Zion Virgin River Dream

Sony Takes a Gamble

I've been contemplating a new camera body this summer. I've grown frustrated with how easily my sensor gets contaminated when I switch lenses all the time. By the time I finished the last cycle my Canon 60D took images that looked like they had chicken pox. I had to spend a small fortune to get it cleaned but I know that the dirt will return as soon as the next cycle begins. The only way to keep a camera clean is to never open it. But since I have several lenses (with another one being contemplated for astro photography) the only solution is to buy more bodies and commit each one to a certain lens. I'll do that for my 2 main lenses (the Canon wide angle and telephoto) and only swap in the astro lens when I'm doing night shooting. I'll have to set up a system for making those changes as clean as possible (maybe inside a big plastic bag to minimize environmental contact) and keep them to a minimum.

Anyway, I've been watching the camera market intently since January and it's become very interesting. Canon opened the bidding with their 5D SR, a 50 megapixel monster that sells for almost $4K. It is an interesting offering but has one serious drawback ... the same noise issues that plague my 60D. Canon sensors are just horrendously noisy and there's no getting around that. I'd need to get seriously dedicated to noise reduction and to buy some not so cheap software to help mitigate the issues this noise creates. But I'd at least not have compatibility issues with my lenses.

Sony offers the only serious competition for the Canon bodies. Their mirrorless design leaves room for adapters that allow the use of almost any lens from any manufacturer but, up until now, there were big issues. Auto focus was painfully slow and often failed so manual focusing was almost a given. That's OK most of the time but when you're trying to take candid photos (like on the street) it's a huge problem. And the image stabilization systems in most lenses didn't work very well either. It was a mess and, quite frankly, the first version of their high pixel count camera, the A7R, had some serious issues with shutter noise, vibration and lifetime. I know a lot of pro photographers made the switch but they were not all really happy with it. But, just this month, Sony introduced the next round ... the A7R II, and it looks like a game changer. It has a big sensor, 42 megapixels, so it competes directly with the new Canon but the really exciting ideas involve 5 axis image stabilization in the camera (by moving the sensor) and auto focus is now fast because they have 399 phase detection sensors spread across the sensor and they work with Canon auto focus lenses. I've seen several videos and the system is very fast indeed. They also seemed to be listening to their customers and made major changes in the software so HDR shooters have more bracketing options and video shooters can now shoot 4K internally to the camera. This last item is a huge advance ... a small camera that shoots ultra HD to the internal memory card (not everything is great ... only 8 bit and the color space is somewhat limited but still...). And the new sensor is very low noise so I can do my HDR thing and my star photo thing and even my video thing all with the same camera. Price is an issue ... $3200 ... and $399 for the adapter, but it's still a major step for them and for me. I can now get the resolution I want, a full-frame 35mm image and some really nice features that will make my life a whole lot easier. Now, all I need to do is find that $3600 and I'll be set to go ... hmmmmm.

Zion Virgin River Dream

Take the Zion park shuttle to the very last stop ... the Temple of Sinawava ... and take the path toward the narrows and you find the Virgin River. This river made the Zion Canyon and the narrows and pretty much the whole park so it's a big deal. In this area the river runs through a lot of rock fall, stuff sloughing off the nearby canyon walls, which makes for many turbulent pools and small waterfalls. It's an extremely picturesque area so I spent most of a day there. One place, in particular, caught my attention. Many rocks had pushed together to create an elevated pool which cascaded over the resulting dam and waterfall. I'm always looking for moving water as it gives me a chance to work with my 10 stop neutral density filter (here and here and you'll need an adapter ring to fit your lens). You've seen the effect I'm sure ... cascading water turns into the neatest mist. You achieve this by using this really dark filter which pushes your exposure times out to 30 seconds or longer. The result is an exposure that obliterates all evidence of individual drops and shows only a ghost of what's actually there. You get an image with some really sharp features (rocks mostly) and everything else is so ethereal. It's a really interesting effect.

Anyway, I spent quite a while at this waterfall and took many images. This one is probably the best of the lot although I'll develop all of them to make sure. This is a single exposure, extensively processed in Lightroom. I used several radial filters to highlight the rocks (especially the one in the middle) and worked with the colors to pull out the water and rock colors. Very dramatic I think.

