Category: landscape

Studying Time

I’ve been studying time in photography, experimenting with different things for over a year. How to capture time in one image? What if images from multiple times are combined into one? What’s behavior of different moving subjects over time? This requires a lot of patience (which to be honest I’m lacking) keeping camera in exactly one position recording world around it at it changes.

The best part of it is a suspense waiting for images to be processed and see the end result. The worst part is not knowing if any of it will be any good.

So far I have had lots of ideas with little success. Finally, it starts yielding some interesting results. Look at those clouds: don’t you like the painting like look of them? That’s no painting though. It is a lot of images taken over time with camera stationary in the same place on a tripod. Good thing there were no cars on this rural road that gave me enough time to make it.

Snow in the Palouse: Steptoe Butte

The whole area has frozen. My car was the only one on the roads making a new track in fresh snow. After driving around at the bottom of a fog ocean I drove to the top of Steptoe butte. As I were reaching the top I emerged from fog. The whole landscape opened up to my view: it was an  endless sea of clouds with peaks of mountains like islands seen on horizon.

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. Snow sparkling in the sun. Roads disappearing in the fog. Pristine white fields in small openings of white fog.

It was just too much beauty around my senses were exhausted. I was taking photos seemingly random, on instinct. I need it a rest.

Back from the top I dove my submarine back into the ocean of fog. Bitter cold but happy.

Snow in the Palouse: White Out

The next morning I woke up early to photograph sunrise. I had a place and scene in mind. Except as always the Nature has its own plans. Everything was still covered in thick fog. it make everything feel more enclosed putting white wall around. Everything was white, fresh and clean: snow on the ground and fog in the air.

There was no hint of sunrise. The fog was too deep for that. So I started to photograph snow in the Palouse in fog. As I was going thru the day my image became more and more abstract and the theme has become clearer: white out.

The whole area looked frozen and deserted. My car was the only one on the roads making a new track in fresh snow.

White out – the land is white and the sky is white. There is only thin line where land meets the sky. And nothing disturbs the quiet stillness of it all.

Where land meets the sky

Where land meets the sky

Where land meets the sky

Snow in the Palouse: The Night I Came

Snow in the Palouse, cold, windy… I went there again to see it, to photograph it, to experience it. And I was blown away by the beauty of it again.

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I arrived there at night on the longest night in the northern hemisphere. Most of the drive was in the dark and most of it was snowless. But the temperature drop was noticeably. As I was driving I was watching outside temperature on my car dashboard. I wanted to know when it drops below freezing to drive slower in case there are ice patches on the road. As I got to the crossing over Columbia river I was watching in awe how temperature was dropping down another degree every 10-20 seconds. It was unbelievable: how temperature could go from +4 to –7C in a span of just a few kilometers.

As I was getting closer to Colfax the snow started showing up. It was getting thicker and thicker. It felt like the Palouse was the only place that had snow, isolated island of snow surrounded by bare land. And it was all in deep fog. It was beautiful. I just had to stop and photograph.

I stopped at the entrance to one of the side roads that was covered with too much snow, not drivable. I went to photograph a small farm by the road. I stayed close to the main road as snow was too deep to wonder off. I was taking picture after picture with long exposure. A snow plow truck passed by cleaning snow from the road. Smashing me with the powerful spray of wet snow and dirt. I was not angry, I was strangely calm, nothing could disturb me soaking up the beauty around me. And after all I saw his tracks – he tried to drive the truck farther away from me but splashing me was unavoidable.

I spent several more hours just driving around looking at all of it, enjoying all of it. Finally, past midnight I stopped, climbed into the back of my car and fell asleep, tired and happy.

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ETTR or Try it before you buy it

There has been a lot of discussion of ETTR (Expose To The Right) on photographic blogs, websites and all kind of other publications. With this method you expose as high as possible with histogram touching the right edge. Here is one article that goes in depth on this method: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml.

