Saturday, July 30, 2022
For about a week now, I’ve been looking to get out for another sunrise landscape shoot. I have narrowed my intended locations down to either Doughton Park, or Price Lake. The former is a location that I have shot many times at sunrise but have recently found a few new compositions that I want to try with the colorful sky. The latter is another location that I’ve frequented at sunrise over the years, but usually from the boat launch area. I have been wanting to work from the typical overlook area knowing that the sun would be to my back. Both locations were going to require some specific conditions with the clouds, namely high clouds to catch the light and an opening at the horizon for the sun to shine through. I knew that I would have more flexibility with Doughton Park because I could shoot from an infinite number of angles to the sun. Price Lake was going to be a bit more limiting because the composition that I was interested in was in only a single direction.
As I looked at the weather patterns for the better part of a week, I was excited to see the chance of storms each evening which would indicate an unstable atmosphere that usually leads to some interesting conditions to shoot in. Each night it would look like the morning was going to bring the conditions that I was after, but morning after morning, the clouds failed to develop the way that I wanted them to. Around the middle of the week, I even woke up at 4am and checked the weather in hopes that something would work. The clouds were all staying away from the areas that I was wanting to work. On Friday evening, I was looking at the weather and once again, things were looking promising for some good color so I tried to get to bed early so I could wake up and be ready to roll well before sunrise. I was only going to have a little bit of time because Toni and I were meeting friends for a double date in Winston for lunch, but that would still give me plenty of time to get the morning light captured. As a bonus, there was a slight chance of some fog which would be perfect at Price Lake.
I was in bed around 10:30, but just couldn’t get to sleep. At best, I would doze for a few minutes and wake up again. It was starting to really make me mad that I couldn’t get to sleep, and I kept doing that math that we all do from time to time. If I go to sleep right now, I will be able to get five hours of sleep. If I can fall asleep right now, I’ll get four hours of sleep….and so on. Around 12:30 or so, I gave up and went to the living room to try and get a good nap out there. I think it was at the point of hearing the clock chime 1:30 that I finally went to sleep. I know that my alarm rang at 4am and I wasn’t happy at all about it. Since my phone was in the bedroom, I had to get up and go in there to look at the weather. The clouds had kind of faded out it appeared with one forecast calling for clear skies, and the other calling for about 50% coverage in the higher altitudes. It was not ideal, and not what I was planning on, but I was standing up and awake again. I decided to go ahead and give it a try because I was sure to miss 100% of the shots that I didn’t show up for.
It took me about 30 minutes to get ready to roll and I felt like I was in a hungover state almost. My brain was full of fog, which I was hoping would show up at Price Lake. That was where I had decided to go because the chance of brilliant color was limited. I was going to go for more of an atmospheric image rather than a vivid stunner of a sunrise. The water would provide a bit of reflection that would amplify any of the color present, and if there was fog to be had, it would be resting on the surface of the water. If it was thicker than that, I could change up my plans and shoot into the sun to get some really good silhouettes of the shoreline which I had done in the past. Doughton was just going to be a simple landscape that needed a dramatic sky to really work which I didn’t think I was going to have this morning.
On my way down the road to get to the Blue Ridge Parkway, I kept looking up to see bright stars which indicated that there really were not many clouds present. In my lack of sleep stupor, I was fully expecting to get out to the lake and see nothing interesting at all before just taking a nap in preparation for the return trip home. I was holding out no hope for this morning’s trek, but I continued on my way just in case.
It was around 5:40 when I arrived at the lake to find a single other vehicle in the parking lot. Sunrise was scheduled to happen at 6:31, so I had nearly an hour to get things sorted out. At my headlights hit the water, I noticed that there was no surface fog at all on the lake which was a huge disappointment for me. Looking up in the sky, there were still plenty of stars to be seen. I tried to get an updated forecast on my phone, but there was no connectivity there so I was basically blind about what the conditions would be in an hour. I drove over to the boat launch area to see if there was any promise over there. It was even more bland and without any interest. Should I just park and take a nap?
I decided to go back to the main overlook view because if nothing else, the sun should kiss the top of the mountain to make an interesting composition with a boring sky. It was a long shot, and one that I wasn’t sure would turn out, nor was I convinced that it would be a good photograph even if it did. After I got parked, I grabbed my bag and tripod and started to shimmy down to some of the little viewing alcoves that I’ve used before with varying degrees of success. It was still very dark, but I wasn’t seeing anything that I thought would be interesting to shoot. I slowly made my way over to the bridge where I had intended to set up. From here, I could get the elements that I wanted in the shot, I just needed interesting light to make it all work.