Zion Dream - 106mm(1.6 crop),f/22,30 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm

Water, water everywhere but...

Traveling the West was an education in water and the lack thereof. Everywhere I went I confronted the impact of the devastating drought that is topic number one throughout that part of the country. I saw it in the empty reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, in the complaints of rangers in Grand Canyon about the complete lack of essential spring floods and the accumulation of damaging sand and silt in the Colorado River, in signs everywhere to conserve water ... I couldn't get away from the impact. And then there's California's Central Valley. You'd never know there was a drought given the massive amounts of water they use to keep their crops alive. I was amazed at some of the things the farmers were doing. I saw more new orchards being planted and watered than made sense given the water is running out. And, in the heat of the day, I saw massive watering operations going full tilt ... imagine the evaporation and how much water never got to the thirsty plants. I seems many haven't gotten the message that water is RUNNING OUT. Farmers think it's an infinite resource along with several large municipal water authorities (I'm looking at you LA). In Mono Lake the LA water authority came around in the 1920s and basically confiscated all the streams that fed the lake. You can imagine the outcome ... the lake almost disappeared. It took decades of fighting and court battles to get even a little of that water back and now the drought is sapping that supply to death so the lake is still very much in trouble. And you read about the convoluted legal arrangements and you no longer need to wonder how this all came about. It involved politicians so the outcome was foregone ... an absolute screw up. They made the mistake of creating fixed allocations ... each entity got a certain absolute amount of water and, unfortunately, the amount they worked with was a historically high measurement. Now there's not as much water but everyone still wants their fixed allocation and screw everyone else. It's a huge mess and I'm not sure if anyone, but especially politicians, can square the circle to fix it. But fix it the must because the future of the West depends on finding a solution. It should be interesting ...

Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm

As I've stated before, I spent a month in the Great Basin of Utah and Arizona because the cap for my 15 year old Nissan pickup needed to be special ordered. When the day came to have it fitted I was informed by the store that the truck carrying it had been diverted down into Texas and Oklahoma and would be delayed for 4-5 days. I wasn't about to sit around Albuquerque waiting at $65/day in a hotel so I jumped in my truck and headed north into Colorado and the Great Sand Dunes. I got dumped on big time ... two nights of heavy, wet snow (which collapsed my tent at 3 am) and froze my proverbial ass off. But bad weather makes for amazing photographs and I got a ton. The dunes were covered with a frosting of white and the sky was heavy with storm clouds ... a photographer's dream for sure. So I put the 70-200 mm f/4 zoom on the DSLR and went hunting for nice compositions. Along the road into the park there were downed trees and that's where I found exactly what I wanted. This is an HDR of 3 images with some Lightroom touches at the end. It's nice and pleasing to the eye and those storm clouds ... what more can I say.

Great Sand Dunes - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY NC 4.0

Humboldt Redwood Renewal

From the Bit to the Small...

It's often amazing the diversity of images I get involved with. Most of the time I'm shooting the big, even colossal works of nature. Take the Grand Canyon, certainly among the biggest of features one finds on this planet. I've made dozens of panoramas of the canyon, a few which I've already shown you (with more to come over the next few months). Or Yosemite or Bryce or Crater Lake ... they are all massive in scale. They are usually the images that get the most attention when posted on 500px or Flikr. That's because they are grand and impressive and have a major WOW factor. That's how it should be.

But I also shoot the small. You've seen a few ... raindrops on my truck's window or the Spruce cones would be another example. I love those shots because they show the beauty in the simplest of nature's many offerings. To not shoot them is to overlook a majority of the beauty around us. To not stop and admire the new growth on a Redwood tree would be a shame as it can be and often is amazing. So, next time you're somewhere spectacular, turn your eye toward the small and see the beauty that's all around you. It makes the greater beauty even more magnificent.

Humboldt Redwood Renewal

It was early summer when I hit the Humboldt Redwoods in northern California. But at the altitude where these majestic trees grow it was still spring and new growth was everywhere. It's almost iridescent against the dark green of the mature trees. You really have to be blind to miss it. I was wandering through these huge stands of trees and this bright green was all around me. So it was only natural that I'd turn my lens onto these little jewels and start shooting. I love this one because the light, softened by the shallow depth of field at f/4, frames the growth perfectly. A pristine gem on the smallest of scales.

