March 2009 Snow Goose Blast-off (click on the image to download a full-resolution original - and click HERE for more photos from Bosque del Apache) Some photographs are the result of much pre-visulaization and methodical composition. Others are pure luck. This month's photo is an example of the latter. While attending a meeting in Albuquerque in early February, I took the opportunity to visit Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge by the Rio Grande about 100 miles south of Albuquerque. The reserve is famed for the vast numbers (tens of thousands) of snow geese and sandhill cranes that overwinter from around November through to late February. The photography opportunities were remarkable. From almost an hour before sunrise till well after sunset, this is a bird photographer's paradise. The highlight of the day, however, comes early. Before sunrise great flocks of geese erupt simultaneously after roosting overnight in the ponds and take to the air with a beating of wings as loud as approaching freight trains on the nearby railroad. This is an amazing spectacle, but difficult to photograph as it usually happens while still quite dark. On one morning, though, I was lucky. The geese took off in the twilight, but sooon after landed and congregated in one corner of the pond by the 'flight deck' observation platform. They then stayed there, contentedly bobbing in the water for the next hour, despite being surrounded by a hundred photographers. Like everyone else I was positioned along the bank, armed with a long telephoto lens waiting for the eventual erruption. I don't know what was the final trigger, but a few of the geese at the edges of the mass started to swim outward and suddenly, within a couple of seconds, thousands of birds were airborne. Everything happened so fast there was no hope of deliberately composing a picture. I had just set the camera on fast motor-drive and servo AF, and filled up the buffer with a burst of shots aiming roughly into the mass of birds. All but one of the resulting images were unusable - a blurry mess of wings and cut-off necks. By luck, however, I count the photo above as a good success. The heads of two geese are nicely framed and are in reasonable, if not tack-sharp focus. And, the closely packed motion-blurred wingtips contrast with 'frozen' splashed water droplets to convey a sense of the dynamics and sheer density of this unique event.   February 2009 Joshua Tree Reflections Click on the image to download full resolution (~25 M pixel) original) What makes a good photograph? Subject, lighting, composition, and technical excellence all factor in. Following on from the theme of January's photo, the first two ingredients are very much a matter of being at the right place at the right time, and this month's photo is one such instance. Joshua Tree National Park is a great place for photography, combining the unique forms of the Joshua trees themselves with warm granite rock formations. Usually it is a hot, arid place, but heavy snowfall in the desert a few days before Christmas gave a very different appearance; further enhanced by crystal-clear blue skies with fantastical lace clouds. A good subject then, and under most unusual conditions. How to do it justice? A recent article by Ken Rockwell emphasizes the importance of composition: where do you put the camera?, how do you frame and select the elements within the image? A common mistake is simply to walk around, always shooting photos at eye level. A more interesting approach is to select unusual viewpoints - to take photos that communicate a view that most people would not 'see' even if there at that same place and time. Reflections make a nice example, as even small rainwater pools can make for expansive images provided you get right down to ground level. Indeed, the photo here was captured using only a small 'puddle' of melted snow at the side of the road. At normal eye level it looked just like a small, muddy puddle, with a large expanse of tarmack behind - but with the camera almost touching the water the puddle became a giant reflecting mirror. This is one instance where I find the 'live-view' feature of recent DSLR cameras to be very helpful. Before, I would have been lying flat in the mud, trying to squint through the viewfinder to compose the picture. Now, I can simply crouch down, keeping dry and mud-free, composing with the lcd screen. A further aspect of composition has to do with symmetry. The 'rule of thirds' holds that key features, such as the horizon line, shoud be placed either about one third up or down from the edges of the frame; but certainly not in the middle. For reflections, though, I often find it works better to break the rule, and put the horizon dead in the middle. The perfect vertical symmetry is certainly more eye-catching. Here there is also an interesting horizontal semi-symmetry, with the two rock formations straddling the center Joshua tree. But not quite symmetrical, and the left-to-right lines of diminishing outcrops and trees contrasted with the expanding lines of cloud formations lead the eye across the picture.     January 2009 Double waterfall and icicles at the Emerald Pools : "F8 and be there" Steve Cossack runs a series of photography workshops entitled 'F8 and be there'. That title encapsulates the view that the main thing in landscape photography is to be at the right place at the right time. The 'F8' simply refers to what is likely to be the optimal lens aperture. In other words, don't worry too much about the technicalities; it is the subject and the lighting that matter. However, this presupposes that you have a camera with you at the time! Having found myself on several occasions gazing at a great sunset but without a camera, my requested Christmas present this year was a new Canon G10. This 'point-and-shoot' camera is small enough to carry in a (large) pocket, yet can create 15 megapixel RAW files, and has received excellent reviews. Thus, when faced with a steep and icy dawn hike to the Emerald Pools in Zion Canyon, I decided to leave my heavy camera backpack with SLR gear and tripod behind in the car, and to take only the G10. My objective was the lower Pool; which does not live up to its name, as there really is no pool. Instead, however, a stream cascades over an overhang creating multiple falls - and best of all the trail passes below the overhang and behind the falls. I had previously photographed here in autumn, catching the falls as they were lit by the rising sun against a background of fall colors in the cottonwood trees. Now, in the middle of Winter the trees were bare, but the lack of color was compensated by fantastic fringes of icicles hanging from the lip of the overhang. Alone at this early hour, I scouted a good position to capture the free-falling water, and waited for the sun to rise over the opposite side of the canyon. But, there was a problem. Although the G10 zooms to an unusually wide angle (28 mm equivalent) for a 'pocket' camera, that was not enough to frame the entire height of the falls; and moving further away destroyed the composition. My improvised solution was to treat this as a vertical panorama, taking three sequential (handheld) shots trying to move the camera along a near perfectly vertical axis. The images were captured just as the sunlight back-lit the falls, while the back of the overhang remained deep in contrasting shadow. To avoid complications I took this initial series of shots using the tree to block direct sunlight from the lens, and then took an additional shot with the sun just peeping between the branches to create a 'sunstar' effect. Some subsequent work in Photoshop then created the final 25 megapixel stitched image, which you can download at full resolution by clicking HERE. Amazing for such a tiny camera! December 2008 Mt. Whitney and Alabama Hills: 'The problem with photographing the beautiful'   Mt. Whitney and Lone Pine Peak after recent snow (click on image to download 30 Mpix panorama)

