Sunday, October 8, 2017
Have I had a week!!!! I had three different activations to work between Friday and Saturday. This counted for 22 hours worked starting Friday at 7:30pm and ending Sunday morning at 4:30am. My weekend consisted of a Sunday where I had to get ready to go back to work on Monday, and sleep to recover from a 14 hour night shift. Needless to say, the plan was not to go out for any pictures at all.
Well, when I woke up around lunch time on Sunday, I started thinking about what I could do to recover from working so much. I figured a little bit of time in the mountains would be beneficial. The only problem was I didn't really have the time to commit to a mountain trek, and I knew that there would be gobs of people along the Parkway since this was peak weekend for most of the Blue Ridge. Instead, I decided that I would rather go somewhere a little closer to home where I could take advantage of the clouds and rainy weather. Hanging Rock was my go to, but I have been there a bunch recently. The next option was Stone Mountain where I hadn't been recently, and haven't seen Widow's Creek Falls since January. I was on the fence about going, so I asked Sierra if she wanted to go for a little hike in the mountains. She agreed, saying it beat sitting at home. She was right.
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| Golden Falls |
When we arrived, we made the short hike to the waterfall and she started to set up her camera after finding a place kind of close to the falls. It had been some time since she had worked with the camera and took a little getting used to before things became natural for her again. While she was getting used to her camera once again, I started looking for a composition. The waterflow was very low so I wasn't all that interested in capturing the entire waterfall. There wasn't much color in the trees, so that made it natural to just skip that composition altogether. Instead, I started working on isolating what excited me about the waterfall. That was the section at the bottom left which had some very interesting voids in the rock that made for great cascades.
I fitted my 70-200mm lens and added a Singh Ray Polarizer to reduce the glare. That combination, along with the light was giving me between eight and ten seconds worth of exposure. That worked out great for the speed of the water. I started to work my composition and found that I was able to get in pretty close to the waterfall and frame a tight shot of the area. I've done a composition similar to this before, but it was void of color due to the lighting and lack of freshly fallen leaves. My intention was to really accentuate the Autumn hues in this, so I got the camera at a height that would give me the best reflection in the water. I set the white balance to give everything a warm glow, and fired the shutter. I was pretty happy with how it turned out in the LCD, but I wasn't sure how the colors would look since I was looking at a desaturated, low contrast RAW capture in the LCD. It wasn't until I got home and processed it in Lightroom that I was able to see that I captured just what I was after.
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| Alleghany Woodland |
While Sierra was still working on some different compositions, I started to pick out other areas that I wanted to photograph. One of these areas was the woodland on the other side of the pool. I still had my long lens attached, and I needed it for the composition that I was after. I went with a full 200mm focal length and composed an image around two trees that stood out from the rest. The idea with this image was to capture a scene that was pretty representative of the woods in North Carolina. For the most part they are not all that orderly, and there is a lot of different types of plants just growing randomly. Having the stark trees as an anchor helps to provide a little bit of order to the chaotic scene that I captured. I would have loved for there to be some Fall colors here, but I'm pretty happy with the different shades of green as they are not long for this world. There was a tad of orange to the right that helped to set the time of year for this image.
It wasn't long before Sierra was done and packing up her gear. She was not quite finished, however, and wanted to do some more hiking. Well, I knew of a nice little trail nearby that lead to an old chimney in the woods that I thought she would have fun with. The hike was not quite a mile by my estimate, but it was pretty steep so she wasn't too happy with me. We did find the old chimney, but it wasn't all that great in my eyes this time. Sierra had fun working it though.
While she was doing her thing, I started looking at the trees, and found a pretty cool design in one of them back toward the trail. I got the camera back out and left the 70-200mm lens on as well as the polarizer. I started to frame the scene up and found that the branches of the tree fit the 4x6 ratio almost perfectly. I worked out the exposure and shot the scene.
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| Early Autumn Tree |
What I really liked about this scene was that you could see some of the early Fall colors starting to appear as yellows and golds. There was also another tree in the distance that stood out and happened to be framed by the tree that I was shooting. From a compositional aspect, this was going very well. There was a slight backlight to the leaves, but it was faint due to the clouds. In fact, there was a little bit of drizzle falling at the time I shot this image.
I tried to work the old chimney, but I just couldn't get anything that I really liked. The one tree was what I got excited about, and what I decided would be the representation of that location. Sierra got several different pictures of the chimney, and started to learn a little about isolating elements using a long focal length. She didn't fully grasp the idea until she saw my interpretation of the scene and the light bulb clicked on. I'm sure that she will incorporate this into her next trek.
When I got home and started to process the pictures from the day, I was exceedingly happy with the intimate portrait of Widow's Creek Falls, and loved the textures, and the contrast as much as I liked the colors in the composition. I was pretty sure that the scene would stand on its own without the colors after processing it. To be honest, I had also envisioned it as a black and white when I had originally shot it. The color was just too good to overlook, but now that I was home, I could do the conversion and see what I had.
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| Rain on Me |
I started the conversion and immediately saw the potential. I tweaked the tonal values to add a bunch more contrast to the scene and found that the monochrome version was pretty cool! The total feel of the image changed, and the original title no longer fit this image. Because this image was so far and away different, I decided (as I rarely will) to give this conversion a different title. I think that it deserves it due to the differences between the moods. I'm not sure which I like better, but both of them represent the strongest images from the day.
