Pastel was the quiet color of morning.

While sunsets at Petrified Forest during my residency were often bright and bold, the mornings from Kachina Point (and others along the rim) were typically quiet. The skies would awake calm and blue, perhaps the slightest saturation-robbing traces of humid haze in the air from the previous night’s storms. My favorite attempts to capture those quiet mornings often were sun-facing, the north and east-looking points tended to be frontlit with little depth, but the west-looking points included more in the way of shadow and texture.

Here, the shadows create a sense of texture across a landscape that would have been far more bland at midday. Soft greens and pinks form patterns that gently lead us across the wash toward one of hundreds of badlands forms in the Painted Desert. I’ve resisted the urge to dump a good deal of contrast into this image, that contrast wasn’t “there” in my mind’s eye, and it doesn’t belong here. I did trim some badlands peaks from the bottom of the image (as I knew I would when I shot the image), they interfered with the sense of space and distance in the image.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 70-200L/4 @ 200mm, 1/4s, f/16, ISO 100.

Another color and texture study of Petrified Forest’s Blue Mesa badlands. Here the contrast between the indigo hills and the yellpw-orange petrified log creates a great deal of visual impact despite the fact that the colors are not, by themselves, greatly saturated.

Technically, a real issue in this shot was lens flare. We’re looking roughly in the direction of the sun (note the shadow on the log), with a wide-angle lens. In addition, I’m pretty close to the ground, which doesn’t directly affect lens flare, but often prevents me from spending as much time looking carefully through the viewfinder for potential flare artifacts. In the end, I held my hand over the lens and a cable release to make sure the lens was shaded when I took the shot. While I could have used a specific lens hood for this shot, I’m not certain it would have actually shaded the entire lens, if you’re trying to avoid direct flare artifacts, don’t assume that a lens hood will fix the problem, look to see if it does, and/or look to see if direct sunlight is hitting the front element of your lens.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 16-35L/2.8 II @ 17mm, f/16, 1/13s, ISO 100.

This is one of my favorite, and in some ways most unexpected of my Petrified Forest badlands images. at one point exploring an area beyond the Teepees I’d had to do a little bit of (quite) easy climbing, and upon reaching the top of the little crevasse I was ascending I stood up and looked down on this small illusion. It was, at the time, all too easy to imagine that I was miles above a large network of converging streams, in reality, the “streams” are only a few centimeters wide, the image was taken from, more or less, eye level.

Unusually for me, I did shoot this image handheld, I very much liked the pattern of converging “streams”, but I don’t think I really expected the final image to come out as well as it did. That was a mistake on my part, although in this case not a fatal one, I thought through the depth-of-field issues and shot a few frames of the scene as insurance to insure I’d get a few sharp images. At exposure times of 1/100s I was well faster than the 1/40th or so the 1/f rule would have required for a sharp handheld shot, I find, however, that I need at least another stop for best results, some combination of personal unsteadiness and the tremendous detail available in the 1Ds3.

(This image is also, coincidentally, shot in accordance with the Sunny 16 rule, although I didn’t plan it that way.)

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 24-70L/2.8 @ 38mm, f/16, 1/100s ISO 100.

Once again, during my residency I found myself fascianted by the patterns, textures and colors of the badlands within Petrified Forest National Park. The Blue Mesa trail is most visitor’s strongest introductions these colorful mounds, taking off from the northwest rim of Blue Mesa down into a canyon surrounded by bizzare clay forms and petrified logs.

As you drop from the mesa’s edge down into the canyon, near the steepest part of the trail there is a delightful little canyon on the right that I took at least three distinct occasions to work, each time as morning began to move across and create interesting textures on the purple hills. For me, this image invites losing oneself in details. The strange toe-like projections at the bottom of the left hill. The bands of grey and indigo clay bands, improbably horizontal. The hundreds or even thousands of rivulets texturing the hills.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 24-70L/2.8 @ 57mm, 1/5s, ISO 100.

Another sunset, this one is all about color and geometry, mostly geometry.

Arizona’s weather, particularly during monsoon season, is famous enough for creating crepsucular rays that those rays are included as part of the state flag. In some circles, crepuscular rays themselves are known as the “Arizona Flag Effect.” Here the strongest rays were up and to the left and near perfectly diagonal, which suggested a square composition to me, a composition perfected by the pair of small hills on the horizon in the bottom left.

It’s interesting to note that this residency generated at least five or six square compositions. (Some of which aren’t up on the site yet.) That’s more than I’ve produced before in total, I don’t know if that reflects a long-term change in my compositional habits, or merely acknowledging the increased flexilbity that having a whole lotta pixels has in terms of flexiblity in cropping. Only time will tell.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 24-70L/2.8 @ 38mm, 1/50s, f/16, ISO 100, circular polarizer.

