evanescent: fleeting, transitory
evanescent wave: a nearfield standing wave, employed for total internal reflection microscopy
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Visitors are welcome to download images for personal use (e.g. as computer desktop wallpaper, or to make a single print). Please contact me at evanescentlightphotography@gmail.com regarding possible commercial use. |
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June/July 2008
'Little Finland Arch'
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The best light for photographing the sandstone formations of the Southwest is indirect: when the sun's rays are reflected into the image from an adjacent rock wall to accentuate the golden red color of the rock and give a pleasently diffuse illumination. A classical example of this technique is photography in slot canyons, as illustrated below by the image of Antelope Canyon. Another famous example is the sunrise view of Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park, where the rising sun hits a vast rock face below the arch, casting a golden glow on its underside. However, that location is too famous, and even in the middle of winter a group of photographers can be found each clear morning blocking all the good viewpoints with their tripods!
Thus, I was pleased to find a 'miniature' Mesa Arch while visiting Little Finland - an extremely remote and little-known region of amazingly eroded and fancifuul sandstone formations in Southern Nevada. The arch is much smaller than the Canyonlands version - only about 5 ft across - but lights up beautifully as the sun rises over the opposite hillside and hits the rock face below the formation. Moreover, the arch itself is patterned with much more attractive erosion flutings than is Mesa Arch itself. To add more interest, I also tried to catch a 'starburst' as the sun cleared the top of the arch. There are two tricks to make this work. First, the lens needs to be stopped down to its minimum aperture to project a pattern of the iris blades. Second, it is important not to capture the full disc of the sun, as that washes out the image and projects ugly reflections from the lens elements. Instead, the photo needs to be framed so that only a tiny part of the sun hits the lens. This is rather trial and error; so I took several handheld shots varying the camera position slightly, and later selected the best one.
Click HERE to download a full res image of Little Finland Arch, and HERE to see the real Mesa Arch
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May 2008
'Uluru Cascades'
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Uluru (Ayer's Rock) is the iconic symbol of Australia's 'Red Centre'. In December 2007 I was fortunate to be invited to speak at a meeting of the Australian Physiological Society, and afterwards took the opportunity to travel to Alice Springs in the company of my colleague and good friend Dirk vanHelden. We rented a 4WD camper van with which to explore the outback, and drove through the McDonnel ranges south toward Uluru.
The famous rock is a magnet for photographers, and is usually captured at sunset and sunrise, when it takes on a spectacular sequence of color changes. However, to be honest, this has become very cliched, with hundreds of nearly identical photos published on the Web. More so, visitors are tightly corralled, and confined to just one defined 'sunrise' viewing area, and another for sunset, so it is difficult to find any original viewpoint.
Thus, after taking the obligatory sunset shots, I felt a little let down. But all was rescued the next day, which served to reinforce David Muench's maxim that "bad weather makes for good photography". Morning dawned grey and overcast, and we made use of the unusually cool conditions to set out on the 6 mile hike around the base of the rock. Shortly the clouds grew darker, it started to drizzle, and then to pour down in earnest. After some delay small trickes of water began to course down the rock face, and gradually these grew into roaring cascades that overflowed the pools at their base, and flooded across the path. This is a rare occurrence in the outback in the middle of summer! A ranger passed us exclaining that she had never seen anything like it before.
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So, a great subject for unusual photographs; but the problem was a complete lack of any shelter under which to take my camera from its secure haven in my (waterproof) Lowe backpack. Any attempts were first thwarted by raindrops on the lens, and then when the interior elements of my mid-range zoom completely fogged up.
The solution came when we finally returned, completely soaked, back at the van. This provided the necessary shelter from the now torrential rain, and the distance from the perimeter road to the rock allowed use of a (non-fogged) telephoto lens. A problem shhoting from a vehicle, however, was that compositions were restricted to places along the roadsite where there was a clear view unobstructed by trees, and where it was possible to safely pull off the road. The photot here with two cascades framing a dead tree ended up as my favorite. Basically a 'straight' shot, using a polarizer to reduce reflections from the rain-slicked surface, a mild saturation boost to enhance the deep red of the rock, and a curves adjustment to compensate for the loss of contrast through the heavy rain.
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April 2008
'Antelope Arch'
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Antelope canyon is a small slot canyon on the Navajo reservation just outside Page, Arizona. It is bisected by a major highway, and lies close to one of the largest, and most polluting caol-fired generating plant in the country, so the immediate surroundings are not auspicious. Nevertheless, it has been a favorite subject among photographers since its 'discovery' some 20 years ago. The reason is that the depth and geometry of the canyon are just right to bounce sunlight off the sinuous sandstone walls to create a wonderful inner glow. Very deep, narrow canyons, such as Buckskin Gulch, allow little light to penetrate to the bottom, and have a dark and gloomy feel. On the other hand, shallower canyons like Spooky and Zebra are too brightly illuminated by direct light, so that the walls largely reflect only the true color of the sandstone. Although the rock of Antelope Canyon is itself only a nondescript orange/brown, it comes alive when sunlight falling directly on one wall reflects multiple times to cast a faint, but brilliant orange glow. Moreover, wonderful color contrasts are created by juxtaposed areas that receive either reflected sunlight, or take on a blue/cyan cast from the cloudless sky.