I shot 38 frames while I was at Stone Mountain (Sierra shot 37), and ended up coming home with these four keepers. I'm very happy about that since I wasn't even going to go out today. I got my rest and recovery from the weekend while recharging in the mountains, and spending time with my daughter. Can't go wrong with that plan no matter how you look at it.
Friday, September 29, 2017
Autumn Peak is scheduled for a week away along the Blue Ridge Parkway. That should mean that the leaves are really starting to get in full swing by this point. In the moderate elevations of the Parkway, I was expecting that the leaves were getting pretty close to peak as they typically change about a week ahead of the lower (primary) sections of the Parkway. I was lucky enough to have accumulated enough hours at work that I could bug out a little early on Friday, which I did. That gave me just enough time to get up to the mountains for about two hours worth of daylight before sunset.
My plan was to work around the area of Rough Ridge which is right at Grandfather Mountain and by my calculations should be quite colorful at this point. I must admit, it was a different animal entirely going to the mountains in the daylight, and in traffic. I was used to going hours before sunrise and knew the darkness around the highway like the back of my hand. Driving the daytime did have its benefits. I could see the clouds that had been hanging around all day which were going to be wonderful in my photographs. Between the dramatic skies and the colors on the trees, I should be having a very successful trek ahead of me.
By the time I hit Wilkesboro, my mood changed a little bit though. The clouds that I had been looking at all day long were starting to thin out and and it looked like by the time I got to the mountains they would all be gone. The cloud forecast was calling for 70% coverage, but I was thinking that they missed the mark completely. Oh well, I was nearly to the Blue Ridge Parkway and I wanted to continue if for no other reason than to see the leaves at Grandfather Mountain.
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| Bathed in Golden Light |
When I arrived at the Parkway, the leaves were barely even showing a change. This wasn't what I expected at all. I knew that Rough Ridge was still up about 1000 feet or so, which gave me hope, but the closer I got the more my hopes dwindled. By the time I got to Price Park and saw the same conditions I had a week ago, I wasn't holding out much hope for autumn colors. The clouds had all but gone as well. Was I looking at a wasted trip to the mountains? I sure wasn't seeing much that I wanted to photograph.
When I got to Rough Ridge, there was no parking available in the parking lot, and there were even cars parked on the side of the Parkway. Yeah, I could pull over to the side of the road, but the leaves weren't all that great at all. Not good enough for me to fight the crowds anyway. I thought that I would head down the road to see if the colors were better around the Viaduct because I knew of a couple of compositions that could be made from Rough Ridge that included that section of the mountain.
When I got there, I wasn't happy with the colors at all. Things were just not looking Autumn enough. The roadway was crowded, and it was just not going well at all. I pulled into one of the first overlooks after the Viaduct to collect my thoughts. It happened to be Beacon Heights which gave a view of Rough Ridge. I looked at the mountain and could see some very patchy color from this side. Since there was only about an hour or so until the golden hour, I decided to stop here and see what I could do. I also knew that there were some hiking trails off of the overlook which I had never been on before.
I started out with working on the Rough Ridge area using the Parkway as some foreground interest. The lighting was nothing really special, but at least there were some clouds in the frame. I got about four frames here, but wasn't happy with any of them Just too run of the mill for my tastes. I packed the camera up and started down the hiking trails.
I passed several folks, one group had a wedding dress hanging on a tree. Well, this should get interesting! I was really hoping that I wasn't going to be getting involved in a wedding ceremony on the actual overlook. The way my evening was going though...
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| Hints of Autumn |
The hike was relatively short and fairly easy to accomplish. I started out with the right fork in the trail and came out on a rocky bald. There were already several people standing and sitting here. There was a pretty good view, but the light was not right, and there were more people than I cared to deal with. Since I still had a bit of time, I moved back onto the trail and took the other fork. That took me to a different bald, but with a similar view, just more to the left. There was more options of foregrounds here, and even more important I could see the Rough Ridge from this section. There was a nice tree that I could use as a foreground interest as well.
I pulled out the camera once again and started to work some compositions. The problem was that the distant mountain was under full sunlight, and the foreground that I was wanting to use was in the shadows. I had to use ND Grads to keep the sky under control, and was still not able to get the exposure the way I really wanted it. I had now shot about 25 frames and had yet to get something that I really thought would work out. I was really starting to get discouraged.
To make matters worse, my silence was interrupted by the wedding party that finally joined me. It wasn't a wedding, but a wedding photo shoot with the bride. Well, now in the background I was listening to modeling instructions and a young boy who was very tired and whiny. My zen was shaken and I wasn't liking anything that I was working with. I intended to swap lenses, but my hands started to put away my camera. Well, that might have been a subconscious sign, so I went with it and packed everything away. There was now about 30 minutes before sunset, and not enough time to go anywhere else. I decided to take my chances with the larger number of people on the other bald.
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| Shadowed Ridge |
When I got there, there were more people. They were sitting, standing, walking, and just generally....there. The change of getting much in the way of a foreground was slim. It was also in the shade, so it wouldn't really work all that great anyway. Because of that I went ahead and fitted my 70-200mm lens, and left the front element bare with the exception of the lens hood to keep any sunlight leaks from causing any ghosting. I started to pick out sections of the range in front of me to photograph. There was a lot of interesting sections, but they were lacking in context for the most part.
Almost on a whim, I decided that I would try a panorama to capture the entire scene. My main reason for this was the way the light was playing with the mountains. On one side, I was seeing a warm glow from the setting sun, while the other side was in the shadows presenting a very cool color tone. This was a striking balance between color pallets. There was really no other way than a panorama to capture this.
