Wishing you wonder, mystery, adventure and good light in the New Year!  Thanks for being a part of Outdoor Exposure Photography!

Peeling the Moon - Cracked desert mud near Escalante, Utah.

David Cobb and I came across this cracked, peeling mud layer in a wash while hiking in the desert along Hole in the Wall Rd in Utah. We were drawn, not only to the curled and cracked patterns, but the pock marks that must have been left by a rain shower.  Without the cracks it would be hard to tell apart from a high altitude view of the moon’s surface.

There was harsh 10 o’clock light at the time, so I shaded the area with my jacket and noticed a great warm glow on the curled portions which was reflecting from the brightly lit bank of the wash. There was also a very slight blue cast in the flat sections which were reflecting the sky. The RAW file has pretty low contrast, but after working a bit in both RAW conversion and in PS to draw out the histogram and increase the contrast, this is the result. I often look for low contrast scenes to photograph knowing that the effect of enhancing the contrast later will give results that I find visually exciting.

Canon 5DII, 24-105mm f/4L IS, 1/6 sec @ f/22, ISO 100

However, I need to stay in the practice of going back and looking through the images that didn’t receive a star or a color label from time to time.  Often I will find a great image that slipped through the cracks or that I had a bias against at the time, but looks more appealing once I have distanced my mind from it a bit.  The photo above of one of the rock formations and beach near Bandon is one such photo.  When I took the photo I was hoping for a brilliant sunrise, so when the dawn came with gray conditions I was disappointed, but still dutifully took a few images.  My lack of enthusiasm for the day affected how I saw this image when I was first editing the group of images it was in and it didn’t make the cut.  Nearly a year later I came across it while searching for different beach images.  Now that I have had time to distance my mind from the fact that there wasn’t a colorful sunrise the image really stands out to me.  Now I rather like the dramatic, dark and somewhat ominous feel and muted tones.  I have also moved the image quite a bit higher in my ranking system.

Intimate Painted Hills

The painted hills in central Oregon is one of my favorite places in the state.  The Painted Hills are located in the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument along Hwy 26 just west of Mitchell.  Even though the hills don’t cover much area, the patterns and shapes and the way light plays across them is visually absorbing.  I often take wide landscapes, but for this image I decided to zoom in for an intimate and abstract study.  When photographed like this, the hills really do look painted…or rather, they create a photograph that looks like a painting.  I’ll have to print this large on canvas and see how it looks.

I really like to use motion blur with trees that have staight trunks.  The technique is more an art than a science, so a lot of experimentation and throw away images are required to get something that I like.  I start by setting a relatively slow shutter speed and making a vertical pan (movement) with my camera.  I have found that shutter speeds between 1/4 of a second and 1/20 of  a second work best.  I move the camera up or down, in as straight a line as possible and depress the shutter release as the camera is moving.  At slower shutter speeds I pan slower and at faster shutter speeds I pan faster.  It is hard to know exactly what will be in the frame so I repeat the process over and over so that I will have many images to select from.  Panning the camera while it is on a tripod can help keep the motion steady and smooth, but also limits flexibility.

Physically panning the camera is often all I need to do to achieve the abstract look I’m going for.  Other times I selectively add more blur by using the Motion Blur filter in Photoshop (Filter>Blur>Motion Blur).  To do this I’ll create a duplicate layer of the background image and blur the duplicate.  Then I’ll add a layer mask to the blurred layer and paint with a black brush on the mask to bring through any detail from the original image that I want to keep.  This digital blurring technique can also be applied to images that were taken in focus without panning the camera.  Digital blurring often takes just as much trial and error as panning the camera.

Several of my favorite photographers have used these techniques to create some wonderful abstract images, including Jesse Spear, Eddie Soloway and William Niel.