There was probably 10 minutes spent moving around along the railing until I found the right spot to set the tripod up. The light was starting to come up at this point and I could make out the background. To my surprise, there was a blanket of thick clouds at the top of the mountain that seemed to be snagged on the peak. This was a very good sign that I might be able to get something interesting from this morning’s shoot. I looked behind me and could see a band of clouds just above the tree line that would more than likely snuff out any of the color of the low sun. Figuring that I wasn’t going to have a lot of color to work with, I knew that I wasn’t going to need a lot of sky present in my shot, but I wanted to get the cloud in a suitable context within the composition. For that to happen, I knew that the lens of choice was going to be my 70-200mm.
I couldn’t help but think about those first times that I tried to photograph this view. I would always go with a wide-angle lens and try to capture something in the foreground or get the shoreline wrapping around the lake. All that did was over-complicate the composition and make the shape of the mountain very small in the distance. I was older and wiser now and have learned that a telephoto lens can still capture a grand landscape effectively. I checked the composition in the viewfinder and determined that I was going to be working in the 70-100mm range of the lens. I kind of wanted to go wider, but I knew that if I allowed myself the chance of doing that, I would end up including too much of the scene and I would lose my focal points. It was a creative decision to limit my choices based on what I didn’t want to happen accidentally in the heat of the moment. I added a polarizer to the front of the lens so that I could control the reflections in the water, and it also allowed me the opportunity to add ND filters or Grad filters later on if the light should warrant it.
I had everything set up and ready, but I wasn’t seeing any light just yet. I wanted to try out a test exposure before things got real just to see how everything was coming together. I started off with a six-minute exposure just to see if I could pull any color out in the sky. The first shot turned out kind of nice and I could see the motion in the cloud over the mountain, but the color was just not there. The lake was bone still and the long exposure made the reflection glasslike, but there was just no interest in it overall. As the light got brighter, I would kick the exposure down and eventually came out of bulb mode and was shooting exposures of 30 seconds and shorter.
The breeze had started to come in at this point, and I could see that the still reflection was going to be non-existent no matter what the shutter speed was, but I found that between 20 and 30 seconds kept the foreground water nice and smooth which was good. It was just the section at the other end of the lake where the breeze was being channeled that was causing me problems. I wasn’t all that concerned because the clouds to the rear were building up and certainly blocking the light from stretching clear across the sky to the Western side. There was a moment about 10 minutes before sunrise that I started to see a bit of color in the sky. It was faint, but there was definitely a pink hue to the thin clouds that were stretched across the sky. I dropped the exposure a bit to saturate the colors a bit more and fired off a series of images at around 20 seconds. It was hard to tell if I had captured the color in my image review because I have the camera set to display a very washed-out image on the LCD so that I can get a more accurate histogram. I wasn’t going to know for sure what I had captured until I got it home and looked on the computer. I just kept hoping that I had something that would work.
The sun continued to get higher in the sky as I kept looking for differences in the clouds. My exposure times were getting very short at about 5 seconds or so. Wanting to even out as much of the water as I could I slid in a Mor-Slo 5-stop ND filter which brought my exposure back down to the 20-30 second mark. There was a second blush of color after the sun had come up which turned the cloud snagged on the mountain pink while the sky was more of an orange tone. The mountain was bathed in that same magenta light, and I thought that I had a perfect capture with some dramatic lighting. I was around 50 or so frames at this point and had only shot a single composition. There was a lot of variety in the colors and intensities though, so I was feeling pretty good that I had something worth keeping out of that batch.
It was seeming that the colors in the sky were fading rather quickly as the sun continued to rise which got me thinking that it was time to call it a day. I had been standing here for about an hour taking the same photograph over and over. I was content with having just a single good image from this effort, but while I had been shooting the changing conditions, I had been looking around for other points of interest. One of those little areas that caught my eye was right down below the railing in the tall grass which had grown up over the water. There was a piece of wood which had found its home right there among the grass. It just stuck out to me and made me want to look. That is usually a good enough reason to take a photograph of something, so I moved the camera over to the spot where I could get the best view of the wood. What I loved about it was that it looked like a soft hand, palm down, grabbing something in the grass. That was the angle that I wanted to photograph this from, and I got the camera set up to capture that. I ended up shooting between two of the railings of the walkway I was on to get the right altitude for the camera.