Renewal - 35mm(1.6 crop),f/4,1/20 sec, ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Grand Canyon North Rim Storm

Flush the Summer Goodbye...

It's been a bummer summer here in Crimea. I was really looking forward to spending at least part of this summer on the Black Sea with the family but that appears to have gone in the proverbial crapper. We've had zero good days this month so far and it's already 2/3 done. It's either too cold and/or the wind is too strong making the beach uncomfortable. And this year the bus company that provides transportation to the beach changed from a very nice VW bus with comfortable seats to this POS Bogdon municipal bus that overheats and is exceedingly uncomfortable to endure for the hour+ it takes to get there. Add to that the insult of raising the price 33% and you've got a good formula for not ginning up the excitement needed to make the trip. So we've been a grand total of once so far and it doesn't look to get any better going forward. No one is happy about this but there's not much we can do to fix it. Just grouse and bitch and hope, against hope, that it gets better soon.

Grand Canyon North Rim Storm

My last stop on this cycle was at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a roll of the dice so to speak as I knew the camp grounds and even the cabins would be booked full and then some. They also have a policy of no 'overnight camping' which is a polite way of saying ... no sleeping in your car or RV in the parking lots or overlooks. I decided to challenge that position and slept in my truck for 2 nights in the parking lot at the lodge. No one bothered me but I think that's probably from oversight more than anything else. The single ranger had other things to worry about than people sleeping in their cars. So I got away with a slight transgression.

On my second day I went out to Royal point which is the eastern most overlook. It's near the spot where the Colorado enters the main canyon. It was a very hot day so I found a shady spot not too far from the bathrooms, ate my lunch and settled back to await the evening. Around mid-afternoon the sky darkened and it started to rain. As any photographer knows, rain is a good thing as it creates drama. Mundane scenes suddenly become interesting and photogenic. I had already selected a nice overlook to visit in this event so I drove as quickly as possible there and set up the camera. The result was a very pleasant surprise and I have now processed the files for your enjoyment.

Grand Canyon North Rim Storm - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY NC 4.0

Lassen Seed Cones

Early Thoughts on the Next Cycle...

I've only been in Crimea for a few weeks but I'm already thinking about the next cycle of my travels. I can't deal with all the driving ... almost 10K miles last time ... so I want to limit my wandering a bit. Also, many of the places I visited will be closed due to snow in the winter so I need to seriously change my tactics in future visits. Right now I'm thinking about several ideas ... one has me spending a month or more in Southern California, visiting LA for several weeks and Joshua Tree plus Death Valley for a week each. It should be a nice time then with moderate temperatures. I want to really get into the Valley as there are some spectacular areas that are really off limits in the summer's searing heat. I'm interested in sunrise/sunset sessions on the extensive salt flats plus the sand dunes and even the race track if I'm willing to brave a dirt road again. I also want to get a good, fast prime lens and get serious about astro photography. I'm a big fan of Tom Lowe and his TimeScapes work. And finishing the work on my video of LA is hanging out there so there's lots to be done.

There's also a more extensive visiting of coastal lighthouses ... I only saw a few ... with the aim of producing a book sometime in the future. The amazing image from Point Arena has me salivating to find and shoot more stunning panoramas that show off the majesty of these guardians and their charges. I'll be more diligent this time and do my homework before leaving.

I'm also contemplating an expansion of my hardware. I really need another camera body so I can dedicate each of my two major lenses (the Canon wide angle and telephoto) to a body and avoid all the dust problems that plagued me last time. I don't mind changing once in a while but I was often going back and forth in a single session and my camera was heavily contaminated because of it. Then there's that fast prime ... maybe the new Sigma 24mm f/1.4 which is getting such rave reviews. I may also buy a new, fast Apple MacBook Pro as an alternative to lugging a big desktop computer around. I could hook my ViewSonic 23" to that little laptop and edit my photos much easier and have more room in my truck as a nice benefit. I hate carrying all my computer parts back and forth, risking their destruction or theft as I lug them through security and customs. I've already had my briefcase unpacked once by TSA and that's enough ... thank you very much. Those clowns have no legal liability should they destroy my gear (or 'confiscate' it as contraband if they so desire). They went through my suitcase on the trip home and created the potential for a major disaster because they didn't put any of the stuff back together, just stuffed everything in the bag and left their little notice absolving themselves of any liability should something happen. I had two large bottles of BBQ sauce in there and they tore open the plastic bag I had them in, then left both bottles on top of my clothes waiting for something to crush them so they would explode. Very unprofessional and stupid. I need to simplify as much as possible the transportation of gear between Russia and America. It's heavy and fragile ... not a good combination when traveling half way around the world.

