Gold sunrise at Gunsight Butte

Gunsight Gold. Seen from Alstrom Point.
Stitched from 7 images, Nikon D600, Nikon 70-200 mm f/4.0 at 70 mm, f/4.0, 1/160s, ISO 100.

One of my many panoramic images that you can see here.

Purple Dawn at Alstrom Point

Purple Dawn. Alstrom Point. April 9 2014.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16mm, f/5.6, 30s, ISO 100.

I found this image hiding in my library. It is from a trip with photographer friends that I did in 2014 to Bisti Badlands, Alstrom Point, and White Pocket. On my way back I swung by Bryce Canyon and Calf Creek Falls. The above image had been lurking in my Lightroom catalog for quite a while, me not realizing the potential of the image. I think I now actually like it as one of the best images from that sunrise. This is a while before sunrise as you can see from the stars still being visible but a purple glow was on the clouds already and a yellow glow started at the horizon announcing the coming sunrise. If you want to see more pictures, here is an earlier blog post on this place.

On seas of calm

Sunset on the Great Sand Dunes, April 2015. I got sandblasted quite heavily on top of this dune and even though I was wearing many down layers and a good windshield, I still was colder than I often am on snow laden trips. Nevertheless, sunset on top of the dunes is still very much worth it and I highly recommend you try it if you get a chance.

On Seas of Calm. Nikon D600. Token 16-28 mm f/2.8 at f/16, 1/5s, ISO 100

A Dream sunrise

Last week, I went for a sunrise in Rocky Mountain National Park. The original plan was to go for sunrise at Lake Helene or Two Rivers lake to photograph sunrise on Notchtop. However those plans were scuttled due to a miscommunication with the friend that was coming with me. We both thought the other was picking us up. So we arrived too late to get to Helene. Due to this delay, we decided to divert to Dream Lake for sunrise, which you can easily get to in half an hour or so. It looked like it was going to rain and overcast completely. Luckily right at sunrise, an opening in the clouds at the horizon let through a spectacular sunrise.

This is looking back in the direction of the rising sun not long before sunrise. The glow is starting.

Ushering Dawn. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 1.6s, ISO 100.

A few minutes later an almost unearthly glow was starting on Hallett peak and Dragon Couloir. There was a strong breeze kicking up waves on the lake which gives the water a smoky appearance.

Dreams of Snakes. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 2.5s, ISO 100.

I also created a horizontal version of this image using another tree trunk as the foreground element.

Smoke on the water, fire in the ... . Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 1s, ISO 100.

A little later, the color got really intense and a few very short breaks in the wind allowed me to compose images that included a reflection. This was really quite spectacular. Very little editing went into these pictures. I did also move back a little bit to get some more quiet water.

The quiet. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 0.8s, ISO 100.

The color was changing rapidly at this point. This image has a somewhat more perfect reflection but the sky was already taking on more blues. The light was fading in and out all the time due to the patchy clouds on the horizon as you can see in the first image above.

Upside Down Dream. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 1.0s, ISO 100.

I also made a portrait version of this. I like both a lot. This one again has more direct light on the peaks compared to the previous shot

Reflection. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm at 16mm, f/16, 0.4s, ISO 100.

At this point, we moved on to Emerald, Hayiaha, Mills and more. On the way to Emerald. I came across a small strand of Aspen trees that was backlit and really glowed. This is a handheld shot.

Trees. Bigger and prints.
Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm at 28mm, f/11, 1/25s, ISO 100.

More tk.

Bender

A pipe in Cargèse, Corsica, FR. I really liked the color here with a simple complementary pair in the orange and blue.

Bend. Buy a print. On flickr. On Google+. On facebook.
Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 52mm, f/8.0, 1/30s, ISO 220

Up and Down - Standley Lake Reflection

One of the first 1000 images I took with my new D600. I am now at 6600 or so shutter events and had to clean the sensor for the second time.

Up and down. Buy a print. Flickr. Facebook. Google+.
Nikon D600. Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 24mm, f/11, 0.6s, ISO 100.