While there is something truly magificent about a large panel of petroglyphs, even in areas of rock art abundance there is something special about finding a single, perfect glyph, and in my travels along the cliffs lining the Puerco River in Petrified Forest, this was one of my favorites. It’s distressingly rare to find an undefaced panel, and even more rare to find such a clean surroundings as this.

It was difficult, given the hot, warm rock to not see this petroglyph as a lizard, but if it is, what’s up with that tail? I don’t know the answer, but I certainly enjoy thinking about the question.

I experimented quite a bit with compositions on this piece, and eventually putting the lizard up in the frame suggested movement, perhaps through the idea of a lizard scampering up through the frame and only barely caught in time. The curved fault in the middle of the image creates an interesting sort of yin/yang quality to to the image as well.

The harsh sunlight was tough, I did experiment with a polarizer to get the right contrast between the desert varnish and the glyph itself, had I to do it over again, I might have experimented more with modifying the light. While I probably would have tried both reflectors and fill flash separately, I’d bet fill flash would be a trick, the desert varnish is a bit shiny, and I wasn’t set up to easily move flash far from the camera. Of course, going back on a different (cloudy) day would have been another option worth experimenting with. Still, in the end, I like the sense of full daylight here given the subject of the petroglyph, and I suspect that this sort of light would have, in the end, been the sort of light I chose for this particular image.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 70-200L/4 @ 148mm, 1/5s, f/14, ISO 100, circular polarizer.

Erosion (primarily rain) works quickly (at least in the geologic sense) on the tall clay badlands of Petrified Forest. In an area behind the Teepees, I ventured twice into steep, 40-foot ravines forming nearly perfect Vs, and trying not injure myself punching through the pourous clay that usually formed the bottom of those tiny canyons.

Returning to my car from higher into the Badlands, I glanced back and was astonished to see a rainbow on the higher formations above. I knew this light could be quite fleeting, so I through down my pack, wrestled out the camera and a telephoto zoom, and worked to make an image as quickly as I could. I knew (and experience would prove this to be the case) that my biggest problem was going to be maintaining depth-of-field at the longer focal lengths I was using, so I stopped down signficantly, tried to estimate where I thought the hyperfocal distance would be, manually focused there, and then repeated this exercise (presumably getting a different focus point each time) quickly a few times as I experimented with compositions.

I got off about six frames in probably no more than a minute before the rainbow began to fade. A few of them did suffer from loss of focus on the parts of the hills nearest the camera, but this image, partciularly when cropped to a more compositionally pleasing square, was in pretty good shape. I really like the sense of an almost constructed geometric pattern here, most particularly the parallel alignment of the slash of rainbow and the badlands edge to the left.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 70-200L/4 @ 78mm, 1/10s, f/22, ISO 100, circular polarizer.

Another detail shot the badlands of Petrified Forest. As you’ll see in this and at least one other detail image I’ve made from the badlands still to come, it’s often difficult at first to make sense of the scale of what’s going on. Here, the streams could easily be rivers, until we take a closer look at skeleton of a bush in the foreground.

This particular afternoon there was a thin layer of coulds, creating a soft but still somewhat directional light that created a nice sense of texture and form, a sense that was enhanced with a high-contrast rendering of this image—the digital equivalent of increasing development bath time.

Many parts of the badlands didn’t live up to the emotional connotations I put to “bad”, often these areas were brightly colored and beautifully textured. This particular area, however, did come along with a mild feeling of menace, a feeling which I hope this image communicates through texture, contrast, limited saturation, and the metaphor of the dead bush.

Compositionally, I have a couple quibbles with this image, Part of me would have liked the thin red band in the badlands to have been less horizontal, and to have included some space around the plant at the upper-right. The near merge halfway up the left edge could be seen as troublesome as well. Far more critical, however, is the shape of the curve at the bottom of the image and the placement of the mini-snag bottom right. In addition, there were distracting elements just “off-frame”.

(It’s possible, as I look at this again, that the (the usual word folks use is “tension”) of a couple of the placements of background items is counterintuitively contributing something positive to the feel of this image, again in terms of trying to put a little of the communicating the slightly uncomfortable “feel” of this part of the badlands into the image. On the other hand, it’s possible that I’m overthinking this.)

For whatever reason I decided to accept the on-frame placement of the upper-right bush. While there is contrast there, I don’t find that it’s placement pulls my eye there when I first look at the image (a matter of it’s local contrast relative to the heaping boatloads of local contrast in other parts of the image), and it does help bridge the eye’s path up the “stream” to a path where it can continue along the top of the image following the red clay band.

