Opportunistic Photography
Composition, composition, composition
Sometimes a composition can’t be supported by a particular camera or lens
Unsettled Weather is the BEST – clouds!
Wide views / people / water features
Look at edges – lakes, mountains, trees
But what does it really take to get a good picture – it’s not the camera it’s the operator. It is helpful to have unsettled weather – solid sun is good and cloudy sucks, but broken clouds are the best. Getting the edges right … you are trying to tell a story, if possible.
The photo that started it all for me… Sawtooth 2007
I did hiking in the Boy Scouts for a few years – nothing like these hikes – then stopped for many, many years. But my daughter asked me to join her for a hike in the sawtooth mountains in Idaho in 2007 and I got the bug. Unsettled weather and a perfect spot for the camp. It was the start for me to get serious about hiking and taking photos.
If I were to take this photo today I would have the whole lake in the picture and more of the sky. But you can see what caught my eye. This was a jpeg photo and not RAW so the cloud detail has been lost. Still, Alpine Lake in the Sawtooth mountains is pretty special!
Camera Settings
(Not easy to set on an iPhone)
Settings for digital cameras
Fixed shutter (my go-to is 1/300sec), let the iso and aperture float!
Bracket (±2 stops) if tough to get right exposure
Zoom / focus / frame for composition
The more I use a good camera, the more I find out how much you blur due to hand holding the camera. It takes a very high shutter speed to avoid pixel smearing especially at long focal lengths. So my main settings for the camera is 1/300th of a second and let the camera decide on the other settings. I move off this ALL the time, but that’s the starting setting. The Fuji lets me see these quickly and easy to change them. Sometimes you can tell that the camera is going to have trouble getting a good exposure, so I bracket – again, something easy to do on the Fuji camera.
This is Marie Lake from Sheldon Pass on the John Muir Trail. Multiple shots made into a panorama all with the primary settings.
I can zoom into this picture and see LOTS of detail in the trees on the lake. We camped at this lake – LOTS of mosquitos there. You can imagine how much I enjoyed the mosquitos…
My Go-To Shot
Panoramic created in LightRoom
So I have found I have a go-to shot and that is the Lightroom panorama. I take a batch of pictures and let the computer program stitch them together to make one photo. It does an amazing job of taking a wide range of exposures to make a consistent picture with bright sunlight to shadows. Here is a set of photos from Aloha Lake in Desolation Wilderness near lake Tahoe.
Together it makes for a really nice panorama.
Off trail in the high sierra with Jen and Patrick
Observation point in Zion National Park.
Darwin Canyon in the High Sierras. Notice this is over 180° side to side – from the sun to sun on the hills.
Moon Shots
- Best at moonrise/set
- Reflected light from moon is VERY bright compared to night
- iPhone will fail
There are some specialty pictures that seem to come up time and again, one of these is the moon. This is another time when an iPhone is a little underwhelming to get a good shot. First of all, timing is everything. You need to be at the right place at the right time. There is an app called “Photo Pills” and it is a GREAT way to find the time and status of just about everything having to do with the sky. And the best use of the augmented reality feature and I really use it!
It’s hard to match the light of the ground to the reflected light of the moon – a photographic challenge.
This was a moonrise taken from Grouse Lake in Kings Canyon National Park. Ultimately I decided
This was the right photo to choose. The right place at the right time with the right lens… Did I say luck played a role?? I should say that.
1/60 f5.6 ISO 128000
— 5 Stops —>
1/60 f5.6 ISO 5000
-2 Stops —>
1/60 f5.6 ISO 1250
— 2 Stops —>
1/60 f5.6 ISO 320
— 3 Stops —>
1/60 f20 ISO 200
About an 12 stop range…
Here is what you are dealing with if you don’t get the timing right. This was past sunset, but still some indirect light on the hills. The moon is just too damn bright compared to the hills. The right exposure for the moon was 10 stops away from the right exposure for the hills. The optical blooming from the moon didn’t allow me to do an HDR bracket reconstruction.
Not my favorite, but not a bad final composition Moonrise over Wanda Lake on the JMT
Sometimes moonshots are unexpected. This is a panoramic picture taken in the sawtooth mountains in Idaho. Really beautiful lakes, (click) but I noticed something on the shore. Zoom in with the 135mm lens and take a picture
WorkFlow
So let’s turn to Workflow for pictures. I could probably spend lots of time describing my workflow and why I pick certain things to do. I really think keeping in RAW, renaming all imports with a consistent naming convention and saving to a logical place year after year is the most important aspects of my workflow.