The trick in photographing slot canyons is to master the extreme contrast range. Indirect light filtering into the canyon is quite dim, necessitating exposures of a second or more, but any direct sunlight hitting the rock, or view of the sky, completely blows out the highlights. So, the art is to frame pictures to just exclude such highlights. Inconveniently, this usually seems to involve camera angles requiring the photographer to lie flat on his back on the canyon bottom, squeezed into a nook so that an overhang of the near wall blocks out any direct view of the sky. Such was the case with the photo above, taken in Lower Antelope Canyon. I had wandered uo and down the length of the canyon a few times scouting for interesting combinations of light and rock form, and was taken by this composition where a sinuous hollow in the back wall framed glowing rock high on the opposite face of the canyon. A wide-angle (16 mm) lens nicely took in the arch, and stopping down the lens to get good depth of field necessitated an exposure of about 1 second. However, there was no space to set up a tripod. Instead, I took the shot hand-held, pressing the camera agains the rock for stability.
While browsing through Michael Fatali's online galleries after returning from this trip, I noticed that his 'Centerfold' image was taken from almost exactly the same viewpoint; though with very different framing. How he managed to set up his 8x10 view camera to get the shot remains a mystery to me, as I struggled to get my small DSLR into position! Click HERE to compare our disparate visions of the same piece of rock (Click on 'view Portfolios, then select 'Stone Cathedrals' and scroll down to the 'Centerfold' image). |
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March 2008
Stalking the Yosemite Firefall
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Horsetail Fall is an ephemeral waterfall high on the cliff face of El Cap. In Yosemite Valley. Sometimes, and only sometimes, it pus on a fantastic light display, catching the dying red rays of the setting sun as the rocks either side plunge into shade. If anything captures the meaning of 'Evanescent Light', this is it!
The first photographer to capture and popularize the 'firefall' of Horsetail fall was Galen Rowell, and it is often said that no one since has done it better. Maybe so; but there is plenty of incentive to get your own photo, and maybe do it differently.
Capturing the firefall demands some planning, and a lot of luck. A first requirement is that the setting sun is aligned well. This happens only in Winter, with the optimal time being around the middle of February. By early March the lower part of the falls go into shadow before the sun is low enough to produce a red glow. Second, there must obviously be a clear sky to the West. Finally, there needs to be a good flow of water over the falls. The catchment area is fairly small, so this needs either a period of recent heavy rain, or a good snowpack with a few days of preceding warm weather. Some years the firefall never happens, and when it does, prime light last for only ten or fifteen minutes. On average, the firefall is present for perhaps only one or two hours per year!
The Photo of the Month here was taken on Feb. 16, 2008. I had been following the Yosemite weather forecast, together with updates on the Yosemite Blog and View from the Little Red Tent, that all pointed to good, clear conditions that weekend, following several warm days. The omens looked promising enough to justify the 800 mile round-trip journey from Irvine. Arriving in Yosemite, the next choice was where to shoot from. The classical view of Horsetail is from near the El. Cap picnic area, replicating Galen Rowell's image, and shown in this image I took the previous year. This time around I decided on a change, and selected a location on the far side of the Merced River with a clear view through the trees of the falls. The extra distance provides a surprisingly different perspective. The view from the picnic area shows the top of the cliffs silhouetted against the sky – nice if there are some high clouds to add interest and color, but otherwise leaving a big blank area at the top of the photo. In contrast, the view across the river reveals the snow slopes that rise steeply above the cliff top, giving the illusion through a telephoto lens of a viewpoint almost level with the falls, instead of looking steeply up from thousands of feet below.
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Arriving at around 4:00 pm there were already around a dozen photographers staking out their few square feet of meadow to set up tripods. Then, it was just a matter of waiting and hoping, stamping around in the snow to keep warm. The photos below illustrate the progression of the light, as the sun swings round to the North casting a growing shadow from the nose of El Cap across the rocks to the left of the falls. On this day the falls became a silvery cascade at about 5:20pm, turned deep red by 5:30, and were extinguished by the setting sun at 5:41. So, not much time to get good shots.
My aim was to produce a high-resolution image by stitching together several frames, taken with a 10 Mpixel Canon 40D and 100-400 lens zoomed in to about 200 mm. I set up using a RRS panning clamp and rail to focus the camera on the falls, and then lock everything down while allowing free movement along the vertical axis. With these settings, three shots nicely covered the height of the falls, with generous overlap for subsequent stitching. A final ingredient for a good photo involves enough wind to kick up a good amount of spray, otherwise the falls themselves appear as only a narrow ribbon of light. That was present, but I worried that changes in the spray pattern between successive shots would cause problems, and took photos as quickly as the two second delay on the mirror lockup would permit. In the end, the photomerge and blend functions in CS3 did a fine job.
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Click HERE to download a full-resolution (24 Mpixel) file of the 'Firefall' image.
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