landscape photography

An Odd Start

Death Valley is a common target of landscape photographers, and it’s a wonderful laboratory of earth processes, holding magnificent dunes and vast alluvial fans, along with the lowest elevation bottomlands in the US. It is as unforgiving in environment as it is in testing a newbie photographer. I shot this at 1/8000 at f/3.5 ISO 800, and I have no idea why…

It is difficult to imagine, over a year later, not processing images, letting JPEG settings baked into whatever digital camera I was using dictate the photographic output. It has long been so cool to have immediate access to images, accepting that they looked “good enough”, that I never thought to concern myself with the fact that my composition did not match my impression of the scene or subject. I guess I did not even think to think that I could alter that – it had not even crossed my mind. I was mostly doing basic documentary photography any way, but can I not do that better?

In the early days of my landscape photography journey, everything seemed new and it was all an experiment and I was seduced by the joy of learning—I still am. I had been scheming my move into “better” photography with Daron, a friend and research colleague, who’s photos I enjoyed. Passing through his place in Las Vegas, Nevada, I showed him my new camera, along with a few photos from my recent Hope Valley excursion. He immediately explained a little bit about RAW files and post-processing in Lightroom. He was not deep into processing yet either, but he was at least one big step ahead of me.

Odd Start Collection

I dove into my camera’s settings, shifted the file type to RAW, and headed home with the intent of downloading Lightroom, ordering a tripod, and continuing the journey. But first a stark, harshly lit road trip through Death Valley, Panamint Valley, and Owens Valley where—on the road to a project site I needed to visit—I jumped out of the truck to snap a few photos. I was so enthralled with taking a few RAW photos, thinking Daron had turned me on to something magically important—I simply failed to consider basic camera settings and had some atrocious results. I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. It was a bright sun-drenched day and my ISO seems to have been stuck on 800 and my aperture drifted toward wide open. This combination, therefore, required a super-fast shutter speed and produced rather poor depth-0f-field. I had absolutely no experience with post-processing so I wasn’t pushing things for some kind of effect, I just didn’t know what I was doing. The images here show some of my early processing; creatively learning Lightroom and Photoshop (the common tools of post-processing) is its own journey, and I had not started down the long road yet.

I have cropped this to salvage something from a terribly noisy and overly blue scene of the alluvial fans of eastern Panamint Valley. Our photographic journey can be a very long road.

If I’m going to photograph alluvial fans emanating dramatically from the Sierran mountain front, I may want to compose for the fan. It is completely lost here. But at least I’d found the ISO button and dropped it down to a more suitable ISO200.

Odd Start Collection

I do like a few of the compositions I captured on the drive, but only because they emphasize the physical geography and geomorphic processes—here, the aeolian dust of Death Valley and the alluvial fans of Panamint and Owens Valleys—that I am most interested in photographing for documentary and creative purposes. There are some long roads in the images, maybe a conscious suggestion of my journey. I would like to find compositions and conditions that portray these interesting and dramatic features of the Great Basin (and elsewhere), as I continue my scientific investigation of past and present landscapes. But first, I need to take some basic steps of better photographic technique, composition, and practice. A lot of practice, with the camera and in my processing.

Keep going.

2017.01.01

On my first day practicing Landscape Photography, I had no idea what Lightroom was, and I shot only JPEG like I had with every other point-and-shoot digital I had owned. My first attempts at Lightroom were pretty bad, and maybe some dramatic clouds would have saved me from the unsubtle vignette. Plenty of room for learning…

First Day Collection

It seemed I was the only car in the darkness, on Highway 89 in the pre-dawn of New Years Day, the first day of 2017. I had packed my snowshoes and was looking forward to my first outing with my new camera, the capable-looking Canon 80D that I had recently picked up at Gordon’s Photos in Carson City. Sometime over the past few months, in the field with my S110 point-and-shoot, I felt the urge to up my game in landscape photography. I knew early morning light in the mountains helped the magic happen, and I was ready to kick off the new year by nurturing something that felt like a growing passion. I have always enjoyed dark early morning highways. The dashed yellow lines ticking into the high-beams with a freshness of recent awakening; very much the opposite of driving into night after a long day of highway.