A recent article by George Barr raised the problem inherent in photographing beautiful places; how do you ever compete with the real thing? And if you can't, why bother?

One option is indeed not to bother - and George's photography is aimed very much at finding beauty in subjects that to the casual eye may indeed not seem to posess much inherent interest or beauty. But, that is rather limiting, and to photographers of lesser skill it would seem that there might be a higher chance of coming out with a great image if you start with a great subject. The problem, of course, is that the great subjects (Delicate Arch, El Cap and so on) have already been photographed so many times, and by so many great photographers that it is hard to impossible to come up with some new interpretation. In his article, George discusses several several strategies that have been historically used to produce an image with some novely, and which conveys something in addition to and different from what a visitor might directly experience at that location. Such stategies include isolation only a small part of a grand scene, selection of unusual viewpoints, and post-processing (e.g. conversion to black and white) of the original photograph). The simplest, however, is merely to photograph the subject in exceptional conditions. It may (and has!) been argued that this reflects more on the photographer's perseverence and willingness to get up very early in the morning rather than his photographic skills; but surely that deserves some reward, and can result in a nice image.

Which brings us to this month's photo - a panoramic shot of Mt. Whitney and the Sierras behind the Alabama Hills. Being the highest peak in the lower 48 states this is cliched subject, but I hope the photo above has some freshness to it. Download the full-resolution original and see if you agree.