Lassen Seed Cones

I've already written about what a special place Lassen Volcanic National Park is. I want to get back there someday to explore further the amazing things in that place. But, for now, I'll just show a very small part of why it's so special. I was exploring the debris field to the north of the volcano which is extremely interesting. They left the field untouched ... no cleanup whatsoever ... after the 1915 eruption. They wanted to see how the surrounding forests recovered. So there's a lot of new growth (relatively speaking) and many new spruce and other trees have taken root in the rich volcanic soil. As I strolled around the area I came across a lot of new growth and started shooting up close with my wide angle. This image is just one of many I have and I may post others if I can. It's a single shot, simply washed through the Develop module of Lightroom. I love the colors and the contrast. And the sharpness of that lens just keeps me amazed. Sometimes it's the little things that we overlook that are truly the most beautiful and intriguing.

Spruce Cones - 29mm(1.6 crop),f/4.0,1/2000 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Point Arena Light

West Coast Lighthouses

I'm a big fan of lighthouses. Although they've outlived their purpose in most areas, they are still a big reminder of the hazards ships used to face and man's efforts to mitigate the risks. They are always in the most dramatic places ... near rocky shores or perched precariously on dangerous cliffs ... and manned by the most insanely crazy men (and occasionally women) who sought the solitude and braved the dangers. They are largely ceremonial now, historical landmarks to an age long gone.

I guess I was disappointed by the lighthouses I found in California. I'm used to the dramatic spires of the East, thrusting high into the sky so their lights could be seen for miles. Some of the old houses in California are like that but most are very ugly and lacking in charm. I drove for miles to see the light at Point Reyes and was floored by how downright ugly it was. Same with the light in Pacific Grove, no more than a light perched on the roof of a small house. Really wasn't worth shutter cycles to take a picture. So it was very gratifying to drive out to Point Arena and find the majestic light there... and the dramatic rocks that it was guarding.

Point Arena Light

Near Flumeville in Northern California, on the Shoreline Highway (rt. 1), lies the Point Arena-Stornetta Public Lands and the Point Arena Lighthouse. It watches over some of the most dangerous hazards in the area. The geology is amazing ... massive blocks of sedimentary rock turned literally on edge by the teutonic forces at work as the Pacific Plate collides with the North American Plate. I'm sure many an ancient ship floundered on these rocks before the light was built in the 1870. Today it's a museum but still ... what a majestic location. After seeing so many disappointing lights it was a huge lift to see one so amazing.

Now there's a back story to this image. I arrived, as I often do, in early afternoon so I could scout the location and find the best vantage point. I wanted to shoot as the sun went down so I hung around to see how the fog developed. As a precaution I took a pano which I'd hoped to process during the afternoon but the weather didn't cooperate and I forgot about it. Turns out the fog rolled in like clockwork ... around 3 pm ... and only got worse as the afternoon progressed. By 7 it was obvious there wouldn't be any sunset so I left. As I said, the images from the pano went into my workstation where they languished until a few days ago. I was going through the catalog and came across the folder in Lightroom. Didn't expect much from the images but took the time to run them quickly through Photomatix and Photoshop. The resulting composite image literally blew my socks off. Amazing colors and the composition was nearly perfect. I make a small jpeg and sent it around to family and friends for their comments.

