Photoblog 2.0

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

This is the most western point of the Point Reyes peninsula, and therefore the most western spit of land in the continental United States. If you could see around the corner in the photo, you’d find the Point Reyes lighthouse.

I took the photo from along the Chimney Rock trail a few days ago. The sunset was blood red because of particles from a forest fire a couple of hundred miles to the north.

[105mm lens, 157.5mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/125 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

In a significant way, photography is about time. A photograph freezes action and captures a moment. Looking at photographs we see the past, perhaps our past. Photographs become memories. Unlike the wizard photos in Harry Potter’s world, the people in our photos don’t move around to get our attention. The time slice is static, and the time capture is usually created with shutter speeds that are a small fraction of a second.

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When shutter speeds get longer, and are measured in seconds or even minutes, then the capture of time changes. Moving cars become streaks of light and people are featureless blurs (unless they hold really, really still like they did at the beginnings of photography). Water in motion becomes ethereal, like the action of the surf in the photo above and below. The waves crashing on the rocks have been tamed and gentled. The rock and arch almost look like mountain peaks peering through clouds.

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In both these pictures, I combined two exposures. Each exposure used the same aperture (f-stop). I used twice as long a shutter speed for the rocks as I did for the surf. I combined the exposures manually in Photoshop using layers, masking, and blending modes. This is not exactly High-Dynamic Range processing, as I explain in Multi-Raw Processing Versus Automated HDR.

The photographic trick is to absolutely and completely not move the camera between the two exposures. A tripod is, of course, required. But absolute camera stillness can be harder than one thinks it will be, particularly when the fierce wind that drives the surf is raging. Even the slightest motion of the camera will show up as a registration problem when you try to combine the layers. A solution can be to anchor your tripod with something heavy (like your camera bag).

Still Standing, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I photographed this arch looking down a cliff on the western side of the Tomales Point peninsula on Point Reyes. Like Adamant, I combined two exposures to fully capture the surf and rock, and to create an effect that’s almost as though the rocks are peaks in a roiling sky.

[50mm, 75mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 3.6 seconds and 8 seconds, both exposures at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

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

Adamant. Indomitable. This rock stands, no matter how the surf pounds. It stands on the Pacific side of Tomales Point in Point Reyes National Seashore.

My thought in making this image was to use a long time exposure to turn the surf crashing on the rock soft, white, and wispy, while rendering the rock itself solid and delineated. I used two exposures, one at ten seconds for the rock and one at twenty seconds for the water, and sandwiched the exposures together in Photoshop as layers.

[170mm, 255mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 10 seconds and 20 seconds, both exposures at f/18 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

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

Mark and I hiked again on the Tomales Point Trail on Point Reyes. We watched sunset from a ledge high out over the Pacific, and I took this photo looking back towards the Tomales peninsula.

This time I concentrated on closer-in views of the water against the rocks and cliffs, captured via long exposures.

[200mm, 300mm in 35mm equivalence terms, 30 seconds at f/8 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

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

At two minutes, this exposure was smack dab in the middle of the dynamic range for capturing bright moonlight. In other words, the exposure should be (and indeed was) “correct” with a roughly equal distribution of dark, middle, and light tonalities and appropriate rendering for each.

If you look closely, particularly in the larger size, you can see that this was a long exposure at night: witness the star trails. But in most ways the digital capture shows a scene with as much vivid detail as a daytime capture.

Other issues: I’m not sure how I feel about the optical artifacts (generated by the internals of my lens) around the moon. The moon is actually a more concentrated light source than the sun, you’d never see quite the targeted beam effect from sunlight. Moonlight is a bit lower in color temperature than sunlight, and you can see the difference on the hillside on the left. And the glow at the edge of the horizon from urban lights is a purely night phenomenon.

Here’s another image captured looking in the same direction from Arch Rock.

Related story: Taming Extravagant Dynamic Range.

Blue Velvet Sunset, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This photo shows the head of the Point Reyes peninsula peering out at sunset from under formidable cloud cover. The point of a photograph like this is not to show fine-grain detail. (Or, should I say, “fine-noise” detail?)

With an eight second exposure and clouds scuttling in the wind, the motion will definitely soften ocean and sky. So my intent is to render an expressionistic image, closer to a water color than a conventional photo.

Taken from Arch Rock at the very end of sunset, this photo reminds me that freedom of the night means not just the photography of digital night. Freedom of the night also implies the ability to photograph until the very end of sunset. And walk home safely through the long tunnel of the night.

Estero by Starlight, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A recent hike along the Estero Trail in Point Reyes ending in night: starlight on Drakes Estero. Venus was so comparatively bright (the middle right) that the highlights of this nightime photo are blown out. You can dimly see the Drakes oyster beds in the middle left of the photo.

Estero at Low Tide, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

My nephew Peter, a strapping 25-year-old from Minnesota, and my friend Mark and I went for a sunset-to-night hike on the Estero Trail on Point Reyes. The trail crosses Drakes Estero, and then heads up a bluff. From the top of the bluff, we could see the sunset reflected in the channels and patterns of the low tide.

