A simple study of texture and color.
Painted Hills Panorama
A simple stitched panorama I took in 2004 in the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. It's nice how much improved the panorama stitching technology has gotten in the past decade, the original raw image files here were small and imperfectly matched in exposure, and this image required (at least with one bit of software back in the day) the hand identification of stitching points.
Now it's select-select-menu-pause-done. And, with Lightroom's recent "merge raw files", it's pretty easy to start from a couple raw files and then work on tonal adjustments and so forth once.
So grateful for the improvements we've gotten, not only in panoramic tools, but in image editing tools in general. It's easier than ever to make technically strong prints, and that allows me to focus on what should remain the harder part, composition, and meaning.
Aspiring Branches
Snow-covered branches reach for the sky, and the mountains within the sky, in this image from Zion National Park. As always with high-key monochromatic images, a bit of care will be essential to "getting it just right" in print, and that prospect is always exciting.
I love the mystery, the reaching for detail that our eyes do, in low-contrast, high-key images. I think that is one of the things that attracts me so much to winter and polar landscapes.
In this case, in a large print, I think it will be possible to just make out some texture against the far rock induced by falling snow. That too will add to the qualities of this image.
I love the branch shapes at the bottom left and center, but I would have preferred if a few things had arranged themselves just a bit differently in the bottom right. Cropping in more from the right doesn't quite work, and in this case, I think it's best to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Clearning Pogonip at Sunrise, Conway Summit
Tendrils of ice fog begin to lift from around the rocky outcroppings near the north end of the Mono Basin. I was strongly attracted to the color contrasts here, as the first morning light raked across the fog, emphasizing its texture.
Winter Sunrise, Alabama Hills
I always love warm/cool contrasts in photography, and this winter image from the Alabama Hills (in California, despite the name) to the east of the Sierra Nevada embraces that. Red morning light pops the already warm-toned geology of the Hills, and the snow-covered Sierra in back largely provides counterpoint, although a few bits of warm light appear on its ridges as well.
Near Lone Pine, the Alabama Hills are a fantastic place to be doing photography, and will be among the first stops on my Eastern Sierra workshop this October. (Registration is still open!)
Floating Spheres
More of the surrealist wonderland that is Mono Lake in Winter. This time from my very first winter visit to the location.
One longer term plan I have is to produce a small book of my winter Mono Lake images, with an emphasis on those that show it's surrealist tendencies. What do you folks think?
Throwback Thursday: Sunset Petroglyphs
One of the best monsoon season sunsets I got in my 2007 visit to the Saguaro National Park area was this sunset in the western unit of the park. I was looking through this today and remastered it as my printing skills have developed a bit in the past eight years. I had not noticed in my first pass through those images that this one shows the faintest trace of rays coming up and to the left from the central clouds, which, when combined with the strange light (a bright pink cloud directly overhead helped there) give this image, for me, an otherworldly feel.
Seismic Silhouette, Little Lakes Valley
I notice I've been using the word "rhythm" a lot lately in a variety of on-line and off-line discussions about photographic composition, and when I noticed that, I recalled and dug up this image from a morning hike into the Eastern Sierra's incredible Little Lakes Valley in late 2013. Here, as I look back to the east, the sunrise is just about to catch up with me, creating a wonderful line of silhouetted conifers, that remind more than anything of a seismograph trace.
Our mind's visual processing is very good at picking up textures, patterns, rhythms, and often effective photography uses this fact to hold a viewer's attention, whether or not there's a dominant focal point in a photograph. I often wonder if this relates to the frequency with which we see photographers (such as Ansel Adams and Charlie Cramer) who are (or were) accomplished pianists or other musicians. Are the links between musical rhythm and visual rhythm so deep? I wonder.
Winter Storm, Baronette Peak
Winter sets into these towering mountains in Yellowstone's northeast corner. I love the gentle rhythm of the rock folks, and the wonderful contrast between the soft mists and the snow-textured rocks and trees. Gentle, almost monochromatic color also adds to the feeling of quiet here.
Light and Dark Falls
Some dramatic moving waterfall details here, some of which will need to be carefully rendered in print. Just enough size to make sure more individual streaks of water are visible through the more general motion blur, just barely enough shadow detail to render the rock behind visible as a sharpness anchor.
I also feel like this image owe a bit to the stylistic influence of John Paul Caponigro, who is worth your attention. (He does, intentionally, do a lot of what us purists might call manipulation, but there's no subterfuge here, just some really wonderful art.)
This is Seljalandsfoss in Iceland. While I have at least a dozen waterfalls that I truly love, this one and one other (Skógafoss) really seem to lend themselves to experimental photography, capturing shapes and forms so chaotically changing and transitory that one never quite knows what one is going to get, and repeatedly shooting the "same subject" dozens of times may, with patience, lead to surprises and the occasional extraordinary result. In this case, the mirrored light and dark flows of water were not even hinted at in any other frame.
While a great deal of my photography is composed in a very controlled form, this opposite strategy is something I enjoy a lot, and that has often produced good results for me. Find an appropriate subject, and give it a try!
Trouble Ahead, Ilulissat
Some very large icebergs peer out from behind fog in this image from the West Greenlandic coast. The enormous scale of these bergs and the rhythmic bands of backlit fog were truly striking. Despite my proximity to the incredible Icefjord, it is likely that these particular bergs came from a glacier farther north, as the fjord's glacial moraine appears to trap bergs even half the size of these monsters.