I had noted the composition on earlier visits while driving along the Movie Road through the Alabama Hills, and pictured an early morning shot with the sun on the mountains but with the foreground rocks sillhouetted in black shadow. During a recent Thanksgiving visit the conditions were promising, an earlier storm having dumped snow on the mountains and leaving the sky crystal clear. However, I spent too long photographing at Mobius and Lathe Arches, and by the time I drove along the road, sunlight was just touching the rocks. A little disappointing, but it's best not to get locked into preconceived notions, and just to take what is offered. Indeed, I think the result came out better than if the rocks were mere black outlines - but I will try that next time and see.
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c (click on image to download full-res original in new window)

Thoughts about this month's photo were prompted by recent articles reporting that the Pentagon had manipulated a photo of the first female four-star general by digitally replacing the background (boring office furniture) with an image of the stars and stripes. So, given the ease with which this can be accomplished using Photoshop, what is an acceptable level of manipulation?. For news reportage, the threshold is generally and appropriately set at zero. The image should reflect what is there, with nothing added or taken away. But what about landscape photography - particularly that which aspires to be "fine-art"? The threshold here is far less defined, and has been (and contines to be) the subject of much discussion. A reasonable viewpoint would be to say that the degree of 'allowable' image manipulation depends upon the photographer's intentions, the viewer's expectations and, in particular, what information the photographer may communicate to his/her audience. Differing examples include Michael Fatali ("no computer imaging ... only natural light") and Alain Briot ("of course my work is manipulated").

A starting point is to realize that no photograph accurately depicts the scene in front of the camera. The colors in a photo are modified by the camera's jpg processing or the raw conversion algorithm; perspective is altered by use of wide or telephoto lenses; a 3-dimensional environment is rendered in two-dimensions; etc. Images as they come straight out of a camera (digital or film) typically look rather 'flat', and some processing is needed to get them looking more like the photographer's remembered perception of the scene. But, beyond that, what might be acceptable in terms of adding or subtracting elements, or processing beyond merely adjustments to curves, color balance and saturation? The photo above can serve as an example of my own philosophy.

The picture was taken at Pfeiffer State beach in Big Sur, when returning from a conference in Monterey. I had been hoping to photograph the famous sea arch with the setting sun casting a light beam through onto the breaking surf. No such luck. As is often the case the beach was beset by thick coastal fog, so I turned my attention to other subjects. The tide was high, with waves washing among clumps of seaweed, presenting a nice opportunity for long-exposure photos to capture the 'dreamy' swirls as the foam from receding waves swept out. In itself, this is already a form of image manipulation. Our eyes and brain work at about 30 frames per second, so we percieve the motion of the waves and cannot integrate over long times as a camera can. But, that alone was not enough to produce the fnal image. Problematically, the most visually interesting clump of seaweed on the beach did not line up with the sea arch - as I envisioned for the final picture - and attempts to move it came to nought as currents were in the wrong direction directly in front of the arch. Eventually, a particularly big wave washed the seaweed out to sea. What to do? Let Photoshop solve the problem!. I had several long-exposure shots of the foam and seaweed, so it was easy enough to blend a foreground image with a separate image of the arch. Indeed, why not go a bit further? In all of the seaweed images, the currents carried swirl of the receding foam either to the right or left - giving an unbalanced appearance. Thus, the final photo is a composite of two shots taken during successive waves (luckily, the first wave did not appreciably move the seaweed). Final step, follow the motto for good photos of 'cut the clutter'. There are smaller rocks either side of the arch rock which rather disrupted the composition, so I cloned them out. The net result is a photo that (I think) succeeds in capturing my intent at the time. It is not intended to be a realistic depiction of a particular place. Rather, a semi-abstract composition conveying a certain mood, and a different way of looking at the world. Hard to put into words - I hope the picture itself speaks to you.

A common saying about photography is that we are not capturing an image of a subject; rather we are capturing light. I think this is exemplified by the two photos above, showing exactly the same subject from almost exactly the same viewpoint, yet expressing very different moods because of a 30 minute difference in time of day and a change in cloud conditions.