In this image, I used a circular polarizer with my camera on a tripod to bring out the colors.

Hidden Beach, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Mark and I hiked out to Arch Rock. It was a crap shoot whether we’d be fogged out, but emerging from the four-mile tunnel of forest the sunset was clear.

Last time I’d hiked out to Arch Rock, by the time I got out to the ocean it was too dark to see more than the general contours of the landscape. This time we were earlier and the sky was bright with moon. By the light of the setting sun and almost-full moon I was able to make my way down a little path towards a hidden beach.

The path switch-backed down a small slot canyon to the banks of a creek. Making my way across a couple of fairly easy rock faces I made my way down beside the creek to where the splash of water met the ocean.

On this small, sandy spot I set up my tripod. In one direction, the high tide created a whirlpool beneath the arch in Arch Rock (photo below, captured at 2.5 seconds exposure, see my O’Reilly blog post for some technical discussion of the exposure and post-processing technique).

In the other direction (photo above, captured at 1/50 of a second), the moon shown through the end of the canyon and on the small hidden beach, also lit by the setting sun.

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Point Reyes from Arch Rock, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

With all the night photography I’ve been doing lately, I’ve begun to feel a bit like a night owl. To put this in another context, sometimes I think I am a mole blinking at the sunlight. Weird for a photographer. In fact, maybe I am becoming a were-Photographer.

My friend Mark reminded me recently that there is more to photography than darkness. I don’t have to be a mole, or a creature of the night.

Although I do tend to focus on my current photographic obsession, whatever that is. So I guess I’ll be photographing the night for a while more. Until I go on to the next photographic obsession.

In the spirit of recognizing that there is more to photography than digital darkness, here’s one of my first captures from Arch Rock while it was still somewhat light. The photo shows the remote side of Point Reyes stretching down to the great cape culminating in the Point Reyes lighthouse. I exposed for six seconds at ISO 100 and f/4, and it was still light enough for plenty of detail to be rendered quite realistically.

The rest of the story, as light faded and the captures became more expressionistic: Night Shore; Renegade Remaining Photons; Twilight Turns to Night.

Photographers of the night unite! A-bleh (in Transylvanian accent with incisors getting longer)!

Night Shore 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Looking south from Arch Rock the twilight turned to night. Individual stars turned to the star-filled night sky and banks of fog shifted in the night wind. Down below, big rollers crashed on end of their journey across the Pacific. The remaining ambient light from the sunset over Point Reyes slowly faded.

Besides the stars, the predominant light source was now the city glow from distant San Francisco, coming around the massive cliffs of Point Reyes and the distant Marin Headlands. This eerie city light played at dancing with the swiftly moving banks of clouds.

I made this exposure for 300 seconds (five minutes) with the camera wide open (ISO 100, f/4, 12mm). Then I packed up my tripod and camera kit, taking care in the dark not to forget anything.

I picked my way carefully off my high platform, and headed back through the darkness of a forest passage to my car waiting on the other side of the coastal hills. Most of the time, I can see pretty well at night once I let my eyes adjust. But the Bear Valley trail runs deep in a valley under dense cover. Although it is a wide path, I didn’t fancy stepping into blackness, so I walked back by headlamp.

Once more it was drive drive drive back to a sleeping house and bed at half way to morning.

South from Arch Rock, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

I left home after dinner. It took me a bit more than an hour to drive to the parking lot at Bear Valley (this is also the Point Reyes visitor center).

The sun had just set and the clouds were decorated with red and gold as I laced on my hiking boots. Pretty soon the trail to Arch Rock became a tunnel through a different universe. I saw luminous eyes in the darkness, big bouncy rabbits, and exotic deer. I heard falling water almost all the way, some dripping in rhythmic patterns.

At about four miles, I came out of the dark tunnel into a great valley. My trail met the coastal trail, and the valley opened to the sea.

There was enough light left, barely, to find my way onto a high perch. The forest had been still other than the sounds of animals and the noise from brooks, but here high above the Pacific Ocean, the wind blew and big breakers crashed to the shore.

To the north, I could see the last light of sunset and the curve of Point Reyes.

South from Arch Rock, the cliffs picked up some left-over light radiation from the sunset, while stars peeked through the clouds. Hard by the cliff edge, with my tripod holding fast in the wind, I exposed this image at ten seconds (ISO 100, f/14, 13mm lens), fast enough so that some wave action was apparent but slow enough to capture the renegade remaining photons.

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Night Shore 1, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

This is a 180 second time exposure from Arch Rock in Point Reyes looking northwest up the coast towards Limantour, Drakes Bay, and the Point Reyes lighthouse.

You can see Venus bright in the sky, the trail of an airplane meandering across the sky, and many stars. Although the waves were crashing below where I was standing with my camera and tripod, and there was quite a wind (blowing the clouds seen in this image), for some reason the long exposure flattened the ocean. I think if you look carefully you can even see reflected stars.

To learn more about night photography, check out Digital Darkness and On Night Photography.

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

Here’s another version of the Point Reyes Lighthouse after sunset, this one a thirty second exposure that shows the lighthouse beacon.