Throwback Thursday: Polar Bears Lunching
Polar Bears Lunching (2011)
Not quite as far "back" as my usual Throwback Thursday fare, but it still seems like ages since I've been within sight of a polar bear, nevermind three. Here, two young bears pick the last bits of food from a whale skeleton, while their mother stands guard. Conditions for this shot were quite frankly terrible, with a lot of haze and an ugly color of coastline, both situations that lent themselves well to this monochromatic treatment.
Later today I hope to complete the paperwork to submit for an artist residency opportunity on Svalbard. Wish me luck!
Passing Storm near Carcass Island
It's rare that a sunrise or sunset by itself will actually capture my attention, but here the improbable, fantasy cloud forms manage to carry the day. Only an hour before I'd been caught in hail looking for cover as a storm rushed through, but it cleared quickly, once again reinforcing my experience that bad weather makes for great photographs.
Basalt Columns and Waves
Since I've been on a bit of a monochromatic kick lately, I wanted to share this slightly older impression of the dramatic columnar basalt from at Vík í Mýrdal in Iceland (near Reynisdrangar, which is hiding around the corner). As with any sort of image of water motion, the feel of the piece, the texture of the water, is determined greatly by exposure time and the choice of moment. Here the soft/hard texture contrast with the rock worked particularly well.
And psst: This one looks really nice as a small print on warm matte paper.
Black Point Bands
Bands of grass, lakebed, lake, island, hills and sky stack in this image from early 2015.
I love situations where the landscape becomes the abstract. That effect is heightened here by a telephoto perspective, the use of monochrome and a bit of carefully orchestrated virtual filtration, dodging and burning.
Taken from near Black Point on the north side of Mono Lake, the Mono-Inyo Craters and Negit Island provide a background for the increasingly shallow water between the island and shore. That water was, as of January, only about chest-deep in places, it was possible to walk to the island from shore. When and if the lake level drops a couple more feet, as it did once before around 1979, coyotes may again return to decimate the gull nests here. Two-thirds of California gulls nest on Negit and surrounding islands.
I will be returning here in October and January, for my own Eastern Sierra workshop and the annual Mono Lake Winter Photography workshop, respectively.
Swirling Mists, Snæfellsnes
In 2007, on my second visit to Iceland, Chris and I got a chance to head out to the Snæfellsnes peninsula, unfortunately, we were a bit behind our planned schedule and ended up on the wrong side of the peninsula for a good bit of the late evening light. But as sunset finally approached, we made our way around toward Snæfellsjökull, getting at least some long views of the ice-capped volcano in late light and, as time passed, some newly forming mists. I was captivated by the range of colors in some of the situations. While I'm pretty sure there's a terrific color version of this image from a bit south of the peak still to be made, this slightly shadow-toned monochromatic rendition has much (and yes, perhaps even more) to offer. I love the strange almost intentional path of the forming mists here.
Lifting Mists, Palmer Archipelago
High winds and ice blocking the port had kept us back from landing at Wiencke Island earlier on this day, but after a long wait, the winds shifted, allowing access to the landing site, and as we began our landing as mists began to clear across the channel, in wonderful yet gentle golds and pinks.
Beyond the Parish-like (Parishish?) light, the sudden appearance of these mountain spires blew me away. I hadn't realized there were mountains in that direction at all (the weather had been that bad), and I was filled with a sense of awe and wonder from their scale.
Because part of the joy of this image is in communicating that scale, I'm very much looking forward to making a huge print of this, the sense of size is not going to come through well on a computer monitor. But to give you a sense of it... the crop of a tiny area (about 2% of the image) at right provides a hint.
Despite the enormous difficulties in getting to Antarctica and the setbacks I've had on this project, it's moments like these, and images like these, that leave me deeply committed to expanding my body of polar work.
Lamar Valley II
Taken not too long after Wednesday's image from the Lamar Valley, I'm again enjoying the first foreshadowing of winter and fantastic, warm and varied light. Here I waited for a half an hour as light and dark played out hoping for the perfect highlight on the group of trees lower-left, and my unusual patience was eventually rewarded.
Throwback Thursday: Rainbow Whirlwind (2006)
Rainbow Whirlwind
Oh boy had I been doing a lot of photography!
It was 2006, and my first visit to Iceland. Moreover, it was a gonzo, too-quick, one-week around the island marathon following at the heels of three and a half weeks photographing in Svalbard and East Greenland, by all rights, I should have been exhausted, but If I was, I didn't notice. As you can tell from the direction of my work in the last nine years, Iceland had captivated me, and few moments more so than this one, spotting the rainbow near the bottom of Seljalandsfoss and managing to put aside the "big picture" of one of the beautiful waterfalls in the world and finding something even more magical in what was, on the scale of this waterfall, a detail.
I experimented a lot, knowing that the "feel" of the moving water was going to vary based on exposure time and the moment I selected to press the shutter, of the dozens of exposures, this one in particular managed to convey the swirling sense that I got within the water.
And only by including just the tiny window into the pool of water at the bottom of the image was I able to connect this incredible light, which suggested a fantasy painting, with the real world, the image is far more powerful as a result.
Perhaps not surprisingly, prints of this image work extremely well on pearl or metallic papers, and just as important it renders well in large prints, a 44" tall print I made for one client looks incredible in her home.
Lamar Valley
It is no surprise that I stopped for this painterly light in the Northeast corner of Yellowstone. Warm and varying lighting, broad vistas, and a sense of the transition between seasons all come together here. The shadows required a good deal of care here in general (the scene was very contrasty, and my eye saw into the dark areas more deeply than the camera's initial rendition did), and that care needs to be doubled when making a print, leaving in important detail while not entirely leaving out a sense of chiaroscuro.
Because of the scale, pulling this up large is probably a good idea.