I do use photoshop on occasion, but it’s really a rare event.
Going through thousands of photos, combining many into panoramic pictures, and finally selecting the few good ones just takes time and energy. It’s good to have a nice place to work and you need a fast computer.
55” UHD HDR Display, MacBook Pro 1TB-SSD, 10TB attached Hard Drives
And a big display.
While you can use a small display to do your work, there is nothing like a large screen to see all the flaws and make editing decisions. I’ve been using a UHD calibrated display for a few years now and I will never go back. I don’t have the latest generation of MacBook, but it’s fast – and I use it all the CPU cycles!
Very few need the added horsepower of PhotoShop, but some do … in fact let’s look at a few of these special cases…
Sometimes there’s no place / time to set up a tripod
You just fix it in post! Not perfect, but no one notices the problems.
Or when you have a depth of field problem. My friends in focus but not the background. Fix it in post and combine images. Makes for a better picture.
Precipice Lake on the High Sierra Route
Lakes are always attractive. All edges of the lake are visible. I think this is my favorite lake in all the sierra. This is about 20 miles in on the High Sierra Route from Sequoia National Park to the top of Mt. Whitney.
Night Shots
You need a tripod, a camera with full manual settings
The app PhotoPills is GREAT for planning and determining settings
I have a fascination with night photography in the wilderness. The advantage of limited light pollution from towns and the high altitude just calls out for photos. But when you are hiking, going to bed early is a reality. Staying up much past sunset is a challenge. We are tired! 8pm bedtime is a reality!
But if you do stay up or get up in the middle of the night you can get some really great photos. You are up to pee anyway, might as well take a picture!
In general the moon is your enemy for star photos. Use the PhotoPills app to find out whats in the sky and where it will be. You can also get exposure times for what you want to get. I have set a 2am alarm clock to go out and get pictures (and pee). Remember it may be below freezing outside in the summer at altitude. You may fog up the lens!
15 seconds f/3.5 18mm ISO 8000 8:40pm
Here is a milky way picture. The light in the valley is a town many, many miles away. I could not see it with the naked eye when I took the picture.
20 x 30 seconds (Total 15 minutes) f/4 24mm ISO 1000 10 pm
Or here is a fun one when the moon helps! This is Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Yosemite National Park. It was taken in moon light that makes the scene look like daylight. Well except for the stars rotating around the north star. Both waterfalls running – proving that they don’t turn them off at night! If you look closely you will see the track of a satellite going past and it’s also fascinating seeing the different colors of all the stars. Makes you want to learn more about astronomy.
More WorkFlow
Taking good photos is one thing, but finding and organizing them is another thing. Best if you have some OCD tendencies. I am paranoid that I will loose pictures. I might be able to use the cloud as another way to back up my pictures, but I’m up to 4TB of photos to store and it’s just cheaper to buy a new hard drive every 3 or 4 years and store the old drives at friends houses.
I have two complete archives physically separated. I carry my current albums on my internal drive of my laptop and that includes this year’s folder, best of, and any special event (like a hike) folder.
I can get to photos from the web on any devices (and so can you).
My folder structure is straight forward. Year followed by event name. I have one folder for general each year. Last year’s general photos took up 228GB of space. A 5TB drive costs $120, so who cares?
But after you capture and process pictures, it does no good if you can’t see or share them. I generally don’t print pictures any more. I use them as screen savers on my home TV system and my laptop. And I share one-on-one from my tablet or phone. I feel pretty good about getting my pictures to where they are seen.
My trip off-trail last year is a good example of what happens to my pictures. Again, I could spend an hour talking about this slide so the key is that I took 1,500 pictures in 7 days (went through 1.5 batteries) and ended up with 26 best of pictures and two of them made the cut to my instagram feed. Filtering is everything. One of these pictures
From that hike, are the Bear Lakes – another beautiful place in the sierras. Did you see Pat and Scott in the photo? They blend in with their stylish outfits.
I generally make a landing page on my website for these event hikes and other events in my life. A few pictures are posted here with links to more pictures. I also include details of the hike itself – miles and altitude information. Simple way to track my pictures.
Pretty Pictures
And then there are just some nice pictures. This is from a hike to Rainbow Bridge on Lake Powell. It was in one of the canyons and it’s all about the texture and colors of the sand and reflected colors of the rocks.
Or the Havasu Falls at the Supai Indian Reservation downstream from the Grand Canyon national park.
And finally sunset at Grouse Lake in Kings Canyon National Park.