From a trip to the southern Oregon coast with a group of Ashland photographers a couple of weeks ago.  I liked the barnacle patterns on this rock and spent some time working on longer exposures to capture some wave motion for an interesting middle ground.  As many of us who like to capture wave motion in our ocean photos well know, it is hard to get in the right position and still stay dry.  I ended up stranded on this rock for several wave cycles until the surf went back out enough for me to wade to shore…the surf here wasn’t dangerous, just wet.

On the hike back to the car a woman approached me on the beach and said, “are you Sean Bagshaw?”  I immediately wondered what I was in trouble for.  It turns out she was with someone in the group.  I had wandered off for quite a while and they were ready to go.  Since she was walking my way they asked her to have me get a move on.  Apparently they had told her I would be easy to spot because I would be carrying a tripod and most likely be wet up to the waist.  I hate being so predictable.

Canon 5D, 16-35mm f/2.8 L @ 28mm, 2 sec @ f/18 and ISO 50, 3 stop ND filter for longer exposure time.

This amazing location required a 4:00 AM wake-up and a cross country hike through grizzly country in the dark up on Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. It was well worth the effort. Streams cascading off all sides of a bowl shaped valley converge at this narrow slot in the rocks. During the summer, melt water flows off the canyon walls in several places creating four of five separate falls, but in the fall just the two main falls remain.

I first became aware of this waterfall from Galen Rowell’s classic photograph.  A couple of years ago it ran on the cover of Outdoor Photographer Magazine and included the following caption: “Light conditions like this are notoriously difficult to photograph.  The contrast between the sky and the shadowed ground is too much for film or an image sensor to handle.  At the time Rowell made this image, he used a split neutral-density filter to control the contrast.  If he was alive and photographing the same scene today, Rowell would have used a digital camera.  He’d have known that he could employ some sophisticated RAW-software techniques to double-process the image file.”

I took that advice and photographed the classic scene in two separate exposures, one for the sky and one for the dark foreground and then manually blended the two images in Photoshop to allow the entire range of light that I experienced to all be contained within a single image.

The magazine caption also noted the irony that in a location famous for being on the continental divide, a place where water usually flows in opposite directions, toward the east or the west, would also be a place where so many streams flow together.

Two exposure manual blend. Canon EOS 5D, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, 3 stop Sing-Ray split neutral density filter, circular polarizer, 3.2 sec @ f/10 (sky), 15 sec @ f/10 (fore ground), ISO 100

When I go out in search of colorful sunrises I am normally met by either complete cloud cover or complete blue sky (anyone else have that experience?). This photo falls into the latter category. However, the crystal clear spring air made for some great stretched out sunrise shadows and direct sun did a nice job of back lighting the new grass and blooming vetch. I like the drama that extreme lighting like this provides. There are a few strangely dark areas in the oak trees that are part of the original RAW files. There isn’t much data there, so I’m not sure how to deal with that.

Canon EOS 5D, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L lens, ISO 100, f/18, two different exposures blended manually in Photoshop to contain the wide dynamic range between the sun and the foreground.

William Neil has been working on a series for the past couple of years he calls “Impressions of Light” or something like that. He is trying to create unusual, impressionistic and intriguing visions of common outdoor photography subjects, something I’m also interested in. He uses a variety of camera techniques, one of which being slow shutter speed panning and/or zooming. A couple months back he had an amazing image in Outdoor Photographer that he took in a Yosemite redwood grove. It really struck a chord with me. This is my own attempt at something similar. It falls far short of Neil’s, but I like how the motion blur smooths out much of the distracting background forest clutter while emphasizing the lines, texture and lighting of the trees themselves. All the blur is in camera. In Photoshop I created several layers that were copies of the background image and then experimented with different combinations of blending modes (multiply, overlay, soft light) to increase color density, contrast and general mood.

On the popular photography website www.BetterPhoto.com my photo Crimson Gorge recently won the honor of Photo of the Day. Photo of the Day showcases outstanding pictures from BetterPhoto’s monthly photo contest and goes out by email to over 26,000 people!

You can read comments from BetterPhoto readers HERE.