I flipped the camera on its end, and racked it out to 70mm. I leveled the tripod, and did a dry run to check that the camera would remain level through the sweep. I picked my end points, and then found the focus length. it was then time to confirm that the exposure would be right. I dialed it in on the right side which was the brightest. I checked the left, which was mostly in the dark. That seemed like it would be correct. I swept through the seven frames quickly sine the light was changing very fast with the setting sun. When it was all over, the light had changed, and I was hoping that I had something that would work. It wasn't until I started to edit the next day that I found out that not only did the sequence work, it also turned into my favorite image from the day!
Shortly after shooting the panorama, the crowds started to leave. Unfortunately, it was not in time for me to compose shots that would include any type of foreground interest. It was just too dark at this point. I went ahead and packed the camera up and started my way back down the trail. Right before hitting the parking lot I found an interesting tree trunk that I wanted to try an intimate portrait of. The lighting was so dim at this point I had to bring out the flashlight in order to get a little color in the trunk. This never really did pan out photographically though.
I was pretty sure that I was done for the evening at this point, so I finished the hike to the truck. I could see that the sky was still kind of light above the Rough Ridge, and there were a couple of faint clouds above the mountain. I decided that it would be worth trying that subject once again. I pulled the camera back out and added the 24-70mm lens. I used no filters since it was getting dark and the exposure was pretty much even across the scene.
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| Blue Autumn |
What I was liking about this scene was that the colors were different than I normally see them. You could see the fall colors on the side of the mountain, but they just looked different. I set the camera up using the railing and the road as a leading line, and dialed in a five second exposure. The longest part was waiting for the traffic to stop long enough to shoot the shot. What you are seeing here was created just after a motorcycle road out of the distance, and a car had passed me by to the left. There was the sound of another car coming from behind me that appeared just as the shot finished exposing. The light became too dark to repeat the exposure the next time I had a clear patch of road. I though about adding light trails, but I wasn't able to get the exposure that long without doing some changes to my setup that I didn't have time for. Plus, I kind of liked the calm effect of the composition that I had created.
With the light pretty much gone, I packed everything up and started the two hour trip back home. Obviously, I didn't get the pictures processed that night. I wanted until the next evening to start the processing, which ran into Sunday morning. Out of 80-some frames, I ended up only keeping four of them. That is less than a 5% cut, but considering the difficulties I was having finding something that I liked, I can live with those four images. It wasn't an earth shattering trek by any stretch, but I found a new place to play with, and I got to see another segment of this fall season.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
I'm not sure if I will be able to get to the mountains during peak leaf time this year. I have mandatory obligations for work during that weekend, and the other weekends in October are starting to come into question. That means that I have to take the opportunities as they come to get out and see the leaves. This weekend was not looking overly promising with the cloud cover, but Saturday won out by a small fraction, and I saw that there was the added possibility of fog around the Boone area.
Since I had been to Graveyard Fields last weekend and found a plethora of changing trees, I thought that the time would be right to hit Rough Ridge and Grandfather Mountain. I could easily work that into the schedule starting with the Boone section for some early morning, moody shots in the fog. The sunrise potential for the weather was pretty bleak, so I wasn't really worried about capturing bright colors in the sky. I did want to get out there in time for sunrise, just in case though.
I set out at about 4am destined for Rough Ridge, but was hoping to find something foggy to shoot prior to getting there. I didn't really pay that much attention to the sky on the drive to the mountains because I knew that there would be few, if any clouds. I did notice that there was not a lick of fog anywhere. I checked on the first two overlooks I came to in order to see what was in the valley. It appeared to be clear throughout. I wasn't going to let myself be dissuaded by the weather, and pledged to myself that I would shoot the conditions as they presented themselves.
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| Two as One |
As I made my way down the Parkway, I started to realize that the potential for a great sunrise was not all that great, and I didn't have much interest in the valley below. I needed something prominent and isolated to shoot. There are these twin trees near Blowing Rock that I have wanted to photograph for a while now. The conditions were never quite right during the day to get what I wanted. Since the actual sunrise wasn't going to be all that great and I would be doing better to get the pre-dawn sidelight, I decided to give the trees a chance. I pulled over on the side of the road near a gate and got the camera built.
I had thought about this composition a time or two before so I already knew that I was going to be using my 16-35mm lens positioned right at the fence. I didn't use any filters as I was perfectly happy with the ground registering as a black silhouette as the trees would be. I wanted to get any color in the clouds that was possible beyond what the naked eye could see. I was also hoping for some stars, which meant that my exposures would have to be pretty close to 30 seconds or less to keep them from streaking too much.
When I got the shot framed and started to set the exposure, I was way off on my shutter speed even though I was shooting at f/8. I ended up boosting the ISO to 1000 in order to achieve a 40 second exposure which would suffice for my needs. I fired the shutter and waited for the outcome. After 40 seconds, the LCD lit up with an image that had the trees, stars, and even peach colored clouds streaking behind the trees. I could see that there were some different tones in the sky that I was looking forward to playing with.
I stayed with this composition for a while hoping for a decent sunrise behind the trees. That sunrise never came, and the increased lighting behind the trees progressively made the image more and more boring. It was my third image of the morning that developed into my keeper from the set.
