In the first post I talked about photographing Yosemite Valley at sunrise from Tunnel View in a snow storm.  I imported the images into Lightroom and reviewed them there.  One stood out.  See The Making of a Photograph Part 1 – Selection.

The next step is to explore the image for possibilities.  I do this in Lightroom, making virtual copies of the image that I can then adjust.  I adjust such things as color temperature, exposure, highlights, shadows, fill, contrast, saturation, hue and more.  The goal is to see what’s in the image and what it’s capable of expressing.  I’m also looking for something that gets me excited.

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So because I’m a professional photographer I’m not supposed to shoot in program mode?  And why not?  Especially if it works.  Oh, you only get JPEG files.  Well, OK, that’s a consideration.  But what about just going out and looking for a compositions and light?  It’s always a good idea to shoot frequently, even in one’s back yard.

So this inspiration hit me as I glanced out the kitchen window.  And having my trusty G11 at hand, well, check it out….

And what was the program mode?  SCN set on Sunset.  Bet you could have guessed that.

The purple sky was really cool.

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I spent a night in Yosemite Valley a few weeks ago.  See 24 Hours in Yosemite.  It was great to be back; no, it was fantastic to be back.  Both sunset and the following sunrise were shot from Tunnel View, the parking area just as you emerge from the tunnel on state highway 41.  You can always count on company, especially for sunset.

I’m working on one of the photographs taken there that weekend.  But before showing you the image, let’s start with some comments about the light.  Sunset was a near cloudless sky.  The only clouds were a few cotton balls floating over Half Dome.  The rest of the sky was clear.  As the sun set the shadows filled the valley, eventually claiming to the tops of the cliff faces.  But as they did beautiful warm light embraced the the mighty granite but gradually gave way to approaching night.

The morning was quite the opposite.  During the night the anticipated storm rolled in and rain started to fall.  The valley was now full of clouds swirling about, shrouding the eternal granite.  And snow flurries came, keeping all of us at Tunnel View on our toes, protecting our camera gear and warming our fingers.

It was an image from the morning shoot that I selected to work on.  There were long periods of waiting.  The snow flurries passed over us and moved on up the valley obscuring most or all of it.  Then they would pass but the clouds wouldn’t be in the right positions.  Eventually a wonderful, exciting light came shortly after sunrise, imparting a very faint warm cast to some of the clouds.  The rest of the scene was cool, both in light quality and air temperature.

This is the image I started from as it appears unaltered in Lightroom.  I selected it because of the sense of mystery created by the clouds that just give us glimpses of Bridle Vail Falls and the Cathedral Spires on the right and towering El Capitan on the left.  The hints of the beautiful warm hues in the clouds that I would try to pull from the image are present but not apparent in this image.  Rather, we see the predominantly cool mood.

Over the next several posts I’ll take you through the process of trying to recreate what I saw and felt that morning as well as what I discovered in this image.  There were some wonderful surprises in store.  So stay tuned.

The journey continues – read part 2.

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I don’t like PayPal.  They are a financial institution that gets to make up  their own rules.  If you’re a PayPal merchant and they want to put a freeze on your money, they can do it.  For example, if you have a dissatisfied customer that complains to PayPal for even a small amount, they will put a freeze on all your funds, not just the disputed ones.  And the freeze can last up to 6 months.  A few years back PayPal had a judgment of $12 million against them for this very reason – tying up funds that belonged to the merchants.  Imaging if a bank said they were putting a freeze on the checking account of a small business for six months.  When the funds were finally released there would be no small business.  I would never use PayPal’s merchant services.  They are an unregulated financial institution and we know what they can do to the world economy, don’t we.

Well, I have another PayPal story to tell. 

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It was July in the Eastern Sierra.  We had just finished photographing sunrise at a gem of a lake outside of Bishop – North Lake.  It’s a small, natural lake favored by fishermen and photographers alike, just a short distance off the road to the more popular Lake Sabrina.  Someone told us that the wild irises were blooming in the meadow up by the campground.  This was not to be missed.

July in the Sierra is mosquito month and I had left my left the insect repellant back in the hotel room.  I’m not always thinking very clearly at 3:30 in the morning when we were getting up.  So this photograph was taken through a cloud of really pesky mosquitoes.  I had no idea I was so popular.

But the results were worth it – a pleasing, quite yet joyful celebration of spring in the Sierra.