A pre-dawn dashboard, a dark roadway split by a high-contrast yellow line, and a travel mug of home-brewed coffee, these easily entice me to get up and get out—so here I am. Driving past Woodfords, California, along the West Fork of the Carson River, climbing into Hope Valley. I was headed to Red Lake at the valley’s southern end. I would snowshoe a short segment of the historic California Trail, climbing toward Carson Pass, to overlook the frozen lake with a sunlit view of the Carson Range with its three-pointed crown at the peaks of Freel, Jobs, and Jobs Sister.

Still, not another car. And that’s probably a good thing given that anyone I encounter may simply be driving off their New Years’ shenanigans on a swervy mountain highway. A bad way to start 2017 for both of us. But I make the Red Lake turn-off below the switchbacks to Carson Pass and the tires crunch into a snow-rutted parking area at the dam. The wind is up as sunrise approaches and I gear up against the cold as much as possible then strap on the snowshoes. The excitement of my new camera warms my hopes for the coming light. My excitement, however, soon turns to puzzlement. This is more difficult than I thought.

The sunrise highlights the Carson Range and nearer summits, but they are light-years away in a relatively wide lens—I thought we used these for landscapes? The sky is perfectly clear—where is the alpen glow and drama that I see on all the calendars? My very necessary gloves (it was 4° F at sunrise) make some of the camera controls a bit fiddly—gloves off, gloves on, gloves off, gloves on—and I’m not at all clear what all the controls on the 80D do. I should have taken some more time to get acquainted with the camera in the warmth of home. My photos on the back of the camera don’t look any different than the photos I took on my point-and-shoot, maybe worse. On the other hand, it is so good to be out here in the brisk, quiet ring of a cold wind on a mountainside. That’s the thing that resonates. I can learn the camera, I hope, and I’m suddenly very curious and intrigued as I begin to remember a few things that go into capturing images. This is fun.

I wanted to think this was merely the tip of a monstrous pine, but the wind-blown grass gave it away. The light is not good, but I can see I was composing around the negative space. I like that.

On the edge of the forest I heard voices, Slavic voices. I stepped onto the ice and was sure I had gotten lost. A Siberian lake maybe? Where’d I go off trail? Just the boys out for some ice-fishing.

Is this some dramatic light? Not really. And trying to make it so in Lightroom ruins the JPEG. Don’t do this. -Pickett Peak east of Hope Valley.

Learning a little, bit by bit. Telephoto compression can be nice. And, wow, I can push a button and get black-and-white. Seems silly, but I remember laughing out loud. Embarassingly late to the show.

I’d seen the glassy, moody water and knew how it was done. But you aren’t going to get there hand-held, especially after my morning espresso. Doesn’t mean you can’t try.

I simply liked this ice…

I shot this at f/11, trying to get the colors to stand out. That’s not how it works, I’m thinking. I still have trouble gauging the aperture settings for a particular depth of field, even though I understand it a bit more (I think). What I got right here: f/11 kept all the pine needles in focus (I often get too shallow when opening up) and the longer focal length softened the background nicely. What I got wrong: lines going every which way with needles against grass, but…

Looking back on it now—I’m revisiting these first trips and journal entries several months later—my complete inexperience, with the camera and what most photographers take for granted in post-processing, is almost funny. I did not own a tripod. I did not know what a RAW image file was. I did not know that processing software like Lightroom existed. I could not have explained the exposure triangle of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed to anyone, even though I had taken some nice pictures in the past, relying heavily on “P-mode” and simple speed adjustments. I gradually thawed during this first, cold morning, learning by watching the results on the camera back, and captured at least one image that still makes me smile.

Running Man. This one I still love. Great shapes, good detail, and soft background. Got lucky just walking back to the car.

First Day Collection

We all start somewhere. I emphasize that it was those few hours in the early morning, wandering in the forest, across the frozen lake, and along the shining river, while kindling the possibilities in the camera (could be any type of camera) in my hand, that transformed me ever so slightly into a chaser of light.

Keep going…

Oh, I can process images?

First Day Out – Hope Valley, CA