The idea is that this produces maximum quality digital negative. Often this produces image that looks overexposed and later in post-production supposedly you can lower exposure to get naturally looking image but with higher quality.

While it looks reasonable that this may reduce signal-to-noise ratio, I noticed that this results in images looking too flat and with washed out colors. On my last trip I took two images one normally exposed and one exposed to the right. The scene is extremely simple which helps illustrate the difference in result. In post-production I reduced exposure of the ETTR image to match exposure of the first image. No other adjustments were done to either image. Here are results side-by-side:

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Guess which one is which? The one on the left is taken with normal exposure, the one on the right is taken with ETTR and then reduced back exposure to match exposure of the first image. As you can see ETTR image results in less color and less contrast, i.e. lower dynamic range. To confirm this here are the corresponding histograms:

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Just by looking at histograms you can see that the range of tonality is greater in normally exposed image as well as greater separation of colors. This seems to disprove the statement that the article I linked at the beginning does that ETTR image has greater dynamic range.

I don’t know about you by I’d rather expose right than expose to the right. This is just another case to demonstrate my main principle in photography: do what you like, what feels right to you. And no matter how convincing a new idea you read somewhere sounds, try it before using it, get your own feeling for it. If you really like it, use it, just make sure it is because you got your own understanding of it not because someone else told you to do it.

UPDATE: I’ve got requests to include original ETTR image with histogram. Here it goes.

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Capture

On a Foggy Night

For a week the area where I live had fog. Every day. Every night. Whole day. Whole night. It was beautiful, smooth, thick, milky white fog. I love fog. It adds mystery and depth to everything.

Unfortunately, I was busy whole week and could not get out to photograph. But one night I just dropped everything I did, picked up my camera and went out on a walk around the neighborhood. While I may have not done any greatest hits, I still enjoyed reconnecting with what I love using even smallest moments I can carve out of sometimes busy days.

Here is in some sense a good representation of my suburban neighborhood and probably many other neighborhoods across US: proudly displaying their flag on their home, keeping cars outside despite having garage because the garage is filled with things that they still cherish, things that they find it hard to part but which they will unlikely to ever use again.

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Pastel Colors of Fall

Finally, the colors of fall foliage is behind us. It is my favorite time of year. For photographers October is like August for farmers – time to collect the harvest. The reason I’m saying “finally” is because I felt burnt out pushing myself too much trying to capture it a s much as possible. For some time I tried to keep up with post-processing but then gave up – I was not getting enough sleep that way. And that was combined with two more art shows that I needed to get ready for.

Now, when fall foliage is almost gone in Pacific Northwest and my last art show of this year is behind me, I can catch up on post-processing, blogging, planning.

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For a few months I’ve been fascinated with pastel colors. I like their subdued soft feel. So, this fall I’ve done several images with intent of having pastel colors.

An important thing about photographing color is to be clear that the subject of a photo is color, not individual branches, leaves or trees. To me it means getting rid of all those details in an image.

One technique to do that is to take photos with long exposure handheld and intentionally move camera in some direction. It seems to work the best when moving camera along visually strong lines such as tree trunks or branches.

On Fire
On Fire

Fall Butterflies
Fall Butterflies

Fall Forest
Fall Forest

Happy Halloween

I took this photo in the Palouse back in August this year but was holding it back to use it to wish everyone a happy Halloween. Enjoy this image of an abandoned house on one very stormy summer night. It looks very much like a haunted house.

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Breaking Patterns

Do you know what fascinates me in my visual world? Patterns. Here is an image I made last weekend, when I was passing by a small island of young aspen trees:

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Do you know what fascinates me even more? Breaking patterns. Just seconds after I made the image above I noticed another island of young aspen trees with one tree bent and still having leaves breaking the pattern of bare trunks:

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Imaginary Worlds: Soothing Moon

While Sun for me is something strong and powerful, Moon is soothing and quite. It is on the other side of the world. Dreamy and sleepy. What can be better than sit at night covered with a cozy blanket looking at shimmering surreal world in a moonlight.

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