Archives

I’m spending a week in Connecticut visiting my parents. We are expecting hurricane Irene to come barreling through over the weekend, mostly on Sunday, but in the meantime, the weather has been quite pleasant. After a 22 mile bike ride this morning through the woods, followed by a trip to Foxwoods Casino in the afternoon, I spent an hour or two this evening standing outside in the dark trying to capture the night sky. Busy day.

Around here, which some might consider “deep in the woods”, there is not much ground light, and plenty of stars as a result. I decided to use tree silhouettes as an anchor point, to give the images some frame of reference. Trees are abundant here, and this also then serves as my entry into this week’s DPS Assignment, conveniently themed “Trees”.

With camera mounted securely to my tripod, and using a remote shutter release, I tried a variety of camera settings, including long exposures and high ISOs. With the high ISO, you of course get higher sensitivity (requiring less light to make the image), but more noise. On the other hand, keeping the shutter open longer means more total light hitting the sensor, allowing for lower ISO, but also results in star smudging as the stars move through the image due to the Earth’s rotation. Even with a 30 second exposure, the movement is quite noticeable.

So in some cases, I tried to keep the smudging to a minimum with exposures as “fast” as 8 to 10 seconds. In others, I went the opposite direction and let the streaking be part of the image, using a 4 minute in one case and an 8 minute exposure in another. For these ultra long exposures, I put the camera in “bulb” mode and made use of the remote shutter release which offers a means to lock the shutter open. I used a timer to decide when to end the exposure, but getting the time exact is not too critical. At 8 minutes, a couple seconds one way or the other is not going to make much difference.

In these cases, I am also using a fairly wide aperture (big opening means lots of light), but that is not the greatest for keeping both the tree and the stars in perfect focus. Still, it helps keep the other parameters at reasonable levels, and with a 35mm lens, the effect is not too bad. Would be even better at 14mm (as would the view of the sky), but unfortunately I did not bring my wide angle lens on this trip.

I do like how the clouds show up with a bit of a reddish tinge. They do not appear that way in real life, at least to my eyes. I presume the tint has to do with the sunlight reddened by the long trip sideways through the atmosphere, as during sunset. In this case, the light is coming from beyond the horizon, but the tint has not changed. Still, at night, the light is so minimal that the clouds are themselves barely even visible to the naked eye, but show up nicely in the long exposed image.

On the last leg of our road trip around the American West, we made our way from Montana down to Southern California along I-15 over a period of days. The time was passed mostly driving or tending to camp. But at one stop in Dillon, MT, where we camped for the night along a river, I set up and took a few photos before the rain came in, right around sunset.

The photos were largely not noteworthy, except in one case I tried taking the same photo a few times with different exposures, just to see what might work. The clouds were glowing in the sunset, but the foreground was not directly illuminated, so as I expected, I was either going to be over exposed for the sky or under exposed for the foliage.

However, since I was taking these photos from a tripod, they were otherwise identical, and so I had some fun merging them in post processing (with a little brightening and a saturation bump). This is one form of HDR, or high dynamic range photography, where you extract more from a scene than the ambient light would normally allow for, given the limitations of image sensors.

Three images are shown in the gallery: the two partially incorrectly exposed photos, and then the final merged product using the good parts of the two originals.

This is not the greatest composition in the world, but it was instructive for me to try this technique that I had only previously read about, and to see how this might work in the future in tough lighting conditions.

The landscape of eastern Washington could not present more of a contrast to what I found in Glacier Park. Aside from the occasional rock outcrop, it’s flat, flat, and more flat. Okay, well more like gently rolling hills, but it feels pretty flat by comparison. Lots of farmland, mostly wheat and potatoes.

We are just coming into harvest time, so the wheat fields are fairly mature. Driving around, you can see the combines starting to do their work as dust clouds rise from the distant horizon. But I had fun messing around in one as-yet-to-be-harvested wheat field, as you can see in the gallery. I tried to convey how endless the field seems to be. (My wife helpfully offered that I probably owed the farmer rent for use of his field.)