Silver city walls

These images were created in Silver City, New Mexico some time ago. Silver city has one of the best playgrounds you'll find anywhere around the area so if you find yourself in southwest New Mexico with kids, head to Silver City and find the playground. The town also has an older area with lots of interesting structures to photograph. Here are two images that I liked mostly because of the color and composition. Enjoy.


Guards. Buy a print.
Tech: Nikon D300, Nikon 18.0-55.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 at 30mm, f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 200
Same image on Flickr. Google+ post.


The telephone. Buy a print.
Tech: Nikon D300, Nikon 18.0-55.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 at 55mm, f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 200
same image on Flickr. Google+ post.

Ephemeral pool sunrise

Continuing on yesterday's theme, here is one of the ephemeral pothole pools on the White Rim at dawn. These potholes are very interesting in that they harbor extremely hardy life such as brine shrimp that can survive long periods of drought and resprout to life when there is some rain.


The eye - ephemeral pool in Canyonlands NP. Buy a print.
Assembled into ultrahigh resolution (50 MP) from 2 sets of 9 images each from a D300 with Nikkor 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 at 34 mm, f/16, 1/5s (exposed for the sky) and 2.5s (exposed for foreground)
Smugmug enlarge. Flickr page. Google+.

Lake Helene and Notchtop

I blogged a little about this trip before here, here, and here. This early morning hike was one of the most impressive I ever did. It was windy and miserably cold, but the experience was unforgettable. I try to do many trips like this but seldom all conditions arrange for a great sunrise where geography, clouds, and sun cooperate. When everything comes together it is truly magical. The images of this trip were for me so ingrained in my mind that it has taken me a while to show them on my blog. One of the ways I check out geography and sun is by using Stephen Trainor's outstanding The Photographer's ephemeris app (for iPad/iPhone here, for Macs/PCs here). I also use Google Earth. I had decided that Lake Helene would be nice with a view of Notchtop illuminated by the rising sun.


View Larger Map

This was also my first outing with my new F-stop Tilopa BC pack which I highly recommend. On to the photos! The following two I showed before but only as a quick comparison.

This is a few minutes before sunrise. Imagine the clouds flying by at very high speed because of the high wind and a blisteringly cold wind flowing over the frozen lake. I really like the composition of this with the rocks and structures in the ice which mirror in the mountain and in the clouds.


Blueness. Buy a print.
Technical data: high resolution image assembled from 9 images from Nikon D300, 18-55mm at 24 mm, f/16, 2.0s, ISO 200.
Here is a slightly different viewpoint done as a single image instead of a high resolution composite that you might find interesting.

These assembled images I create will easily print 8 feet high with impeccable detail. If you're interested in such prints contact me as they take some special care to do right. The standard sizes that my site offers will print gorgeous as is straight from my website.

Just a few minutes later the sun had come up revealing this:


The moment. Buy a print.
Technical data: high resolution image assembled from 9 images from Nikon D300, 18-55mm at 24 mm, f/16, 1/8s, ISO 200.

As you can see from the much 4 stops faster shutter, the intensity of this light is quite a difference bathing the entire scene in warm light.

I stayed around for a little longer finding different viewpoints such as this:

Head in the clouds. Buy a print.
Technical data: high resolution image assembled from 9 images from Nikon D300, 18-55mm at 24 mm, f/16, 1/13s, ISO 200.

and this:

I wonder. Buy a print.
Technical data: high resolution image assembled from 9 images from Nikon D300, 18-55mm at 24 mm, f/16, 1/13s, ISO 200.

At this point, I could hardly move my fingers anymore and I really had to get out of the wind. I haven't found a really good solution yet for gloves that allow me to control the camera but still keep my fingers warm.


This was truly an extraordinary morning. Hope you enjoy the images.

More fall color in Eldorado Canyon State Park

This image was taken two weeks ago in Eldorado Canyon State park (for earlier pictures from the same outing see here and here). This was quite a while after sunset while I was walking back to my car and the yellow trees were positively glowing.


Blast. Buy a print.
Boring technical data: Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16 mm at 11mm, ISO 200, f/11, 8.0 seconds. Two different developments in Lightroom of the image were combined in enfuse to balance sky and foreground.
Same image on Flickr. Google+ post.

