Photoblog 2.0

Touching the Rainbow, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the Patriarch Grove, abode of some of the oldest living things, the Bristlecone Pines, the weather was wild with sun, rain, hail, and a rainbow. These ancient Bristlecone Pines are located in the White Mountains near the California-Nevada border, across Owens Valley from the Sierra Nevada, at an altitude of between 10,000 and 12,000 feet. It’s hard for me not to approach these trees with an attitude of reverence.

Related story: Seeking Methuselah, a story about the ancient Bristlecone Pines when I visited on a road trip in 2005; my Bristlecone Pine set on Flickr.

Hill, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I’ve been thinking about lines in composition, and black & white. Here are two examples where both visual effects come into play.

Above: A fence divides the water utility (EBMUD) lands from the public park in East Bay, and a path follows the fence up the hill. You actually have to payan annual fee to hike on the EBMUD land, and they have their own private force policing this.

Below: How often do you see a sunset in black and white? It’s like seeing flowers in monochrome.

Watching this sunset fron the end of Point Reyes, I was surprised how contrast increased as the sunset progressed, and I realized there really is a simple compositional story here.

View this image larger.

Point Reyes Twilight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In the LCD, this twilight view of Point Reyes looked like grey mush. Probably the fault of the auto white balance setting. Back home, I adjusted the color temperature to make the scene look more like its natural colors, and multi-RAW processed the image for a painterly effect.

22mm (33mm in 35mm terms); 8 seconds at f/4 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Coming into Zion, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Looking down at Zion Canyon, Utah in the bright spring sunshine, it was clear to me that I couldn’t create a single exposure that would capture the dynamic range from the deep, black shadows in the foreground to the white clouds in the background. So I made a number of different exposures at a constant aperture, bracketing the shutter speeds, and combined the different exposures by hand in Photoshop to create a single image with greater dynamic range than any one of the individual captures.

It was hard to concentrate on image making with the boys running around like maniacs on a rock platform with an unfenced thousand-foot exposure, but as you can see I managed.

22mm, three captures at shutter speeds between 1/200 of a second and 1/50 of a second; each capture at f/10 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.

Leaves of Grass, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I realized that I needed a fast shutter speed to capture this field of grass blowing in a brisk wind. Otherwise, the pattern would have gone mushy. The point of the thing is best seen when the image is larger.

[200mm, 1/1000 of a second at f/10 and ISO 320, tripod mounted.]

Surf, Kirby Cove, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

On a recent overcast evening, with my guest from Finland, on a bluff above Kirby Cove, I waited for the night lights of the Golden Gate Bridge.

To pass the time, I tried long exposures of the white surf on the dark beach. My idea was to get the exposure as long as possible, so I used a circular polarizer to make things darker (and increase the tonal contrast). I also wanted to underexpose the overall image, because I knew I could pick up the white waves in post-processing.

This was an image that I pre-visualized in black and white, although I exposed in full digital RGB color and converted using the techniques I explain in The Photoshop Darkroom.

Breaking Wave, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I shot this photo a few years ago, obliquely facing the rugged cliffs along the outer Marin Headlands. Here’s the color version and partial backstory; the photo appeared in color in my Light & Exposure book with the following caption:

I was struck by the contrast between the dramatic surf in the sunset and the dark shore in the shadow. I decided to create an interesting photo by exposing for the sunlit-breaking wave and letting the cliff go dark. Actually, you can’t even really tell that it is a cliff, and the mystery about the dark shore helps make the image compelling.

18–200mm VR zoom lens at 200mm, 1/250 of a second at f/6.3 and ISO 100, hand-held.

I’ve been on a black & white conversion kick lately, and this one struck me as a good candidate for monchrome. The conversion took eleven separate black & white adjustment layers, each with its own mask, and one LAB inversion used as a layer, but I think it was worth the trouble.

Dune Grass, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

We camped in a small BLM campground near Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in Utah near the Arizona border. The kids were excited to climb to the top of the highest dunes, and I performed the photography dance with tripod in sandy conditions. Making sure that no camera gear touches the sand while getting the tripod set up and camera out always takes a bit of doing.