As I waited for the responses I started looking more carefully at the image. It had serious problems that I hadn't noticed in my rush to get it processed. One major problem with HDR appears when there is motion in the scene and the various images have differences. You often get 'ghosts' ... streaks and shadows in your images that cause major disturbances, especially when you try to make a panorama. In this case, Photomatix left huge holes, black areas, in the images which ruined the pano big time. There was also the ever present popcorn noise although it was diminished because the sky was dark. And, when HDR merges images with movement it often creates a muddled result that's not really acceptable for a professional image. These were all issues I had to fix. Fortunately, Photomatix has tools for dealing with ghosts and muddled images and I was able to use them to eliminate the major problems. But it took many iterations to get it right as a fix in one area would create a problem in another. Photoshop's ability to merge images isn't one of its really strong points and sometimes a merge line runs right through the middle of a major focal point (like cutting the light house in half so the top was displaced to the right of the bottom ... a very major muddle). It took several days to get everything right but the result was definitely worth the effort. I'd have to classify this image as one of the best and most stunning of all the photos I took during this cycle. It may be the crown jewel of my trip ... don't you agree?

Point Arena Light - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

One PS: the light from the 'light' is faked ... most lights today don't sweep dramatically across the water anymore ... it takes too much electricity ... so to add drama I created scatter from an imaginary light because that's what we all expect from our keepers. It's not a deception if I tell you about it and almost every photographer does it. It's expected after all.

Crater Lake Storm

Contrails and other human detritus

I tend to be a landscape photographer ... that means I'm a photographer of natural formations. Natural implies an absence of man and his artifacts and his lame attempts to tame the unruliness of that world. Anyone who's visited a national park or any wilderness area knows that it's almost impossible to erase the human influence. There's always garbage and scars and destruction no matter how far from 'civilization' you run. Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most visible impact is in the sky. I'm always having to deal with jet contrails ... the white lines left by the hot exhaust from jet engines at altitude. This is a major problem in the California parks due to the high traffic flowing into LA. Imagine how jarring that is ... a magnificent image marred by one or more basically straight lines drawn across the sky. And, they are surprisingly hard to remove. It's not like you can just erase them. Of course, both Photoshop and Lightroom have tools for removing unwanted features from an image but they can only do so much. Contrails, being large and obtrusive, often don't lend themselves to this type of surgery so one has to be creative. But it's extremely hard to deal with and getting worse. In Yosemite it's almost impossible to find shots that don't have some type of human artifact in them.

Crater Lake Storm

I was in Crater Lake for 4 days. Three of them brought rain and bad weather. I started feeling a bit waterlogged and then the snow came. But the old saying goes ... when life gives you lemons make lemonade ... and that's what I did. I'd watch the weather from my campsite and, if the sky started to clear, I'd drive the 7 miles to the crater's rim and hopefully find interesting and challenging views. Sometimes I'd not even get to the rim before the fog closed in and forced me to retreat. It's not a good idea to drive the twisting and somewhat dangerous roads leading to the crater when you can't see the road. But several evenings I was lucky and the sky gave me just enough clearance to let the late afternoon sun break through. Those were dramatic images.

Crater Lake Storm- 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

This image was very challenging. Not because of the weather but because of the jet contrails. The open area to the west was almost obliterated by contrails. There must have been a dozen or more. I'm not sure where those planes were going but flying in and around Crater Lake seemed to be on everyone's agenda. I was also forced to redo the entire process several times as there was an added problem with popcorn size noise coming out of Photomatix. I think it has problems with nearly saturated pixels and deciding how to show them in the final image. Whatever it decides, it doesn't work too well. So, to get around the issue I was forced to use Noiseware on the images going into Photomatix and on the HDR images coming out. This seems to knock the noise out but does some serious damage to the sharpness. I like my images sharp and it bothers me that I have to sacrifice even a bit because of this noise amplification coming out of Photomatix. I've sent them emails asking for help but they are silent so far. Fortunately, because Noiseware is so good at obliterating noise I was able to use very aggressive sharpening in Lightroom which brought back at least some of the definition. But I'm still looking for a solution to this problem.

Anyway, once I had the panorama I went to work with Lightroom's content aware fill to see how much of the contrail mess I could fix. It took a while and a lot of retries but I think I did a pretty good job overall. There's a bit of fluff left over but it looks natural enough that I just left it. Hopefully it doesn't do too much damage to the final image. I'll let you be the judge.