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| Low Clouds Passing |
As I looked around, all of the clouds in the sky were well off to my left, and were not looking to enter my frame any time soon. I decided to move over to the gate that I had parked near and see what I could do with that as a focal point. I left the 16-35mm lens attached without any filters sine time was now of the essence. I found a location to shoot from that captured a scene that made sense, and included the clouds. I was even able to include the tree that I had started out photographing. I was really needing some ND grad filters though since the sky was getting so bright. In order to expose for the sky, the ground went completely black, and if I tried to get detail in the ground, I lost the color in the sky.
There wasn't going to be a good way to use a grad here, so I opted to shoot this one as an HDR image. I bracketed four shots, a full stop apart from each other to give me 3 full stops of latitude in the final image. I had no idea how this was going to turn out since there was no preview button for the HDR, I just knew that I had four individual frames that were never going to work on their own.
After I got home and started to process the images, I merged the four shots together and started to process it. The end result was one that I really like! There is a great tonal range throughout the image and it is clean with no sensor noise at all. I'm really starting to appreciate the power of the HDR images.
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| Pasture at Dawn |
Once I got the picture of my gate, I started to really want to get the distant mountains more in a composition. There was also a nice red tree at the base of the grade in the pasture that I was standing beside. I decided to swing the camera around and move in closer to the fence. I still had my super wide lens on, and hat it at around 22mm for this shot. The sky was much easier to control at this angle so I did not need any grad filters, and I was able to capture enough information with a single shot as opposed to needing HDR. Again, there were no filters used in this image as well. The sky was just that brilliant.
After I shot that scene, I moved over to where the clouds were set in the sky. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the landscape beneath the clouds to make any sense. After about 15 minutes of trying different compositions, I decided to pack up the camera and move on to Rough Ridge in hopes of getting some Fall color at the higher elevations.
Well, as I was driving along I started to see some fog in the air, which got me excited about Rough Ridge. I still wasn't seeing much in the way of color, but I was up here, so I wanted to continue on and see what I could see. By the time I got to Cone Manor, the fog was gone, and the sky was noticeably void of clouds. My optimism was fading quickly and I was about to just turn home.
Then I came across Price Lake...
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| Muted Autumn |
There was a light fog on the water, and more in the distance. I could also see some of the colors starting to change. I just about locked up the brakes on the 4Runner in order to get stopped in time. I nosed right up to the waterfront and started to scope out possible compositions. There was a ditch right next to the parking lot that was to become my workspace for the next 30 minutes or so. While I was getting the camera built, there was another photographer coming back to her car. She was talking about the beautiful sunrise that she had seen over the lake. Normally I would have stopped and chatted, but I needed to get to work as the light was quickly changing. She had already pointed out that I had missed a most excellent sunrise, and I wasn't going to miss the foggy conditions reminiscing about something I had missed.
I started out with my 24-70mm lens which I added a 3-Stop grad filter to in order to keep the sky under control. I started out using the rocks as a foreground and photographing the distant shore and mountain range. These pictures were fair, but they were lacking punch to the composition. I tried all sorts of compositions to varying levels of satisfaction. The sun was getting brighter and I was thinking that I would just pack it in.
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| Clouded Reflection |
Then something really nice happened. The breeze stopped, and left the water glass smooth. Now, I was getting happy again. I went back to composing around the rocks on the shore as a foreground interest. The clouds in the sky reflected beautifully in the water, as did the trees on the distant shore. I was cooking now, and having a great time reworking my compositions from before. Because of the foreground interest, a portrait orientation worked very well for this largely horizontal scene.
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| Light Fog |
I found that I could get right up to the water and down low to isolate the one lone rock in the foreground. I've always found that to be a very effective compositional tool when dealing with perfect reflections. Things were going great now that the water had calmed down. But then the fog started to roll in ever so gradually. With that fog came a slight breeze that pushed it across the lake. The mirror was gone, and I knew it was time for something different. I went back to the truck and stripped off the grad filter and swapped the lens for my 70-200mm, to which I added a polarizer.
I went back down to the water and started to look for compositions. The rock right at the shoreline was still capturing my attention, and there was a nice reflection of a cloud near it. The water was also still once again. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this, but I decided to shoot an abstract of the rock and the cloud. I applied just enough polarization to make the composition interesting and shot a single frame.
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| Breaching the Surface |
Honestly, I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out when I got finished with it. I could see that there was a good deal of potential in it from the LCD preview though. The polarizer was able to cut the surface glare in the bottom right half, while keeping the full reflection in the upper left. The way the brightness works, unless you are aware of what you are looking at, there are only a few clues to give a sense of place with this image. I think I achieved my goal of an abstract picture with this one.
I had my long lens on, and that gave me some powerful options to work with. I started to look for the interest on the distant shore. There were a few places, but nothing screamed out composition to me. Then it hit me...this was going to make for a great panorama. I set the camera up quickly to be perfectly level. I flipped it on its side and worked out the proper exposure over the length of what I was going to capture. I then shot a 10 frame panorama.
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| Lakefront View |
There was so much to look at with this photograph. I had bookend trees that framed the who picture. I had the fog rolling in from the left, the trees on the distant shore showing off their fall colors in the warm morning light, and a distant mountain to the right. It is so simple, yet has so much depth and texture present.
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| Life Reflections |
At this point, I decided to move to the shoreline to the right for some more pictures. The wind had not intruded here yet and the water was still mirror smooth. I found a trio of trees countered by a yellow and red tree to the right. The reflection pulled everything together and created a very abstract pattern. It wasn't quite the bright fall foliage I was hoping for, but I was pretty happy with it in this setting. It motivated me to find other compositions along the shoreline.
