Skies

It's been a busy few weeks.   I haven't blogged in weeks and have barely done anything with my fall photographs and we had our first snow flakes today! Time is passing by quickly but June and I have found time to get out and enjoy God's creation in gold, yellow, and red before the leaves are all gone.

We took one day and drove up to Burke's Garden, Virginia.  It's a favorite place for landscape photographers but we had never been.  Burke's Garden is a bowl valley completely surrounded by Clinch Mountain.  The valley is reported to be the highest in Virginia at around 3,000 feet above sea level.  This elevation brings fall to Burke's Garden before many other places in our area.  

The day we picked turned out the be cloudy and overcast.  When we got into the valley the clouds had come down far enough to cover the surrounding mountains and even creep into the valley.   Overcast days can be great for some photographs but challenging for others.  One of the most valuable lessons for an outdoor photographer is to know what to shoot under different lighting conditions.   A cloudy overcast day produces fantastic soft light, obscuring shadows and eliminating bright spots.  It can also make colors more vibrant. 

In this first shot you can see how the clouds were hanging very low over the mountains.  The clouds thinned a little allowing just enough sunlight through to highlight the trees in this shot.  Including the sky in this shot puts it in perspective and tells more about the place and conditions.

In this shot of a road lined by beautiful trees in fall spender you can see how the soft indirect light allows the color to pop without being washed out by bright light.  The sky does not add to this photo but there was no way to get this shot without including some of the sky.

Most of the time you want to avoid including the sky in the composition if it is bland and uninteresting.  Below is the same shot with different crops.

In the second version I cropped out that bland sky.  I also cropped out the grassy foreground because I didn't think it added anything to the image.  If something doesn't add to the image then think about cropping it out.

The next weekend we took a side trip to Cataloochee Valley on the way to meet friends for the weekend.  At times we had the same overcast conditions but later in the day the clouds started to break up and create some different conditions.

With some interesting clouds in the sky I had some different compositional opportunities.  In this photo of an old barn the blue sky and clouds added to the photo.  The clouds are cool and the blue is a nice contrast with the fall colors.   To make this shot I had to use a graduated neutral density filter to compensate for the sky being much brighter than the rest of the image.   I don't use these filters on every trip but when I need them they make the difference between an impossible shot and something worth sharing.

Of course these bright conditions made other photographs very challenging.  I had to wait a while for the sun to go behind a cloud before I could get a picture of leaves in that little stream.  

The secret to getting good photos outdoors is to understand your light conditions.  Unlike the studio, you take what God gives you and make the best of it.

Rainy Days and Fridays

It's hard to believe that it's been 40 years since The Carpenter's Rainy Days and Mondays went to #2 on the charts.   Today brought that song to mind.   Our photography workshop group spent the morning shooting in drizzle and fog on Cadillac Mountain and The Wild Gardens of Acadia in Maine.   Cloudy days are great for photographing a variety of different subjects.  The clouds and fog disperse and soften the light eliminating almost all shadows and giving things a rich color.   Today we had blowing drizzle when made shooting a challenge.  Most of the time I wasn't wearing my glasses because they were covered with water.  I had to trust the camera to get the focus right because I couldn't tell if I was even close to in focus.   I had to constantly wipe the front of my lens and then quickly take the shot.

I'm not complaining.  These conditions gave me the opportunity to take photos like these.

It has been cold enough that some of the vegetation on Cadillac Mountain has started to turn red.  Add some evergreens, the pink granite, and some fog and you get a decent photograph.

 The granite was worn smooth by glaciers long ago and has since cracked, which make great leading lines in the photo.

This bunch of grass had turned golden.











After stomping around on the mountain we went down to the Wild Gardens of Acadia.  There was not much blooming in the gardens but many of the ferns had turned golden.

 

 I was able to move around to get a green background behind the golden ferns making a nice color contrast shot.

Tomorrow promises to be a nice sunny day.  We'll get out and shoot but it will be different from today.   I'm looking forward to it.

Contrasts in Sierra Nevada

Click on any photo for a larger view.

It's been two months and I've still not gotten around to posting my photos from Sequoia, Yosemite, and Kings Canyon National Parks.   There are so many I've not figured out how I want to share these.  So far I've shared photos from Bodie California and the Wildflowers of Sequoia and Yosemite, which you can find in previous blog entries.

One thing I tried to look for and pay attention to on this trip was contrasts.   There are lots of different kinds of contrast in the world of nature photography.   Some contrast is to be avoided, such as when the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene are too extreme for the camera to handle.  Having contrasting colors in a photo, such as red/green or blue/yellow, can really make an image.  Sometimes you can add interest to a photo by including contrasting subjects, such as large/small, fast/slow, or immobile/moving.

Here are some images from the the parks in Sierra Nevada where I tried to make use of different kinds of contrast.

The first two photos are examples of color contrasts.   The evergreen branch contrasts with the vivid blue sky in the background.   The light colored bird and the darker background also add tonal contrast to the image without exceeding the camera's ability to capture the range of light.   The second picture has layers of contrasting colors - cool blue in the river, green of the trees, and the warm pink-orange color of Bridalveil Falls and the cliff face at sunset.

The second pair of images show contrasts in size.  The small evergreen in the foreground and the Giant Sequoia in the background tell a story of growth.   One day that sapling may be one of the largest trees on earth like the one behind it.   The Giant Sequoias can live to be over 2,000 years old so it may take some time.  The second image shows a small dead twig on a large dead stump (no, I didn't place it there).  This also has a Giant Sequoia in the background as well.   Because they are so big and there were so many I had lot of opportunities to use them as backgrounds.

This photo shows both death and new life in one image.  The dead tree stump is the remains from a forest fire that destroyed much of an area of Yosemite several years ago.  Without the tree canopy to block the sun the Lupines are thriving and spreading new life across the hillside. 

This final image show the immobile solid rock surrounded by the flowing water of a stream.   The rock is sharp and in focus, while the water is smooth and blurry, adding an interesting contrast to the image.

I'm going to continue to post images from our trip in June.  Be sure to come back or better yet subscribe for email updates .