Composition is sometimes a matter of compromise, and, analysis aside, I am quite satisfied with the way this image reads and feels.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 24-70/2.8L @32mm, ISO 100, f/16, 1/3s, circular polarizer.

“Sometimes a sunset is just a sunset.”

One of the great joys of being a landscape photographer is the number of opportunties to see the incredible colors of sunrise and sunset, for many people, sleep and dinner represent impenetrable barriers to this sort of beauty. It takes nothing away from that beauty to suggest that not every incredible sunrise or sunset has the raw materials for a great photograph (in and of themselves.)

Still, occasionally, the sky will by itself rise to the occasion, and I think this particular evening qualifies. Again I was at (I believe) Pintado Point, the highest sunset-facing point overlooking the Painted Desert, and a long, thin band of clouds mirroring the horizon caught my eye, suggesting a more panoramic image shape. I photographed this sunset constantly from before the sun hit the cloud bank to after the cloud set below the horizon, but this was my favorite frame from the sunset. Just a hint of actual sun, a beautiful crisp line of light along the top of the cloud bank, crepuscular rays projecting from the top of the band, and great color.

A slightly (not dramatically) off-center placement of the sun leaves the image feeling restful, I don’t know if there were other reasons that I avoided a more off-center placement (e.g., rule of thirds or more), but I like the emotional feeling the image has in any case.

Finally, I get a very strong impression of the sun as an “eye” in this image. I’m not sure I can entirely explain all that factors that lead to that impression, but it does “add” to me for the image, it gives the image a pull that many other sunset images (including other frames from this particular evening) lack.

This image was shot handheld, which likely explains my (for this particular frame, unnecessary) use of ISO 200 rather than 100.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 300L/4 IS, ISO 200, f/4.5, 1/1250s

My residency at Petrified Forest National Park was nearly my first exposure to Badlands (an exception being a quick visit in 2004 to the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds NM in Oregon), and I found the forms of those badlands enormously beautiful. The Blue Mesa area in the center of Petrified Forest is one of several easily publicly-accessable badlands areas, this partiuclar shot was taken within a couple feet of the start of the Blue Mesa trail.

The range of color and form in the badlands is overwhelming, at this point I can’t think of a color of the rainbow that I haven’t seen represented in badlands clay, in this case, violets and browns. This particular shot is a mild abstraction of the landscape, showing a canyon perhaps fifty to a hundred feet deep (if you look closely, you’ll be able to make out a couple of small plants near the stream bed at the bottom of the valley.) I photographed this particular location in a number of lighting conditions but this was one of my favorite frames, as a light cloud layer and individual thicker clouds conspired to produce an interesting sense of depth on the badlands. I composed this image both with and without a hint of sky to provide context, but eventually decided that I preferred the simpler, more abstracted frames.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon 1Ds, Canon EF 24-70/2.8L @57mm, ISO 100, f/16, 1/6s, circular polarizer.

Sunrise was one of my favorite times to visit Kachina Point, it was across the street from my cabin at the park, I could wander over with my morning beverage easily, and watch not only the sunrise, but the first moments where light began to reach into the Painted Desert below. Most days I skipped the camera, but this particular morning I’d become fascinated by a particular badlands mound and the interesting harder rock structures that capped it, and I loved the way the first, pink light came across it to highlight it.

Otherwise, it was straightforward save for being careful to not blow out the exposure on the caprock. That eventually reuqired some negative exposure compensation, probably about two-thirds of a stop, but as always, I simply shot, checked the histogram, and dialed in adjustment if necessary.

This image was made with the assistance of the National Park Service artist-in-residence program at Petrified Forest National Park.

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III, Canon EF 70-200L/4 @ f/14, ISO 100, 1/2s, polarizer.

I’m really looking forward to this:

Joe Decker is a nature photographer, writer and educator living in San Jose. He will share with us about his fine art landscape photography. He will also give us a demonstration of how he culls photos after a photo shoot. If you would like to see Joe cull a set of your photos, bring a thumb drive with ~100 raw (unculled, unprocessed) photos from a single photo shoot.

After Joe’s presentation, we will have a moderated group critique. Everyone is welcome to bring a jpeg on a thumb drive that we can quickly load onto the laptop to display with the projector. (Please make sure your jpeg is *quickly and easily* located on the thumb drive.) Everyone in the group is invited to make constructive comments.

More info here: http://www.meetup.com/TWiP-Meetup/calendar/12588664/

There’s also an associated Photowalk I’ll be attending the previous day, info here: http://www.meetup.com/TWiP-Meetup/calendar/12583924/?from=list&offset=0

Come on by!