Amazing sunrise on Sprague Lake

The following images are from a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park back in January. I was planning to hike up to one of the high mountain lakes from Bear Lake trailhead, but when I got to the trailhead early before sunrise it was blowing snow really hard up there and was dastardly cold. Not conditions in which you want to hike for a few hours and not get anything worthwhile. I waited for an hour or so drinking my coffee and eating some sandwiches to see whether the weather would let up. But it didn't and I decided to go back down. The clouds that the snow was dumping out were really only hanging on the peaks around the basin and going down I noticed that it was relatively clear around Sprague lake. Sprague Lake is a popular very short trail that you can hike around with kids and be back before the whining starts. In winter it offers nice views of the basin. I hiked up the lake and found a great position and some interesting structures in the snow and the sunrise was spectacular. These images are taken away from the basin that kept being shrouded in clouds.


Symmetry. Buy a print. Also on flickr.
Assembled from 9 images (3 rows of 3) at 50mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/20s


The wave. Horizontal crop of the above image. Buy a print.


Blobs. Buy a print.
Assembled from 9 images (3 rows of 3) at 50mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/20s


Red dawn. A little later the colors changed. Buy a print.
Assembled from 10 images (2 rows of 5) at 50mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/20s.

It was incredibly cold standing there in the blowing wind over the ice but undoubtedly better than up higher.

Yellow sunrise at Blue Lake

Stitched from 9 handheld images. 18-55mm at 18mm, f 8.0 1/80s ISO 100.
Buy a print of this image at smugmug.

This is a redo of an image I shot in 2008 at sunrise along the shores of Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. Truly an awe inspiring place. I could never get the yellow right in this image, which was just blindingly saturated in real life. On a whim I redid this using the v3 camera landscape profile for Lightroom and this is pretty much what I got. Stitched from 9 images. Added a slight amount of vibrance and clarity and there is a grad filter brightening the rocks and water as well as some curves work to add some contrast. Amazingly, the sRGB version you see here loses quite a bit of saturation from what I see on my wide gamut monitor. I'll put it on smugmug at some time too (the image is several 100 MB so this is only a low-res jpeg)

White Sands Yucca

One of the nice things about raw capture is that you can always go back later and redo your images using more modern processing tools. We have a very large print of an image I took on a family vacation to the South at White Sands National Monument hanging on our wall. It is a gorgeous image of a yucca in the white dunes in my not so humble opinion but color wise I always thought it was duller than we experienced the moment which was quite magical with gorgeous warm sunset light playing over the dunes and ripples in the sand. This turned the shadow areas on the white sand a gorgeous blue. Neither comes out very good in the print. So I dug up the harddrive that these older images are stored on and fired up Lightroom which has the references in its database to these older images. Typed in White Sands in the search box and poof there the images were. They were of course done in the old process in Lightroom and I was using the Adobe Standard profile. Users of Lightroom may know that this usually leads to dull color. Switching to the new process extracted significantly more detail, turning on automatic CA correction also helped, but mostly the image was helped by selecting the landscape profile for the camera. I also upped the exposure compensation a little, making the image more high key as appropriate. Exported the three photographs to 16-bit ppRGB tiff and stitched them in hugin. Below is the result as uploaded to flickr



The same yucca image (cropped differently) in the older treatment is here. The same cropping in the older treatment is on smugmug here, which is the print we have on our wall. I'll probably replace the smugmug image sometime soon with the new higher quality image. Even though it was a few years ago, this image feels much more like the experience we had trolling on the dunes that evening.

