but due to the same depth of field prominent in our camera lenses, my eyes were focused on an object that rendered them completely out of detail and focus to my perception.
I then wondered, “what is the aperture range of the human eye?”
After conducting some research after this incident, I found that to my surprise, the human eye does have variable aperture and depth of field abilities. I had roughly assumed that the depth of field of our eye was roughly similar to a prime lens around f13. As I later found out though, the human eye can roughly “open up” to about f2.1 and “close down” to a range of about f8.6 to f11, depending on the person. Additionally, I discovered that the focal length of the human eye is roughly about 17.2mm (although I later discovered, after the fact, that this portion was inaccurate, since our visual sensors are not in “35mm format”, so to say…rather, with the adjustments, our focal length is closer to 43.2mm). It’s been widely circulated that the sweet spot for the 17-40L lens is normally around f5.6 to f9 (every lens is different), so the overlay of apertures landed me with a thought that f8.6 or f9 were going to be my experimental aperture for this information. With all of these factors together, I had told myself that at some point during this fall foliage trip, I would expose an image at 17mm, with the focal length at either f8.6 or f9, just to see if it really made a difference in perception by the human eye. Would the familiarity of our everyday field of vision translate to two dimensions easier this way? I wasn’t sure, but I had my mind set on giving it a try.
Technical Notes on Post-Processing:
As previously mentioned, this image, due to the factors at the time of capture was going to require a blend of exposures in order to meet the standards I had visualized in the end result. For the two exposures, the initial exposure was utlized for the sky and snow covered mountain tops, and an exposure at +1.9 was utilized for the foreground detail. The two images were overlayed in photoshop and a 100%, soft edged layer mask was applied to the foreground of the top layer (the layer exposed for the sky) to allow the foreground of the +1.9 exposure to come through. The transition between the two areas was transitioned just beneath the snow line with a 30% mask in that same layer. Between this mask layer and the Background layer, a Hue/Saturation layer as well as a Photo Filter layer were added. The reason that these were added beneath that mask layer was to only permit the effects to show up in the foreground. I did not want anything at all to touch that perfect sky and alter it in any way. The photo filter layer included a Warming filter set to 50% to offset the blue tones in the shadows. The hue/saturation layer included the saturation set at +32 to emphasize the color of the aspen groves, willows and evergreens. Above the mask layer, a dodge/burn layer was included with particular emphasis on dodging the shadows of the evergreen trees in the foreground to bring out detail. A light burn was also performed on a few of the snow covered mountaintops on the right and left edges in order to de-emphasize their presence. A high pass contast layer was added in order to put the finishing touches on the contrast of the scene. The settings for the layer were overlay mode, 20% opacity, with the “Blend if Gray” settings bracketed at 50/70 for the black and 185/215 for the white. The high pass filter was run at 50.2% for the desired contrast. No sharpening has been applied. The final step was to shore up the composition by removing 99 pixels of space from the top, 95 pixels from the bottom and 204 pixels from the left edge of the image, leaving the final file dimensions at 3684×2398.
Creative Notes:
McClure Pass has long been known as a popular destination for landscape photographers during the fall foliage season. I have observed endless images of the single, signature aspen stand along the ascent up the pass (not visible in this image) with a few aspen that consistently take on a red tone in contrast with the other golden groves around. Additionally, a handful of great images have been captured at the overlooks and areas where rockslide danger does not prohibit one from stopping. After observing an image posted by by Todd Caudle over on NPN the year prior, I was somewhat driven at my next opportunity to stop somewhere along the pass and explore a little for less seen compositions. Low and behold a rough 4WD road and a short walk leading down (not up), from the summit of the pass was my avenue to this image.
February 17, 2008
Technical Notes on image capture:
The slight blur along the crest of the Teton Range is not a technical issue or a digital manipulation, but rather a slow rendering of blowing snow off the crest of the peaks. The unusual appearance of the clouds is due to the swirling motion of the clouds throughout the 4 seconds of exposure time. An aperture of f11 was chosen primarily to keep the exposure time below 5 seconds without sacrificing detail by going to ISO 200. In a couple of exposures taken just prior, exposure times longer than 5 seconds were creating just a little too much disarray and blur in the clouds, to the point that the clouds were losing any sort of identifiable form. It was an assumption at the time and examination of the images in the digital darkroom later on confirmed my preference to the shorter exposure time. I was willing to sacrifice some depth of field in the trees in the immediate foreground as to hopefully avoid them drawing too much interest of the eye away from the remainder of the scene. The ISO was kept at 100 for the finest grain of detail available to the camera. The focal length of the image was a complete zoom of the 17-40L lens to 40mm (64mm focal length with the 1.6x crop factor to 35mm format). No grad ND filters were utilized during this capture. In the previous year, I had placed a 2 stop grad ND on my camera while exposing in this location and while I had the greatest light I’ve yet to see from this location, the ND filter took the sky to a place that I really wasn’t thrilled with. So, in this situation, I bracketed exposures and was willing to compromise more in the foreground than the sky if a blend somehow fell short of standard.
