Let the light be right

In browsing through my images from last week's Moab trip I came across a set of images that are almost exactly 1 day apart but are framed almost identically. One taken several hours into the day in relatively harsh daylight and the other shortly after sunrise in soft light. Both were taken looking out from Dead Horse Point towards Canyonlands National Park. In the first, we visited it with the group to scout it out. The next day, I was the only one to rise in time and drive over to catch the sunrise. It had looked like it would snow that morning and be cloudy all around so everybody had more or less decided to stay in. However, I could see stars when around 4 am I stepped outside the hotel, so I set off by myself and had an awesome morning.

On the left, the daylight image. On the right, the sunrise image softened even more by the presence of clouds. The moral of this story of course is that getting up early pays...

I'll blog about the Dead Horse Point sunrise sometime later. In the mean time, here is a link to the above sunrise image in it's full glory.

A few seconds difference

These two images were taken last Saturday evening in Mayflower Gulch (click for a bigger version, return by hitting the back button). They are only 37 seconds apart. You can see that it pays to pay attention to the light in landscape photography because of the very different moods in the two images. There was only a window of good light of a few minutes that evening where the setting sun shone through between two layers of clouds.


I have some more images from this little outing that I'll post later. There are a lot of flowers in the high country this year.

What a difference a day makes

Two days ago, I was with my wife and kid at a lake where we hiked a little and I took some photographs. It was in the middle of a snowstorm and I needed extreme white balance values to get correct color. So yesterday, as I saw that the sky was clear and the sunset would give nice color I went there again to make photos at more or less the same time. The differences are astounding. Where two days ago this very distinctive tree looked like this:

Yesterday it looked like this:

Quite different indeed.

Another example (bigger version in the link):

Whereas yesterday:

This just illustrates how important it is to be somewhere on the right time to catch the light and the feeling of a place. You can see more images from this place in the flickr set here.