Sean Bagshaw Outdoor Exposure Photography

Images from the edge

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Beautiful Light, Northern California Coast Range

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Lupine and oak in the coast range of Northern California.

I just finished reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book, "The Overstory" and am having a hard time getting trees out of my mind. Having grown up in southern Oregon, oak trees are some of my favorite trees as they remind me of running through the woods in childhood. I return to this tree regularly for inspiration.  The blooming lupine, lush green grass and a sun-star on this particular visit was a combination I couldn't pass up.

If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. When you're done, research it online if you need help with some obscure plot points, because that little step blew my mind and made me love the book just that much more...

Beautiful Light Print, Northern California

El Chalten, The Smoking Mountain (Mount Fitz Roy)

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Daybreak on El Chaltén (also known as Mount Fitz Roy). The name means Smoking Mountain in Tehuelche, the language of the ancient nomadic hunters who lived in this part of Patagonia. They named it so because the mountain is almost always shrouded in cloud. I spent three days here back in 2016 with Christian Heeb and our group and was fortunate to have clear views each day. But this, the morning of our second day, was by far the most spectacular!

Canon 5DsR, polarizer, 24-70mm lens at 53mm, 1/200 second, f/11, ISO 400. I had to really scramble for this photo. We had been hiking around photographing all morning and were just getting back to the car when the lenticular cloud formed and the first band of light hit the foreground. I knew it would all be lit up in seconds, so I bumped up the ISO, ran to this spot and clicked off a couple of exposures handheld.

Fitz Roy Print, Patagonia, Argentina

Fitz Roy Stock Image, Patagonia, Argentina

Two Guardians

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Those two trees you can just see out on this point on the Oregon coast apparently have a name...The Two Guardians. It may be just the one guardian by now since the tree on the right is leaning out off the crumbling cliff at a precarious angle. On this particular morning, I was more captivated by the fascinating eroded sandstone shapes in the foreground which were illuminated and complimented by the fiery sunrise.

©2013, Canon 5D Mk3, 16 mm, polarizer, 10 seconds, f/18, ISO 100.

Tangerine Dream – Badwater, Death Valley

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Tangerine

The rain this winter allowed a thin layer of water to pool on the Badwater salt flat in Death Valley National Park. Zack, David and I spent the twilight hour exploring the patterns, reflections and glowing light one evening on our recent road trip. The next day my shoes were completely encased in a crusty rime of salt. For scale, if you look closely you may see another photographer out in the water toward the horizon.

Canon 5DMK4, 22mm, polarizer, 1 second, f/16, ISO 100. The expanded dynamic range of the 5DMK4 allowed me to capture this scene in a single exposure quite easily. The dynamic range wasn’t extreme, but too much to get it all in one exposure with good shadow quality on the 5DMK3.

Red Racer – Death Valley National Park

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Red RacerI finally made it out to the Racetrack in Death Valley while road-tripping with the boyz a couple weeks ago. Super clear skies were calling out for a starry night shot. Zack and I spent a chilly hour or two experimenting with different light painting techniques. The one I liked the most was the red “night vision” setting on Zack’s headlamp. We selected this particular sailing stone because it had a wonderful S-shaped track. For the land exposure, we set the long exposure timer for 4 minutes, carefully walked the track with the light pointed at the ground, groped our way back to the cameras in complete darkness…and then adjusted our technique and repeated. We had lots of screw ups. For developing I blended one 2-minute natural starlight exposure together with the red, light painted exposure. The starry sky is from a third25-secondd exposure to avoid star-trailing.

If you aren’t familiar with the Racetrack or how the famous “Sailing Stones” move around the playa check out THIS VIDEO.

Canon 5D4, Rokinon 14mm lens. Natural light exposure: 2 minutes f/5.6, ISO 6400. Light painted exposure: 4 minutes, f/5.6, ISO 1600. Sky exposure: 25 seconds, f/2.8, SIO 6400.

Red Velvet – Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

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Red-Velvet
Working on some images to submit for a book on Costa Rica gave me a chance to revisit photographs that were forgotten in my archives from several years ago. This image of a moody sunset at Playa Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica apparently fell through the cracks the first time around. I remember the sky that night was ominous and mesmerizing. I took advantage of the darkness to take a 25-second exposure and create the velvety surf.

Canon 5D3, 24mm, polarizer, F/18, ISO 100. Two exposures, 2.5 seconds and 25 seconds, blended for dynamic range and water texture.

Ghost Forest – Torres del Paine National Park, Patagonia, Chile

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Ghost-Forest

Fires have burned large sections of Torres del Paine NP in the last 20 years, many of them apparently set off accidentally by backpackers. I never like to see beautiful landscapes burn, but fire is part of the ecological process and these burned out trees do create impact and help tell this particular visual story.

Canon 5DsR, 25mm, Polarizer. 1/10 second @ f/18, ISO 100.

Peeling The Moon

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0581166-20091026-Edit
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

Never Hurts to Check

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Bandon Beach, OregonIt never hurts to check back through old images. I apply a fairly rigorous editing process to my images. After a shoot I download the images and then begin the deleting. Using Adobe Lightroom I first find any images that are out of focus, poorly exposed, etc. and delete them. Next I go through and flag all the images that I think may have some promise. Looking at just the flagged images I now go through again and give each image a rank from one to three stars, with three stars being the top level images. Finally I give color codes to some of the stared images, red to indicate a prime select and yellow to indicate a basic stock image. Once this is done I am now able to quickly get back to the best images from a shoot as well as sort them by their potential future use.

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

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Intimate Painted Hills
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.

Photo Tip: Blurry Trees

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Much of my photography is of the greater landscape and I’m often trying to present sweeping vistas with sharp detail. However, I also like to photograph more intimate scenes and abstracts. One of my favorite abstract techniques is motion blur. This can be achieved a few different ways and is a particularly good technique for emphasizing leading lines in a photo while smoothing out distracting elements. The final result can often look more like a painting than a photograph.

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.

Blue October Sea

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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.

Photo Journal: Photographing Double Falls

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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

Featured Photo: Land of Pure Sunlight

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land of pure sunlight

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.

Featured Photo: Grove of Shadow and Light

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redwood grove

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.