I don’t know when I’ve felt so connected to a place as I felt on the North Shore of Lake Superior in October 2010. I’m sure being with my brother Roger and his good friend Travis Novitsky had a lot to do with it. Also visiting the Spirit Tree for sunrise Saturday morning surely made the connection stronger.

But the land is also really ancient up there. The young rocks are a mere billion years old; yes, that’s billion with a B. And not far away are rocks that are more than four billion years old. These are some of the oldest rocks on the planet and somehow I could feel their age. I guess the best way I can describe the feeling is one of reverence.

So I’m returning to the October Minnesota brother shoot for this month’s pick for photo of the month. I have other photos that are begging to be recognized but I really want to start the year with this Minnesota image.

Partridge Falls 2 (2010)

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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.

To see more of my photographs click here.

Join me on an upcoming workshop.

Become a fan on Facebook and follow along.

It’s official.  We are offering a five day photography workshop to beautiful Utah in mid October, 2009.  We’ll be photographing two days in Zion, two days in Bryce and a day in Cedar Breaks.  The dates are October 17-22.  Priced at $695, we invite you to compare this workshop with the others and you will find it’s a great value.

Besides great photography, our goal is intensive personal attention.  Therefore participation is limited to just six.

To learn more go to http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/workshops/2009_sw_utah/2009_sw_utah_announcement.html

For our 2009-2010 workshop calendar go to http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/workshops/workshop_home_page.html

Also, visit http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/

You can also join us on Facebook and become a fan.  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ralph-Nordstrom-Photography/112254382772

Use of Spot Healing Brush

I have an image that is a shot of the Eastern Sierra at sunrise.  There are gorgeous clouds hanging over the peaks.  The early morning sun lit them on fire along with the mountains.  It was amazing!

My exposure was pretty close to being right on.  And yet, there was one part of the clouds that technically wasn’t clipped but was very close.  The RGB numbers were not 100% but were in the high 80% to low 90%.  The thing was there wasn’t much detail and it really stood out.

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Last night marked two months since the fire came through our ‘back yard.’  Since then we’ve had about four inches of rain.  In fact, there was more rain in one storm than all of last year.  As a result the scorched hills are starting to turn green.  We’ve seen crop duster planes flying over the foothills and mountains seeding the slopes to help control erosion.

Last night’s sunset was spectacular!

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What I’d like to do is keep a journal of the steps I go through and the decisions I make when creating the Zion Canyon print.  It was shot on 11/24/2007 near the Great White Thrown turnout.  I was there the day before closer to sunset and realized this shot needed to be taken about an hour earlier.  So I came back at 4:15 the following day.  The shot required both stitching (vertical panorama shots) and HDR (three exposures bracketed at +/- 1 stop) for a total of six shots.

The image was shot down by the Virgin River although it’s not in the picture.  The foreground is a meadow in the shade with two cottonwood trees.  The middle ground is a Navajo sandstone cliff jutting in from the right, also in the shade.  The background is a tall cliff, also Navajo sandstone, that is still catching some sunlight.  The sky is cloudless and blue.

Here then are the steps I’m going through to take these six shots from RAW to a finished print.  It will probably not be completed today.  Sorry I can’t show the before and after of each step.  That would be interesting.

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