It was great fun watching Julian and Nicky roll down the dunes, getting coated with sand in the process (yes, I do have the photos to prove it!).

It’s disappointing that this park has essentially been turned over to dune buggy (off-road vehicle) fanatics. True, there are a few “conservation” areas set aside. But you can’t walk in them without being blasted by dune buggy engine noise. I took quite a few photos of vehicle tracks in the sand (in fact, it was hard to find pristine areas to photograph) and I may publish some track abstractions if I can overcome my disgust.

I remember visiting quite a few years ago when this place was tranquil and serene. Now it’s not. Considerring that these unique dunes are a fragile ecosystem with unique plant and animal life, it verges on the criminal that it has been so badly desecrated. Shame on the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, part of the US Department of the Interior) and Utah Parks Department who have presided over this give away to a small, noisy, and very destructive special interest group.

Eye Colorado, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a view of the Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River near Lee’s Ferry in Arizona. When you put in at Lee’s Ferry, going under the Navajo Bridge is the last sight of civilization before the Colorado sinks through geologic eras into its great canyon.

I love the old steel girder bridges over some of the chasms in the west, like this one and the bridge over the Rio Grande in New Mexico.

Abstractly, the shapes in this composition remind me of an eye, perhaps turned on its side.

Tunnel View, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: This is the view from Tunnel View in six progressive captures, with the forest area that’s in shadow combined using Photomatix HDR and the sunnier sky and rock formations added using hand layer masking in Photoshop.

Along the Inspiration Point Trail, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

At Tunnel View there are almost always crowds and photographers. Except sometimes at night. Well, the view is worth it.

Walk a couple of hundred feet up the Inspiration Point trail, and the crowds are gone. Everything is serene and quiet again.

Came Both Mist and Stars, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: It was a wet, misty Yosemite night. The fog clouds that were almost snow only seemed to be getting denser. Facing south down the Merced River I was surprised to see stars. In post-processing, this twelve minute exposure looked more like something pictorialist or impressionist than a modern photo.

Related story: Yosemite at Night is looking the other direction from Swinging Bridge (with far less mist).

Windswept Shore, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: On Drakes Beach a ferocious wind blew through the gap in the bluffs out to sea. In the wind, the sand scoured across the beach. I was a bit reluctant to take my camera out, but (surprisingly) the “sand storm” was all low lying—within a foot of the ground. So I could stand with the blowing sand swirling around my knees and photograph without risking my lens.

Other Drakes Bay wave photos: Patterns of Design; Surf; and Wave Tangent. Also check out Mountains on the Beach.

Flash Dance, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: The cloud above El Capitan was lit with the last light of the setting sun, but the winter trees below were stark, dark, and cold.

This is a composite of ten exposures ranging in exposure time from 1/10 of a second to 1/200 of a second. All the exposures were made at f/11 and ISO 100, using my Nikon D300, the 18-200mm VR Zoom lens at 18mm (27mm in 35mm terms) and a circular polarizer, with the camera mounted on a tripod.

I combined the ten exposures into a single HDR image using Photomatix, tone mapped the result, and tweaked it a bit in Photoshop (here are the details of how I’ve been post-processing these images shot for HDR).

Mirror Lake, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I got the boys occupied in throwing snow balls and trying to crush through the skim ice on Mirror Lake. Then I hunkered down to the ground and fired off a series of ten wide angle, high depth of field exposures. These were shot at 12mm (18mm in 35mm terms) and f/22, with shutter speeds ranging from 1/6 of a second to 1/125 of a second. In other words, a twenty times range to capture the full range of lights and darks in the scene I was seeing.

Back home, I used Photomatix to blend together the ten versions, adjusted using the Photomatix tone controls, and then hand corrected with another five layers in Photoshop. Here’s a more detailed explanation of my process.

For some more of my photos of this much-admired spot (in the late 1800s, Mirror Lake was a required subject for artists visiting Yosemite), check out Mirror Lake and Mirror Lake in Winter and Spring.