Artist Point Fall Colors 2010
As most of you know, last Saturday September 28, I rolled out of bed at 3 AM to fix a pot of coffee, load up my car with lots of camera gear, and head off into the darknes to make the long (3 hr) drive to Artist Point and Mt. Shuksan. Sometimes I think that photographers really ought to just stay awake all night, finally heading to bed a few hours after sunrise, to awake again just a few hours before sunset.
When I got to the well-known Picture Lake, I found that the wind was howling, and I was alone at the Lake. It is always hard to make the decision to leave one possible location for a sunrise shot to head to another, but that is what I did. I figured that I had shot enough images from Picture Lake, I could afford to miss the sunrise there - especially with the wind howling.
I returned to my car, and started up the road to Artist Point - just a few miles further up a few switchbacks. When I arrived at the parking lot at Artist Point, the lot was already starting to become populated with the early morning photographers and early hikers, and the light from the approaching dawn was brightening quickly. I grabbed my camera backpack (around 50 lbs of gear - ugh!) and my carbon fiber tripod (makes me wonder - with 50 lbs of camera gear - does it really matter that I save a few ounces on my tripod?!), locked the car, and started up the trail - at a slow run. I wanted to move to a potential photo site before the sun rose (as it turned out, I still had a bit of time).
Before the sun rose, and lingering for a while after sunrise, there were beautiful lenticular clouds above Mt. Baker. After photographing Mt. Baker from several perspectives and with many different lenses, I was returning to the car when I saw this beautiful vista.
For this shot, I mounted my Canon 24mm f/3.5L TSE lens on my Canon 5D Mark II, and shot a very wide range of exposures. Although the sky in the distance is clear, I was actually standing in the relatively dark shadow of overhead clouds. In reality, although this presented some exposure difficulties - especially with howling wind - the soft light made the scene even more intense with color. With the sun off to the left, I also used a circular polarizer to hold down the reflected sheen on the foliage and to slightly darken the sky.
This image is actually composed of a blend of multiple images all shot at ISO 400 using manual exposure and an aperture of f/8.0, starting with a shutter speed of 1/4000 sec (underexposure of the foreground - but about right for the sky) - to a maximum exposure of 1/250 sec at f/8.0.
By using a tilt-shift lens, which allows you to literally tilt the plane of maximum focus so that the foliage a few feet in front of the camera is in tack-sharp focus while also capturing the distant mountains in sharp focus, I was able to stop the motion of the foliage by using a maximum exposure of 1/250 at ISO400.
I chose ISO400 as a compromise between going too high and risking too noisy an image, and too low, where my shutter speed would be too long and the plants would blur in the wind. By using the tilt shift, f/8 worked to capture sharpness throughout the image (especially because this was a 24mm lens).
Richard
2 comments:
Cool story and shot - and isn't it something to be able to do _landscape_ photography at ISO 400!?
Dan:
Thanks for the comment...and you are so right - it is cool to be able to shoot landscape at higher ISO - and perhaps more importantly, it is terrific to be able to change the ISO to whatever you need for the situation.
One photo I like a lot - a shot of Sol Duc Falls on the Olympic Penninsula, in Olympic National Park, really capitalized on the ability to rapidly change ISO to meet the needs of the particular situation. I wanted the water streaming over the falls - shot at 1/2 second, ISO100 (or so...I'd have to revisit my EXIF data to be sure), and I wanted to freeze the motion of the Devil's Club leaves just below my camera - shooting with a 24mm TSE lens to get all in focus simultaneously. What I ended up doing was to shoot the falls at a low ISO, then I cranked the ISO up to 1600 (on the 5D MKII, that actually works remarkably well!) to freeze the motion of the broad leaves of the Devil's Club. I then blended both images in Photoshop, and despite the breeze blowing the leaves, I then obtained a crystal clear image with water streaming over the falls, and the plant leaves frozen in motion at a high shutter speed. It worked incredibly well.
It is interesting to try to keep track of all of the variables we can now work with, and to keep in mind that higher ISO shots generally have lower latitude.
I also find that sometimes I use "extreme bracketing" to cover a tremendous range of intensities in an image - and capture an image closer to what I recalled seeing.
We are so lucky to have the gear we now have!
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