Technical Notes on Post-Processing:
This image was a straight forward blend of two exposures. One exposure was captured for the face of the mountains, the snow on the bluffs and the sky and another exposure was captured for the foreground forests. A mask was applied to the overlay layer with the majority of the masking done on the foreground trees on the bluff in the lower left corner of the image. Very slight masking was done on the groves of trees along the Snake River itself. The black and white conversion was done with a Channel Mixer layer at 114% red, 18% green and 0% blue. A slight bit of contrast was added with a curves layer with points at 0/0, 64/47, 192/202 and 255/255 on the RGB. A levels layer was also added with the white slider pulled in to 246 with black and 0 and gray at 1 on the RGB. A layer for dodging and burning was applied with a fair amount of dodging on the foreground trees and a small amount on the clouds and focused areas of highlighting on the face of the mountains. A high pass contrast layer was added to boost the contrast even more at the usual specs mentioned in other Post-Processing discussions. The final layer was a layer of slight gaussian blur to eliminate some of the harshness of lines on the upper levels of the mountains. I can’t quite figure out why, but for some reason the Teton Range in the winter has a few cracks and crevices and tree rows that always take on an oversharpened look, straight out of the camera. A simple blur layer at 84% with masking to avoid the blur from affecting areas outside of those special sections was applied to clean this issue up.
Creative Notes:
I arrived at the Snake River Overlook parking area at approximately 6:45 AM on the morning of February 17, 2008. Weather conditions, as expected, were frigid with the temperature at -6 and a modest, but piercing, wind out of the northwest. The winter of 2007-2008 was an epic winter in the Greater Yellowstone area, dumping over 600 inches of snow on the Teton Range near Jackson Hole. What’s that have to do with photography? In the image Snake River Overlook from the previous winter of 2007, look at two key areas: the Snake River itself, and the banks just above the Snake River, between it and the Teton Range. In 2007 when that Snake River Overlook image was created, roughly 2-3 feet less snowpack at valley level was settled in place in comparison to the 2008 trip during the same week of the year when this First Light, Grand Teton image was created. In the image from 2007 when signifcantly less snow was on the ground, the Snake River had far more visible water flow emerging from the snowpack to catch the light reflecting off of Grand Teton itself. Additionally, the banks above the Snake River had much less snowpack taking up residence as well, lending a much different texture and visual pattern to that area. In particular though, the very defined pattern of drifts was something that I wanted emphasized in this 2008 image not only due to the improved pattern, but also due to the fact that the light striking Grand Teton never did end up turning as warm as it did in 2007 (sigh).
My standard procedure on the one winter morning each year that I stand at this location is to arrive at location roughly 30-45 minutes before sunrise at Civil Twilight to make certain that I get the exact tripod position that I want based on the conditions. Often times, even in frigid weather conditions, it’s not unusual to stand at this overlook with at least 5-6 other photographers seeking to create the same image. I can say from experience that a few feet to the left or right can make a big difference in composition at this location. Once I have secured my tripod position, I will use the 30-45 minutes of pre-sunrise twilight lusco fusco to capture various exposures to see what’s working with my vision and what’s not working as far as technical qualities in composition, depth of field and noise, while also paying attention to the light patterns based on potential light barriers over the Gros Ventre range directly to the east. As was the case on this day, rapid moving clouds and blowing snow prevented an accurate rendition of composition and feeling in these test images. In the case of this image, one of those “test” images actually ended up being my favorite of the 90 or so exposures from that morning. While there were some technical flaws and apparent noise due to the
Without doubt, most with an interest in landscape photography have taken a glance at Ansel Adams’ famous image of theTetons and Snake River. Like most of his work, I have studied this image extensively as well. Barring an epidemic, torrid windstorm or the intervention of man, the composition from his very position will never be replicated nowadays due to the growth in height of the trees in the foreground blocking the Snake River.