Wild Irises (2009)

Coming up in November I’m not sure what you will see here.  There are a number of exciting photographs to choose from.  It could be North Lake under an angry, stormy sky, Yosemite Valley filled with clouds or some of the wonderful images captured in my recent trip to Utah, images that I’m very eager to show.

So stay tuned.

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Remember when you first started driving?  Just about everything you did behind the wheel was a conscious act – steering into a curve, breaking for a red light, backing out of the garage, whatever.  Everything required a conscious effort.  But now, those things are all automatic and you can safely drive from point A to point B without even once thinking about the physical act of driving.  It’s a part of you.

If you learned to play a musical instrument you went through the same process.  I played piano and at first had to think about every key I pressed.  But as time went by it wasn’t which key needed to be pressed any more but how to interpret the phrase.  The fingers automatically went to where they were supposed to go.

Athletes also experience the same thing.  For example a tennis player at first needs to concentrate on every part of a backhand swing or a serve.  But after a while it it all becomes muscle memory.

The single most important thing that causes this effect to happen is frequent practice, usually daily.

But what does this have to do with photography?  Well, this applies on two levels and I’m specifically referring to photography in the field.  The first is the operation of our instrument, our camera.  At first things such as exposure, focus, depth of field, filtration, etc. are all conscious acts.  And this doesn’t touch on all the additional functionality modern digital cameras provide such as highlight tone priority, high ISO noise reduction and on and on.

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I love dawn.  Besides the obvious fact that it’s the start of the day, it’s a way to get the day off to a beautiful start.  If you’re looking for spectacle, sunrises don’t generally compete with sunsets.  During the day the atmosphere gets churned and stirred up by the warming effect of the sun.  Winds kick up dust, human activity creates pollution, all of which contributes to the warm rich colors of sunset.  But during the night the atmosphere cools down and becomes quite,  So that when the sun makes its way around the back side of our planet and is ready to begin its journey across the  sky, the air is clean and calm.  All of this makes for a clarity and purity that is the special realm of dawn.

The general rule of thumb for photographing sunrises is to arrive about 45 minutes early.  By this time all but the  brightest stars have faded and the eastern sky is beginning to glow.  I  prefer to arrive even earlier, up to an hour and a half before sunrise.  At this time I get to marvel at the night sky, enjoy the constellations that are familiar from my childhood and experience the entire progression from night to day.

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I took a side trip to Kodachrome Basin State Park this afternoon.  What a cool place.

The park is famous for it’s columns of cemented sandstone that stretch in come cases hundreds of feet into the air.  Geologists believe that they were once hot springs like those in Yellowstone and that they cooled off and filled with sediment.  Then the earth around them eroded, leaving them standing there.  They call them ‘sand pipes’ and the park has over sixty of them.

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Here’s something I’m liking a lot about the G11.  There may be images I’m interested in but don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up the tripod and big Canon.  So, with the G11 on a pouch on my belt, I can just whip it out, turn it on and snap a few.  These can be those documentation shots we like to take like signs of places we visit or those cool interpretive signs scattered about all the interesting places in national parks and state parks.  I can also grab a quick shot of whatever the interpretive signs are expounding on.  In other words, it’s great for grab shots because it’s so easy.  And I feel like a tourist except for the fact that the G11 is much thicker than most of theirs and it shoots RAW and aperture priority and, well, it’s a really powerful camera.

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Well, the storm rolled in last night right on schedule.  By dawn the precipitation hadn’t started yet.  That was to come.  But clouds were covering most of the sky.

I had a brief moment of excitement when I looked up and saw Orion.  But hopes faded away when a few minutes later it was nowhere to be seen.  Sunset Point was the shooting location I had planned for sunrise.  Yes, you heard correctly.  Is said ‘Sunset Point.’  This is where Thor’s Hammer is found, one of the most distinctive and impressive hoodoos in Bryce.  I’ve tried on previous occasions to photograph Thor’s Hammer but never got  anything I liked. Maybe this time would be better.

But first, I set up on the observation lookout and started the shoot with a 25 second exposure at f/4 and ISO 200 (for you camera geeks out there).  I just pointed the camera in the general direction of some interesting clouds and pushed the shutter (the camera was on a tripod of course).  And, well, it turned out pretty good – good enough to share with you.

Beautiful clouds, wouldn’t you agree?  I believe it was Galen Rowell who first said, “Bad weather makes for good photography.”  I love the contrast between the almost abrasive ridges and hoodoos of the canyon and the soft, soaring, ethereal clouds.

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