Tag: Death Valley National Park

Focus Stacking – First Impressions

A practical guide to focus stacking

Background

Depth of Field (DOF) is a staple of near-far landscape photography.  It is used when the composition contains object that are very near to the lens as well as objects that are distant.  Traditionally, it has been achieved by using a wide-angle lens with a small aperture or a tilt-shift lens.  Using this technique, it is possible to have the nearest object one or two feet from the lens and everything is in focus from the object to infinity. 

Racetrack rocks death valley 160222 39731
Depth of field example. The rock is 18″ from the lens but with a wide focal length (16 mm) and a stopped down aperture (f/11) everything is in focus.

The disadvantage of this method is you must use a wide-angle or tilt-shift lens, preferably on a full-frame sensor camera body, and a small aperture.  (In this image, the rock was 18” from the lens.  I used a 16mm lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor and was able to get the needed DOF at f/11.). But small apertures introduce lens diffraction which work against you by softening the entire image.  And what if you don’t have a wide enough lens.  You couldn’t get this shot with a 24mm lens.  And getting any kind of DOF with a telephoto lens is virtually impossible, even with fairly distant subjects.

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Photographing Death Valley National Park

Enjoy some of the photographic wonders of Death Valley National Park on an exciting photography workshop.

People sometimes ask me if there’s anything to photograph in Death Valley.  At 5,262 square miles of desert and mountains, it’s one of the largest national parks.  The valley itself is 140 miles long.  Think of it.  It takes three hours to drive from one end to the other.  And surely, in all that space there should be something to photograph.  And yet, most of it is desert.  In fact, the valley itself is the hottest, driest place on earth. It’s also the lowest spot in North America at 282 feet below sea level.  So what’s to photograph?

Mesquite Flats Dunes

Death valley dunes 2011

Being a desert you might expect sand dunes and you would be right.  The Mesquite Flats Dunes are in the middle of the valley near Stovepipe Wells.  While not excessively high, they cover a large area and provide wonderful photographic opportunities at both sunrise and sunset.  I prefer sunrise which means heading out across the desert while it’s still dark to arrive at the dunes just as it’s starting to get light.  I go to a place that’s not heavily visited.  It’s an exciting experience.

Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie point pano 140211

Zabriskie Point is one of the most visited places in Death Valley.  It attracts photographers and tourists alike.  At first it looks like an inhospitable badlands with not much to offer the photographer except a lot of tan wilderness.  But at the right time of day these ‘bad’ lands become extraordinarily beautiful.

Zabriskie collage

It’s all a matter of being there at the right time.

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It’s Raining in Death Valley!

Rain in Death Valley this now bodes well for an exciting photography workshop in February.

We have a great storm passing through California and it’s raining in Death Valley.  Why would I care?  Because rain in Death Valley now makes for a fantastic workshop in February.  So far we’ve been having a wet winter in California.  That bodes well for more precipitation in Death Valley.  And winter precipitation in the Valley bodes well for some pretty fantastic conditions.  The  past two years we’ve had major flooding in the playas which means very unusual reflection shots in the hottest, driest place in North America.

death_valley_reflections_2009

Why not join us.  The workshop is February 12-15, 2011.

Join me on an upcoming workshop.  Click here for more details.

To see more of my photographs click here.

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Photographing Death Valley

Death Valley is a wonderful location to photograph and here are a few of my favorite places.

Every year I lead a workshop in Death Valley.  We offer personalized instruction and photograph some of the many exciting locations there.  Click here for more information.

death_valley_reflections_2009Now, the only time you want to be in Death Valley is late fall through early spring.  Otherwise it’s just too darn hot.  Personally, I like February.  It’s kind of a quite time and we’ve had some mighty good luck the last couple of years with major rainfall in the weeks leading up to the workshop.  What this has meant for us is some of the playas were flooded.  When that happens you have lakes six inched deep that spread for miles in every direction.  It doesn’t take a lot of rain to flood the playas either.  Generally an inch will do.

There are some locations in Death Valley that I really love and I’d like to share them with you.

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Genuine Fractals Impressions #3

I finally had a chance to perform a test with Genuine Fractals that’s been on my mind for some time.  This test was performed on an image from a Canon 10D with a 6 M pixel sensor.  The image was blown up to 24″ long at 180 ppi.

Now, there’s no way you can get a super sharp image of that size with a 6 M pixel sensor.  So that wasn’t the point of the test.  When I previously blew this image up there were a lot of artifacts that were enhanced, especially when I performed the output sharpening.  I spent about an hour with clone stamp and healing brush removing these artifacts one by one.

So the point of the test was to see how well the smooth areas were enlarged; that is, if GF could enlarge them without creating these artifacts.

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