False Kiva

False Kiva is an extraordinary and more or less secret place in Canyonlands National Park. It is nestled in the side of a mesa rim in a just absoluteley amazing setting overlooking the White Rim and Green River. I visited this place last October on Hallow's eve. The next day, I was going to do white rim by bike with a group of friends, so I decided to camp in the one campground in the park the night before and do an evening shoot at False Kiva. The interesting thing about this archeological site is that its location is kept more or less secret by the park service. There are no signs and no designated trail. You can find GPS coordinates on the web, but those are basically useless as they are accurate but are simply lead you to the rim of the island in the sky right above the mesa, but no way of knowing or seeing what's below it, if you don't want to plummet to your death. So ignore the GPS coordinates. There are a few photography books that have instructions but the best way to figure out how to get there is to talk to a photographer that has been there. The hike is short and not very technical but there are some exposed spots. You start at a ditch that is not at all where the GPS coordinates would have you go, after a while, you hit the rim and swing around and go down a rocky path to somewhere below the Kiva and cross over on a bench that looks precarious and then climb up again, all the way not seeing where you are going. You just don't see the kiva from anywhere on the trail. Then you go over a hump and suddenly the Kiva lies before you overseeing a breath taking view. It's smaller than you would expect from some of the famous images taken of it.


Buy a print of this image.
Assembled from 2 sets of 15 images at 35 mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/50s and 1/10 assembled in hugin and stitched in hugin. Exposure blended using enfuse. This image will print wallsize with exquisite detail.

I shot some other viewpoints too of which I liked this vertical view:

Buy a print.
Assembled from 2 exposure sets of 9 images at 35mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/10s and 1/80s.

A tighter horizontal framing is here:

Buy a print.
Assembled from 2 exposure sets of 12 shots each at 35 mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/6s and 1/40s.

At the site is a little log book and a some explanation of what the archeologists think the site was used for. It certainly has some of the features of a kiva (the depression in the middle for the smoke blocker and such) but is quite different from other real kivas in the southwest. Regardless of what it meant to the people that lived here, this is a very worthwhile site to visit and it was quite an experience to be there all alone on Halloween. The contrast with the throng of photographers at Mesa Arch the next morning couldn't be greater. I will certainly go back to False Kiva and try different light conditions. This would be interesting in winter with a sun setting more in the frame and perhaps some snow on the rock formations. The sunset was great but I left a little before to make sure I could see my trail back. In my images below you can see that it is golden hour light though and the glow is lovely. A few more clouds would have been great but hey I am not going to complain. This was an absolutely fantastic experience in itself. I headed back to the campground where I met a few of the friends with whom I would hit the rim the next day that had been able to find the site I put my tent up in which was easy as the campground was virtually deserted. They had already prepared some excellent tortellinis and it was a good but very cold night with frost on the tent in the morning. I headed out to take pictures of Mesa Arch the next morning before hopping on the bike. I'll post about both those trips soon as I got some excellent images out of it that have been chomping at the bit on my hard drive.

See more pictures of False Kiva here.

Mount Evans/Summit Lake

In recent weeks, I went out twice in the evening up to Mount Evans to do a sunset at Summit Lake. The geography of this place is not right for good Alpenglow, but under the right conditions (as you'll see below) you can get glowing clouds that bathe the entire place in crazy light. I've never seen pictures like this from this place before so this mostly was a gamble on my part. This condition only happened the second time I went there and lasted only a few minutes. It was spectacular nevertheless. I got good shots both times that I really like and I'll share them with you below. Click on them to see them in the gallery. You can also visit a set on flickr.

Blue and yellow

ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 3.0 secs

Yellow blankets

ISO 200, 16mm, f/16, 4.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.

King's crown

ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 25.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.

This was one of my two favorites from the first evening I went there. The King's crown flowers are deeply red colored (not visible in this scaled down copy, but will be if you order a print as the full resolution of the image will be used. My second favorite was this rock shaped like a bird:


ISO 200, 11mm, f/16, 30.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.
The shutter is much longer here because it was getting dark very rapidly.

Rolling clouds

ISO 800, 11mm, f/16, 30.0 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND.
Far after sunset.

The second time I went there as I said, the conditions were right for a glowing sunset. Here is my favorite.

Assembled from 9 images at ISO 200, 35mm, f/16, 0.8 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND in the top row of shots.
This will print well even wall sized. There is also a panoramic version of this here that I use as a backdrop on my monitor.

This is a detail from the above panorama that I liked.