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| The Water's Edge |
There were all sorts of little alcoves for me to choose from. The fog was rolling in, which helped give a sense of depth which I enjoy. It was just about finding the right compositions that had the proper balance within them. I tried to focus on trees that were changing, or light colored bared trees that contrasted with the greens. There really was no shortage of possible compositions here.
I found myself thinking about the photographer I had spoken with when i first got here. She was packed up and gone by the time I got the camera turned on. She had said that the good light was over, and that I had missed it. I had now been here for about an hour and begged to differ with that. There was a lot of great light here, and many moods to pick from. I was very happy that I stopped when I did, and looking back on my sunrise shots from the pasture, I don't think I really missed anything, and might have gotten some better views along the way.
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| Jagged Tree |
The fog was starting to get rather thick which was going to cause problems since I was shooting from a distance. Thick fog works better when you can get up close to your subject to bypass the haze and isolate it. I wasn't going to be able to do that here for much longer. I decided to climb back up the bank and pack up the camera. While I was walking to the truck though, I noticed a tree across the Parkway that was sticking out in a rather artful way.
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| Autumn's Dance |
In a strange twist of fate, I had just found a tree that only had the top visible through the surrounding foliage. I really like capturing the base of trees, but I couldn't see the base. There was, however, a bunch of foliage directly beneath the section that caught my eye. That provided the base of the picture and I used the yellowing leaves to the left as the counter element to the tree. The shape of the tree almost looks like it is reacting to the leaves encroaching on its space. Having the elements relate to each other in a woodland shot is a very good practice, and it keeps a level of visual tension in the photograph.
After I shot that tree, I decided it was time to get to Rough Ridge to see what the leaves were looking like there. It wasn't that far down the road, and when I got there, I could see very little difference in the trees from what I had just seen. With a good many cars in the parking area, and the quality of light diminishing, I decided to call it a day. I turned North once again, and headed back to the highway for home.
I had no idea how many frames I had shot, and really didn't know if any of them would turn out. I had tried things much more different than I was used to this time. I worked out of my comfort zone for many of these pictures. I was just hoping that I would have a handful that were worth keeping. When I got home, I realized that I had shot 98 frames, and of those, I found 12 worth keeping. I can't complain about that at all!
Sunday, September 17, 2017
I hadn't planned on going to the mountains this weekend since I'm sure I will be going quite a bit over the next month. However, when I started seeing posts on Facebook with some pretty good color, I started to take note. It seemed that the leaves were changing at the upper altitudes already, and there were some pretty good pictures coming from Graveyard Fields near Brevard. I had gotten caught up at home so I decided to take a drive on Sunday out to the Parkway.
I wasn't thinking that there would be much of a sunrise, but I did want to get up there early so I could beat the crowds on the trails. My compromise was to get up at 3:30 and start the 3 hour trip that would take me to the mountains just at sunrise on the off chance that something might take place. I actually arrived on the Parkway as first light was hitting, so that worked out great. The trick was to find somewhere that I could potentially see some action.
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| Sleepy Town |
I was pleased to see that there was a good bit of low cloud cover in the valley below. It was going to be a race against the clock to find a vantage point though as there are not that many overlooks in this section of the Parkway. As I was driving along, I found a nice clearing in a curve that showed some nice mountain ranges in the background. There was a small shoulder just beyond the guard rail so I pulled off and grabbed the camera. I knew that I was going to be shooting a long focal length for this scene since the interest was out beyond the foreground. I left the 70-200mm lens attached, and added a ring for the ND Grads just in case the sky started to get blown out.
I set up my first shot that showed some of the near ridges fading off into the distance. I shot some horizontal, and some vertical but never really found a composition that I liked. As I was already situated in the vertical format, I decided to line things up for a quick panorama. This was the first time I had shot one in the quickly changing light of sunrise, so I knew I would have to move quickly. I found my composition, and did a quick dry run to make sure that the camera would stay on target through the arc. It looked good, so I started a seven shot spread from left to right. I've always enjoyed the low clouds in the mountains, and I was very excited to see how this would turn out.
With the sun creeping up over the mountains, I tried a few more exposures, but found that the lens flare was too intrusive into the frame since the sun was well above the horizon by the time it cleared the mountains. That meant it was time to move on toward Graveyard Fields.
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| Mountain Islands |
Well, the intention was to finish the road trip portion of my journey, but I got sidetracked along the way. Just a few miles down the road I found a similar scene with the low clouds in the valley. The difference was, the sun was full up at this point which made for an interesting set of issues when it came to exposing the image. I left the long lens attached and started to frame my images. I could tell that things were going to go white in the sky which I wasn't really wanting to happen. My options were reduced to cutting the sky out completely, or shooting with the intention of making monochrome images. I opted to reduce the sky, and go for an abstract rendering of the scene before me. When I got home to edit the images, I was pleasantly surprised that with a subtle tweak of the color temperature of the scene, a warm tone appeared in the sky which suited the scene quite well. I actually ended up getting a couple of color images from this scene that I think work very well as foggy abstracts.