The subject is a formation of Tufa towers in Mono Lake. These unique faetures were created underwater, and are visible only because much of the water flowing into the lake was diverted to the thirsty mouths of Los Angeles. By themselves they are intriguing, but in harsh sunlight photographs come out looking very mundane. Around dawn and dusk it is a different matter. The topography of the lake does, however, present some problems. The tufa is found mostly along the southern shore; where views West to the setting sun are blocked by high mountains of the Sierras, and Eastern views of sunrise are cluttered by low hills and an indifferent shoreline. The formation shown here s thus one of my favorites, being nicely isolated at some distance out into the lake, and with a viwepoint giving a North-East perspective to better catch the light.

The upper photo was taken soon after the sun had set behind the Sierras when the clouds were nicely lighting up. The sky was still bright, and I used a 2 stop graduated filter to tame the exposure and bring out the reflections in the water. A classical 'calander' type shot; nice enough (I think!), but merely capturing what the scene looked like at the time.

The lower image, my favorite of the two, conveys a more mysterious atmosphere, and is a case where the camera captured something that was not apparent by eye. This requires previsualization (anticipating how the camera will 'see' what comes through the lens), a little technical trickery, and some luck. The key to the surreal atmosphere was a long (30 s) exposure time. This has the effect of blurring out ripples in the water to give a misty appearance; but more important here it has the same effect on rapidly moving clouds. A second trick was to provide some fill light from a hand-held flashlight. The tufa formations would otherwise (as in the top photo) remained as black sillhouettes, but a little artificial lighting highlights them and brings up the nearby rocks at the lakeshore to provide foreground interest. The art is to balance natural and artificial light to create a natural looking effect - somewhat hit-and-miss procedure, but greatly aided by the ability to immediately view the results on the screen of a digital camera.

Click on the images above to open a full-resolution copy in a new window/tab. Click HERE to view many more images of Mono Lake. TThe key to the suhe

All my previous 'photos of the month' have, in one way or another, featured a piece of rock. So, time for a change. This month a man-made artifact close to home; one of the oil rigs off the coast at Huntington Beach. Two renditions of the same subject, under very different lighting conditions and conveying different moods. Both were captured using a 400 mm lens. The sunset image was taken with the camera down at beach level, perilously close to the surf line, to dramatize the breaking waves. Given the bright, backlit sky I could use both a fast shutter speed to 'freeze' the waves, and a small aperture to keep the distant oil rig and the close wave in focus together. This photo has been in the Evanescent Light galleries for a couple of years, and has been one of my best sellers, in surprising demand from oil exploration and supply companies for use in catalogs and advertising materials. The pre-dawn photo is a recent image, captured at about 5:15am on an August morning when the sky was blanketed by the marine layer. It is one of a series, taken over the course of about 30 min, which best balanced the featureless pre-dawn blue of the sea and sky with the warm colors of the lights on the rig. I stopped down the lens to f8 both to maximize sharpness and to give an exposure time of about 20s so as to blur the reflections in the waves. Unlike the sunset photo, this was taken from high up on the bluffs; a vantage point providing a more extensive foreground and, given the slightly misty conditions, allowing the sea and sky to blend seamlessly. UPDATE I never got around to adding a new photo for September, so instead here is another capture of the same oil rig; now taken at dusk with a setting crescent moon. I had timed this visit to Huntington Beach three days after the new moon, but was disappointed to find that I was a little late, and that by the time the moon sank close to the horizon virtually all color from the setting sun had faded, and the sky was almost completely black. The photo here is thus a slight cheat, in that I combined an image captured earlier using the 'lighten' blend option in Photoshop layers to add color to the sky. Click on any of the photos above to download full resolution images.

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.

April 2008 'Antelope Arch' 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).

March 2008 Stalking the Yosemite Firefall   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.   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. Click HERE to download a full-resolution (24 Mpixel) file of the 'Firefall' image. last updated 01/01/2009

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