ISO 200, 35mm, f/16, 0.8 secs

A few minutes later it looked like this:

Assembled from 12 images at ISO 200, 30mm, f/16, 5 secs, 3 stops hard graduated ND in the top row of shots.

This is an image focusing on the reflection you can also see in the above image:

Assembled from 8 images at ISO 200, 30mm, f/16, 5 secs.

All in all this was a very productive two evenings. I have far more interesting shots from this place than I put in the gallery but I did not want to overwhelm you.

Tonight's sunset

Behind our house right after a small thunderstorm that brought some hail

Great images from a fun festival

The Frame comes through again with gorgeous images of Holi.

A word of caution on using custom camera profiles

If you own a colorchecker, you can use DNG profile editor, or X-rite's passport Lightroom plugin to create a custom camera profile for your camera. This works really well. I should however caution you about an issue I discovered with this. One of the problems is that neutrals are not kept neutral when you change to a different camera profile in Lightroom or ACR. An illustration is given below.



On the left is the result of first assigning my self-calibrated profile generated using the passport plugin (this is also true for other profiles) and then using the white balance dropper on the neutral patch on the card and on the right is the result of first setting the white balance and then assigning the exact same profile. As you can see on the right, my very neutral grey backdrop turns green and the girl's skin is rendered a little too yellow. The skin tone might not be too bad but the green backdrop is very distracting I think. On the left, the color is just fine, no tint to the backdrop and good skin tone. The difference is simply in the white balance chosen by the white balance dropper. The image on the right, Lightroom chose 5700K and -3 tint, while on the left, it chose 5450K and +12. Quite a difference for white balancing on the same patch! I tested with all the other camera profiles and they all show this problem that there is a shift in the color temperature taken from the neutral patches.

P.S. if you prefer slightly more warm skintones than the very neutral rendering you get when using the neutral patch, the passport has a set of warming patches in the top row. You can simply select patches more to the right of the standard patch to warm up skintones. This results in the backdrop staying far more neutral but just the skintones warming up. A far more pleasant effect. See below for the result of choosing the patch two spots to the right of the neutral patch (the middle one in the top row of neutral patches. The second row of neutral patches also allows you to go to cooler colors and is more useful for landscape photography.



This made Lightroom choose 6000K and +27 tint. The skintone that resulted is very nice I think.

Conclusion: do your custom white balance after assigning the profile you want to use.

EDIT: It appears that this is mostly a problem with self-created dual illuminant profiles. I create these by shooting one image under tungsten light and another in sunlight as I don't own a calibrated D65 reference. Whether I create the profile in X-rite's passport program or DNG PE, they show the issue of neutrals not staying neutral. The Adobe-supplied camera-matching profiles also have the problem, but it is too minor to worry about. The differences in grey-card set white balance are on the order of 100K which you won't really notice.

Want to see some crazy colors

Check out this gallery of images from Holi, the Indian festival of color. Be sure to use a color managed browser on this as the images are a mix of sRGB and adobeRGB.

I can't believe I haven't noticed this. Real color management in Firefox 3.0

I wrote earlier on how to enable color management in Firefox 3.0. It was great to see that finally a major browser next to Safari has color management, even if you have to go into a secret settings menu to enable it (see link above). At the time I assumed that the color management was just for images with attached tags. The same thing that Safari does. This would make Firefox, just like Safari, color foolish and causes lots of issues on Macs that are by default calibrated at a lower gamma than most windows PCs. However, and this was pointed out to me by outstanding photographer Greg Cope in a discussion on flickr, Firefox 3.0, with the color management enabled, color manages everything, CSS colors, text, and untagged images. If a page element has no attached profile, Firefox assumes sRGB. This is awesome and the absolute right thing to do. I tested it and it is absolutely true. If you have a Mac, enable this feature right away, even if you do not calibrate your screen. If you have a windows PC and you calibrate your screen, also enable this right away. On windows if you do not calibrate, the feature is not too useful as Windows assumes sRGB by default for the monitor profile. This brings Firefox quite a bit ahead of Safari and will make all web pages far better looking (no pale and too low contrast images anymore).