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| Set Adrift |
The monochrome idea held very well though. This one turned out just as I had envisioned it. With the clouds, there was very little contrast in the scene so my job in the processing was to get a good tonal coverage throughout the scene without there being a true black or white point. There was not a lot of clear detail, so I was going for textures more than anything. There was a perfect little ridge in the foreground that provided the bulk of the "detail" in the image while the rest were just abstract shapes that carried the eye into the image. There is a certain amount of movement in this picture from how the clouds are stretched onto the foreground. I was really hoping that I could shoot a long exposure here and get the motion of the clouds captured. Looking at the scene, there wasn't much motion, so doing a long exposure wasn't going to capture the feel I was after, and would just introduce more noise into the image. As they taught me in school, I followed the "KISS" principle which is "Keep it Simple Stupid".
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| At Peace |
As I was going back through my culled images, I actually started to work on this one once again. The more I worked it, the more I was liking it. There were some really great tones here, and I liked the composition. There was more detail to it than the black and white image, so that suited a color rendition for this particular frame. This made for the second color image from a scene that I shot as monochrome. I can't say I was complaining at all with that.
One thing that did have me concerned was the lack of Fall color in the trees. I knew that I was not quite in the elevation that I was wanting to be, but I was expecting a little more patchy conditions than what I was seeing. Well, I was here to find color and that was what I was going to do. I was only about 30 miles away from Graveyard Fields, and that was about 1500 feet further up in altitude. I kept my fingers crossed that I would find more color than what I was seeing currently. But hey, even if I didn't I was feeling pretty good about the 30 something images that I had sot already.
I didn't really see anything else along the way to Graveyard Fields that caught my eye. There wasn't that much color, but there was nice patches of reds and yellows to be seen. I figured that my grand landscape shots were probably done for the day. It was going to be all about intimate woodland shots from here on out in order to get the color that I was after. I got parked and was surprised that I was only the third vehicle in the lot. I went ahead and grabbed the camera and started down the loop trail.
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| Autumn Pool |
The sun was pretty bright, and there were not many clouds in the sky when I got started. This would usually mean that I was not going to shoot woodland views, and definitely not a waterfall. Within the first little bit of hiking I decided that I was going to throw both of those rules out the window. I came across a small cascade in the stream that was bordered by some pretty nice fall color. The pool at the base was reflecting the colors as well. I wanted this shot, but it was going to be very difficult to get.
I found a section of rock that I could set up on between the two boardwalks. I got the tripod positioned the way I needed it, which ended up being on a slope. Mental note to self, be VERY careful not to bump the tripod once the camera was on it. I built the camera with my 24-70mm lens so that I could get a good portion of the foreground in the shot. I added an intensifying polarizer and started to frame the shot. There was just too much exposure latitude for me to deal with unfortunately. The sky, and the trees were just too bright to accurately capture the foreground which was largely in the shadows. I thought about shooting an HDR capture of the scene, but was going to have a hard time keeping the clouds in the same place over several long exposures. I decided to add my filter holder and use a 3-Stop soft edge filter. That helped, but wasn't enough to keep my exposure values correct. I added a 2-Stop hard edge and that did the trick. I carefully positioned them independently to bring back the exposure in the sky and the trees. That allowed me to properly expose the water below. I could tell by the histogram that I was right on the money with this composition.
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| Prelude to Fall |
After I was satisfied with my capture of the small waterfall, I kept on down the trail. I left the camera built so that I could set up quickly in case I found something else. I did find a few trees along the way that I liked, but was just unable to work a composition that I liked. I ended up going off trail in the fields in search of trees to make woodland compositions with. I tried a couple that I was not happy with because of the compositions available. I then found a nice white trunked tree that stood out against the fall colors just perfectly. I tried to get in a position to capture it but was completely unhappy with the composition.
I remember specifically thinking to myself "ok, stop f'ing around here and change your lens!" I broke the camera down and swapped in the 70-200mm lens and added the same intensifying polarizer back on. With the compression, I was able to pick out the tree just perfectly. Yep, sometimes you just have to use different tools for the job. With the reach of the long lens, I was able to really isolate the trunk and kept it completely surrounded by the warm Autumn colors. With the narrow depth of field, that tree trunk was almost surrounded by an oil painting effect and I really liked it....so much in fact, I decided to flip the camera and get in even closer.
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| Wrapped in Autumn |
This was what I came all this way for. I wanted the Fall colors, and this one lone tree helped me to bring it all together. I was also very excited to show this tree to Toni who loves trees and abstract renderings. I was pretty sure I had both represented in this picture. It is hard to believe that peak is still several weeks away based on this picture. That is the beauty of the long lens though. I was able to compress the colors and avoid the predominantly green hues that were so prevalent throughout the field.
I was on a roll at this point, and was really getting into the colors and the woodland approach. I started to go in the direction of any color that I could find in hopes that I would see a tree nearby that I could use to anchor it. It was a fun little game of cat and mouse. I went off trail several times, and got lost a couple times, but I was having a blast! I decided to head down to the Upper Falls which was a spur trail off of the loop. The further I got, the more green I was seeing. It was too bright to shoot a waterfall for the sake of a waterfall, and it was looking like the colors were going be be sparse, so I turned back around before I reached the end of the trail.
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| The End of Summer |
The side trip was not a waste though. In fact, I was rather happy that I went that way. I did find a small clearing with a couple of tall pine trees. there was a bit of red splashed at the base, and the sky had some clouds in it. It wasn't quite a grand landscape, but it was a pretty nice scene. I went ahead and shot a single frame of it. There wasn't that much to it, so there wasn't a need to work multiple compositions on it. I wasn't even sure if I would keep the image. Well, I liked how it turned out, so I did end up keeping it. There is something to be said for those one and done scenes.
