Ringing in the New Year at Pilot Mountain

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Pinnacle Beneath the Heavens

It has been since last year that I went out on a Trek.  Wow, that is a very long time indeed!  Well, I don't guess it was that long, but it has been a very long time since I've been to Pilot Mountain, possibly three or more years now.  Since it is one of the most iconic locations here in the Piedmont of NC, I don't do a lot with it photographically.  I'm sure it has all been shot before at one time or another.  However, I have been wanting to try a couple of things there for a while now.  The main thing that I wanted to try was doing a long exposure with the knob as the anchor.  I've intended to do that on a number of occasions now, but the conditions just haven't quite worked out for me.

As last year came to a close, I was looking at the weather, and noted that the clouds would be low, and there should be pretty decent cloud cover as well.  That was the recipe for what I was looking for, so I decided to get up and be at the park at 8am when they opened the gates.  With a little bit of usable light happening before that time, I decided that I would also try another location right at sunrise to maybe increase my chances of a good day behind the camera.  I chose to go to Historic Bethabara first, right at the blue hour.  My intention was to get some long exposures with the predawn sky above some of the rooflines of the buildings.

Well, I got to Bethabara right when I planned, but the sky was rather drab and there was very little motion in it at all.  Added to that were the street lights that were all over the property and I decided that this was not going to pan out.  I went ahead and got in the truck and headed out to Pilot Mountain hoping that I would at least get the opportunity to pull the camera out of the bag.

I got there before all of the gates were even opened up, and I watched as the clouds changed around, and gave me hope, and then took my hope away.  They were much thinner than I was hoping for and the sun was actually shining through which was not a good thing.  Based on how the overlook for the knob was positioned, I was going to be shooting nearly into the sun for most of the compositions I was looking for.  I stuck around though, and went on up to the summit when the gate was open.  I got to the parking lot, and saw that the sky was very interesting in the opposite direction from the knob.  There wasn't much going on facing the knob, so I decided to look for something that I could use to showcase the sky.

Just Before Eternity

As it happened, there was a small overlook just to the side of the parking lot.  I went out to see what was there.  For the most part, there was flat landscape that reached for miles and miles.  However, to the right of the overlook there was a small outcropping with a couple of trees on it, with a small path.  I decided to stay elevated and not hop the fence to get to the path.  I fitted my 24-70mm lens and a color intensifying polarizer and started to work the shot.  I wasn't happy with the composition as I shot in landscape orientation.  I started looking at things critically, and decided that the sky was the main player, and I just needed that little section of outcropping, not the flat landscape.  I flipped the camera on its side and recomposed.  That was what I was looking for!  I dialed in the polarizer, and waited for the wind to slow a little bit.  I grabbed several different variations on this composition before deciding that the sky was breaking up too much to continue.

I went ahead and worked my way along the trail to the summit and paid attention to different compositions that I could work.  I stopped at a couple of the little overlooks and looked to see what I could do while the sun wasn't really cooperating.  One of the areas allowed a really cool view of the knob, but it was very much backlit with a bright sky behind it.  The clouds really weren't giving me any breaks today!

Evergreen Veins

I was faced with a difficult exposure, but I was getting more and more familiar with what my camera was actually capable of capturing.  I went ahead and fitted my 70-200mm lens with the deep lens hood, and positioned between two slats in the fence so as to avoid the tree that was hanging low above me.  I was having a hard time getting the composition right, until I flipped the camera over and composed in portrait orientation.  Not quite sure why, but I was really liking the vertical perspective today.  I grabbed a line of evergreen trees that lead up to the knob and composed around that leading line.  Since I was basically shooting into the sun, I chose to skip any filters for fear of ghosting.  I even used my hat off to the right side to shield the front element while I shot.  I purposely exposed for the sky and left most of the landscape in the shadows.  This was a conscious decision, as I could have used an ND grad filter.  Had I done that, I would have lost valuable exposure on the knob, which I needed to be properly exposed.

Looking at the histogram after I made the shot, I saw that there was actually plenty of information available to me.  There was no clipping on either end of the spectrum.  The LCD image looked very dark, and the sky was very bright, but the pixels were all there, and ready to be massaged in Lightroom.  I wouldn't know what I had until I got home though.

Working off of this recent exposure knowledge, I moved on to the knob where the lighting was not much better.  I went ahead and swapped in my 16-35mm lens so that I could get a little more flexibility with my composition.  My intention was that I would be adding filters, and didn't want any vignetting on the wide end of my 24-70mm lens.  As it turned out, the 16-35mm worked wonderfully, and allowed me to capture several different compositions from what I was used to getting in the past.

The opening photo to this blog was shot at 27mm, which was a very comfortable focal length for that lens, and I could have added another filter if needed.  Again, my plan was to shoot long exposures up here.  However, the weather wasn't going to cooperate with me.  There was a slight breeze at my level, but there was little to no movement in the sky.  I would have to have about a 3 minute exposure to get the movement that I wanted, and that was just too long.  I decided to shoot with regular exposures and try to eek out as much detail as I could in both the mountain and the sky.  I still was hesitant to use one of my ND grads because I wanted the knob to stay as bright as possible.  As with the previous exposure, I just made sure that I had enough pixel information to allow me to massage the image in Lightroom.

Pinnacle Beneath the Heavens in B&W

When I was actually doing my editing of this opening image, I thought that it might look pretty good as a monochrome image, so I did a quick conversion.  I saw a lot of promise in it, and started to work on the tones.  In the end, I ended up really liking both the color and the B&W versions here.  There is a lot of mood to these pictures which my previous Pilot Mountain shots have always lacked.  Maybe it was due to the time of day since I have never shot the knob in the morning before.

Happy with the grand landscape shot, I decided to move back to my 70-200mm lens for an approach I had not done before.  I wanted to really get into the personal space of this mountain today.  Again, I decided to skip any filters to avoid any ghosting with this lens.  For me, it feels very strange to shoot without a polarizer attached!

The Jagged Edge

Trying to make use of the rising sun which should have been covered, I chose to shoot the side that was being lit.  I would have rather gotten the other side, and showcased the mountains in the background, but I needed the light more than the supporting elements.  I worked on composing an image that made sense, which was difficult to do with the major part of the image being the foreground.

What I found was that the bare trees were allowing the trail to the knob to be exposed.  That was going to be my leading line, through the foreground.  The distant landscape and the sky all blended together to make the background.  Thanks to the trail, the actual knob became the mid ground of this shot.  The trick was going to be the exposure.  Again, the histogram showed that I had captured all the detail that I would need.  It was just going to be up to the processing at this point.

The Jagged Edge in B&W

I was very lucky with my exposures.  I took some chances and didn't stay in my comfort zone.  I was rewarded when I started to process the digital negatives.  While I would have much preferred a little softer appearance, the (essentially) backlit mountain turned out really well.  There was no shortage of detail in the forested parts, and like the sun aged skin of an old farm hand, the rocks had a ton of texture to them.  I was very happy with the outcome.  I ended up with 48 frames in the hour and a half that I was there, which isn't bad considering many of those were bracketed attempts to get the exposure correct.

I was considering returning to shoot it again at sunset, but sadly, there is a lot of rain falling right now, and the sky is just featureless.  I'll get back out there again for my long exposure attempts, but for now, I'll be happy knowing that I just got the first Trek of 2017 under my belt!

Happy New Year!!!!!!