On the other hand, while you can drive for hours upon hours and see only endless wheat, there are occasionally other things to look at. Toward the end of the last ice age, this area bore the brunt of massive flash floods as an ice dam periodically built up and broke in western Montana. Impossibly large volumes of water flowed from the Missoula area through Washington to the sea. This resulted in carving a number of interesting land features, including what is now called Dry Falls, shown in the gallery. It looks roughly as though someone turned off the tap on Niagra Falls. In fact, it apparently would dwarf Niagra Falls, if the water were flowing. Downstream of the falls are miles of boulder strewn fields, full of the rocks deposited there by the water, and as a result, no good for farming. I guess this is used as ranch land.

And finally, night fall presents an opportunity for viewing big open skies, and lots of stars. The moon is almost new just now, so you can see it set for an hour or two after sunset. The photo I took below used a very long exposure, and unfortunately results in a blurred moon as the moon moves during the course of the exposure. Still, I liked the shot, so I included it.

The first few days I was in Glacier, while I was staying in Two Medicine, the weather was a bit windy, cold, and wet. Toward the tail end of this weather system, the clouds were rolling through fast and low over the mountains, coming in from the west. Unfortunately, I did not catch the really low clouds that were brushing the mountain tops, but a little later, when the periodic rain showers grew less frequent, I ventured out and planted the camera on the tripod at the foot of the lake, and captured a series of shots that I later stitched together into the time lapse video below.

If you view full screen, it should give you the option to view at up to 1080p, if you are so inclined.

Since my last post, I spent a few days wandering around Glacier National Park, hiking and making photos. For those who know the area, I stayed in the Two Medicine campground for two nights, toward the lower east side of the park, and then for two nights in the Rising Sun campground, along the Going to the Sun Road, but again on the eastern side of the park. From this base, I used the park shuttle to move along the Going to the Sun Road, so I did get to see the western side as well. The park is split down the middle by the continental divide, so there is quite a difference between the west and the east in terms of weather, foliage, and terrain.

I hiked probably 25 or 30 miles altogether, some of it in the rain, and all of it with a lot of gear. Given the number of days I was in the park, this is not actually that much, but my average speed was held down by the fact that I kept stopping to take photographs. I was also trying to be cautious of wildlife, as I was hiking alone. Glacier is filled with, among other things, bears, including Grizzlies. I carried bear spray for emergencies, but the best defense I guess is simply to avoid surprising a bear coming around a blind corner, so I learned to yell out at intervals to announce my presence well in advance and to take corners slowly. I also did not go as far into the backcountry as I might have with a companion. In the end, whether because of my caution or just due to luck, I never did encounter a bear, although many neighbors in the campgrounds spoke of (harmless) bear encounters. I did see lots of other wildlife, however.

The park is absolutely spectacular, and there is an amazing vista at every turn. Towering cliffs over valleys carved by glaciers, crystal clear lakes, and green meadows filled with a rainbow of wildflowers are everywhere. It was easy to get carried away and just start shooting. It took me a little while to settle down and exert a little discipline. Just because something looks spectacular to your eyes does not mean it will make a good photograph. But once I got into the groove and remembered my fundamentals, I made a few good photos.

I am particularly pleased with “Avalanche Creek” in the bottom row of the gallery below. This was along a fairly touristy, well-traveled trail, but the light was really soft and the view of the creek nice, so I set myself up on a rock and waited patiently for a break in the traffic (which would otherwise be visible right along the bank of the creek). I had been lazy and not lugged my tripod on this walk, but in order to work in this dim light, and especially to get the smoothed water effect that I wanted, the camera had to be steady for about a second. So I balanced the camera on a rock and laid down next to it to line up the shot (which got me a few strange looks by passers-by). In the end, I think it was worth it. But after that, I carried the tripod.