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| Woodland Red |
While there wasn't much color to be had, there were some places where the reds were really popping. I happened upon one of those locations and was greeted by another tree that I could use. There were also two of the same tree just off to the side which made for a nice composition with the bright colors above and behind. I went ahead and framed things up and shot a couple of frames with this scene. I wasn't sure exactly how it was going to turn out though, but once I got home and started processing it, I went with the abstract approach to it. There was already a narrow depth of field that forced the focus on the tree trunk. The other end of the spectrum was to really punch up the colors and make it like an oil painting. The final result is one that really pops and gives the eyes a lot to look at. You know, I am really liking this woodland technique!
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| Exploding Colors |
There comes a time when I've looked all around and have exhausted my options. That doesn't mean it is time to pack up my gear and go home though. That means to look up. That was just what I did and found a tree that was towering above me resplendent in red leaves. Going with the woodland theme, I picked out the main shape of the tree as it came out from another tree. The trunk was going to be my anchor with a narrow depth of field. A twist of the polarizer and the red popped against the sky.
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| Ahead of the Curve |
I hated to waste all that great red at the top of the tree, so I widened the focal length and recomposed the image. This time, I got a much larger portion of the tree with a little bit wider depth of field. There was more blue sky behind it which worked well for balancing out the amount of red in the image. Fall is such a wonderful time of year!
I continued to hike the rest of the trail and found that there was no more open space to work with. I was thinking about going back on another one of the trails to find more color, but when I got to the parking lot I saw that it was standing room only. It was time to leave and hopefully find some nice vistas to grab some grand landscapes with the clouds that were now all over the sky. Unfortunately, the quality of light in the distance was lousy in the middle of the day. Oh well, I had shot nearly 100 frames in the three and half hours I had been on the Parkway. That is pretty good considering it was not really the weather that I prefer to shoot in. Life was good...now I just had to keep it in my lane on the way home. I hate driving sleepy, but I was getting used to it on my mountain trips.
Thursday, September 14, 2017
It seems that I have been spending a good amount of time driving to get to the locations that I have been shooting. That has been the case with many trips to the Blue Ridge Parkway over the Summer, but I have also been doing a lot of things close to home. This morning was one of those times that I only went about 30 miles away to Hanging Rock State Park before I went in to work. I forgot how nice it was to go out with a camera on a weekday. There are generally no crowds, and everything is just so much more low key.
Having woke up to get Sierra out the door for school, and not needing to be at work until 11am, I decided to take the several hours and use it to my advantage. Looking at the weather, I was expecting patchy clouds for the most part with some scattered showers. That actually made for a pretty good landscape forecast, but I wasn't going to be able to get to a good vantage point in the time that I had to work with. I was hoping that the clouds would do me enough favors to make a quick morning of photographing a waterfall.
It has been quite a while since I have been to Hanging Rock, and even longer since I have been to the Lower Cascades. I don't know why, but for some reason, I started thinking about this waterfall last night and wanted to go. To put this in perspective, this was the first waterfall I ever photographed some 11 years ago. Since that point, I have photographed it many times over. It is a pretty waterfall, and one that is easy to get to. Unfortunately, that means that many people have photographed it, and have done all of the obvious compositions. My last time out, I did get lucky and find a downed tree that I could use as an interesting foreground.
My goal for this Trek was to shoot something completely different than I had done before. Sounds easy enough, but when you actually look at how things are laid out, that becomes a pretty tall order. Fortunately though, when I arrived the lighting was pretty good overall. The tree was gone, but there was another one which was knocked over by the rocky wall. That actually became my first effort of the morning.
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| Floating Tree |
I went ahead and fitted my 24-70mm lens and added an intensifying polarizer. I tried to compose an image that captured not only the tree in the water, but the rocky wall and the greenery that was growing from it. Since it was still pretty early in the morning it was pretty dark on this side of the pool. So dark in fact, I was able to set a 25 second shutter speed. This smoothed out the water quite nicely. I was able to get some really good reflections from the wall and the tree.
As I was working this composition, I quickly realized that one of the things that really draws me to this wall is the size of it, and how it towers over pretty much everything. I have yet to really capture that aspect of it, so I thought that this might be just the right time. I mean, I wasn't photographing the waterfall, so the wall would become my focal point for the first time. I flipped the camera on its end and used the same fallen tree as a visual anchor for the image.
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| Chiseled Wall |
As I was fine tuning the composition, I started to see that there was an "S"
curve starting to form. I moved my position ever so slightly and raised the camera up as far as it would go in order to emphasize the log as the lower section of the curve. It then fed into the greenery that brought it back to the shadows of the wall. That completed my visual design. I kept the exposure where it was for the other composition giving me 25 seconds to smooth the water. On my first exposure, I checked the LCD image review and found that everything was blurry. It wasn't the wind because the rocks were blurry. I hadn't bumped the tripod, so I had to investigate further. What I found was the tripod leg had slipped ever so slightly during the exposure. It wasn't enough to see, but it was enough to affect the sharpness of the image. I'm so glad that I check the LCD after each shot because had I not caught that mistake, I would have missed this shot for sure.
After I made a second long exposure for the rocky wall I started to look for other compositions. I wasn't finding any, but that was fine as I was here to photograph the waterfall primarily anyway. I started to look for a composition that I had not used before as was my goal for the day. That proved to be rather difficult though since I have probably been here at least a dozen times, if not more. I really wanted to get the rocky wall and the tree with the waterfall, but in order to do that, I was going to have to include the sky. There was actually some interesting clouds in the sky, so I wasn't completely against the idea. But I did know that there was a huge difference in exposure between the shadows of the wall and the bright white of the clouds. I framed up the image anyway through the viewfinder. I found a very nice composition at 24mm which captured everything that I wanted to.
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| Serenity Pool |
When I switched on my live view to dial in the focus and exposure I saw a huge problem. In order to expose for the sky, I was going to have to let the ground go dark. If I got a reasonably decent (although dark) ground interest, the sky would go completely white. With the design of the landscape (a scoop in the upper right corner), an ND Grad was going to be a poor choice. I was unable to get a single exposure that captured enough information so I could pull detail out of the edges of the histogram. My only option, short of abandoning the composition was to shoot this in HDR.
I've done a number of HDR images, but never one that already has a long exposure technique built in. Oh well, it was digital and cost me nothing to give it a try. I found three different exposures which covered the sky, the waterfall, and the shadow elements in the scene. There were about seven stops total latitude covered with the three exposures. When I got home after work, I blended them together in Lightroom and went to tweaking the tonal elements in the scene. There was a moment early on in the processing that I knew I had captured what I was after. I continued to work on the different areas until I had the exact image that I was looking at when I was moved to capture the picture. I finally had an all new image of the Lower Cascades which included elements I have never been able to capture before now. The tree in the water was just icing on the cake providing a nice foreground interest to the scene. At this point, I would have been satisfied with the Trek and could have left. But, I still had about an hour before I needed to leave for work.
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| Rocks and Roots |
Since I was pretty happy with what I had found thus far, I decided to go to a "normal" composition just cause I was there. I moved over to the other side of the waterfall and crossed over to the far side of the pool. From here, I was able to capture the root system of the tree that was just to the side of the waterfall. I decided to position myself in such a way that I got the rocky wall that I love so much, and the intricate root system. The waterfall was almost a supporting player in this composition. I like how this one turned out, but it is one that I've seen too many times and doesn't really hold that special quality that I was after on this Trek. But, it did turn out pretty good if I do say so myself.
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| From Behind Cover |
I still had my 24-70mm lens attached which has always been my go to lens for this waterfall. I worked my way up the rocks until I was pretty close to the waterfall. From this point, I had a good bit of the jagged rocks in the way of the waterfall. This was not accidental in the least. I was planning on getting a deeply shaded foreground with lots of texture giving way to the waterfall, which had a background of a different textured wall which was in the sunlight. Textures and contrasts were the name of this game. I carefully framed up the shot so that the waterfall made sense behind the shadowed wall. I placed the greenery beside the waterfall in the upper left intersection giving a visual balance to the apex of the shadowed area. This turned into a very interesting photograph by the time it was all said and done.
I milled around for a bit until I decided that I was pretty much done with this waterfall. It was getting about time to think about heading back, and I was very satisfied with what I had shot so far. After I got back to level ground, I started to break the camera down and swap back the 70-200mm lens that the camera is stored with. Then I thought to myself..."Self, since you have the long lens on, why not shoot a couple of isolations with it?" I made a good point, so I fitted a polarizer on the end of the barrel and started to hunt some intimate views of this waterfall.
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| Cradle the Cascades |
What I found was that the part that really drew me in was the way the rocks appeared at the bottom of the waterfall. I started to work out compositions that included that element. What worked the best was a vertical shot that really showed the textures of the water, rocks, and the smooth pool in the foreground. I played with different exposures and found that a wide depth of field and a slower shutter speed worked well for this even though I had previsualized it with a short shutter speed. I was back at getting shots of this waterfall that I had not done before and I started to get excited all over again. I went back over to my fallen tree and tried some other compositions with the longer lens. Sadly, nothing even came close to the success I had at the wide end of the spectrum.
Just before I was ready to put things away, I realized that I had the opportunity to shoot a panorama here just in case the HDR attempt didn't pan out. In order to keep the perspective from looking strange I like shooting panoramas with my 70-200mm lens on its side. I found the place that I wanted to set up that included everything from the tree to the waterfall. I set up the tripod to be perfectly level, and then worked on the focal length to capture everything that I wanted to. After setting the focus point, I made a dry sweep of the scene to make sure that I had everything in the proper place.
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| Seclusion |
I started shooting from left to right, moving the camera just a tad each time. When it was all finished, I had shot seven frames in portrait orientation. I knew from experience that would give me a good aspect ratio for a photograph, and plenty of data to make a huge print. After I shot the panorama, I packed the camera up and started the short hike back to the car. As I was walking up the stairs it started to rain. Yep, I had picked the right time to leave, that is for sure.
I had shot 70 images over the course of about an hour and a half. After going through the editing process, I decided to keep seven of them. The amazing thing is one of the images represents seven frames all by itself, and there is another one that accounts for three of them. I'm still doing quite well with my hit rate these days, but more importantly, I am having a blast with the camera. I'm starting to create completely different images from areas I've been countess times before. That is how I know I am progressing as a photographer. I was so excited about these images that I came home from my evening meeting at work and started to process the pictures and get them online.
I'm not sure what is coming next, but Fall is knocking on our door. I saw a few trees that were already starting to change at Hanging Rock. This is a good sign that Fall will come early this year, and very possibly be quite vibrant!