With the breeze being an issue for this shot, I removed the ND filter and ultimately had to boost the ISO to 400 in order to get my shutter speed down to two seconds which was fast enough to capture everything sharply. The breeze was very mild and would come in spurts which was why I could go with a two second exposure. I would have loved to have gotten it faster, but in order to keep the depth of field sharp throughout, I had to stop the lens down to f/18 which made for a very dark exposure here in the shade. I wanted to keep the noise down, so I didn’t want to go higher than 400 ISO, which left me with two seconds being the shutter speed and a good enough compromise for the image and conditions.
I tried a few different compositions with slightly different framing, but most of them were very similar to the one that I have shared here. This one just had the best overall feel to it with the relative size of the wooden hand within the frame as well as the placement. When I saw it on the computer monitor, I was actually happier with it than what I thought I would have been. I was very happy that I had decided to go with a large depth of field for this composition because the blades of grass deserved to have crisp edges since the wood was much softer in texture. This gave the image a much needed contrast in my opinion that really helped direct the eyes around the scene.
I didn’t need to spend much time with the wood, but the experience with the grass really got me thinking about doing some minimalist photos of the grass poking through the water. There was an edge to the grass before the lake transitioned to smooth water. It was the edge that caught my eye the most. I worked on finding a few sprigs of grass that I could isolate from the rest. There was just a single section that would work for what I was after. It was a good distance away from me, but looking through the camera, I was going to be able to frame it up well at 200mm. I got positioned in a way that I could avoid the other grass and general clutter of the scene and framed up the shot.
I still had the polarizer attached, and it was doing a great job at cutting through the glare of the water. I could see the bottom of the lake pretty clearly, but I knew that would ruin the shot. I pulled the polarizer off, and the scene immediately transitioned into what I had previsualized with a very high key approach. As I dialed in the exposure, I could see on the live view that the contrast was a bit too much and the grass was going very dark while the water was pretty much going white. It was going to look good as a black and white image, but I was kind of wanting to see it in color. I replaced the polarizer and dialed in a very small amount of the effect. The end result was the water changed from white to a pale blue as it reflected a bit of the color of the sky. There was a bit of texture to the reflection with the clouds that were in the sky as well. The grass was still rather dark though, so I bumped up the exposure to get the water nearly white with just subtle colors and splotches of clouds. This gave a good deal more detail to the grass and allowed the now saturated colors to shine through much better. This was what I was looking for!
I shot about five different variations on the composition keeping the exposure the same. I knew that I was wanting a lot of negative space, and I wanted to reduce this down to color and shape to allow the viewer to interpret it as they wanted to. In short, I wanted to make this one a fine art piece as I have recently been able to define for myself. I tried square crops, horizontal crops, and vertical crops. It was the vertical and square ones that I felt worked the best. In all of them, I was really worried about how close the blades of grass came to the edge of the frame. It felt crowded to me, but if I included more space, I would end up including more grass which would grow the composition and change the feeling of it. I was hoping that this wouldn’t be a problem when I saw it on the computer monitor, but if it was still an issue, I had a couple of plans on how to deal with it in post. I wasn’t looking to fix the photo in post, but rather to fine tune the image to what I wanted it to look like. I was shooting it with the postproduction techniques in mind which makes the capture just a step in the ultimate series of steps to the finished product.
As it turned out, it was this vertical composition that I felt had the most visual impact. I was pleased that the close proximity of the grass wasn’t nearly as bad a problem as I had thought it would be, but it was still closer than I wanted it to be. I did a very simple edit in Lightroom to get the colors and detail established the way I wanted and then it was into Photoshop for the final touch that I had planned on doing. I went with the easiest technique first to see if it would work out. I cropped the image to a 5:7 ratio because I felt that was going to be the strongest ratio. That cut just a tad off of the top and the bottom which worked well to give the grass more weight. I then shifted the frame over to the left and overshot the edge of the frame slightly to the left. I let Photoshop apply a content aware fill to that added area which was nothing but luminance values and color. The fill went seamlessly and looked perfect. The final bit of editing here was to flip the image horizontally to put the grass on the right side of the frame as opposed to the left. That added to the readability of the image and did a better job of directing the eyes where to go. The final image was just what I had hoped for and is the first time I’ve been able to successfully shoot this type of composition.
When I was done shooting what has now turned into my favorite image from the day, I noticed that the sky was looking a bit more interesting as the clouds were coming into the area. I placed the camera back in the spot that I had started at and put the 5-stop ND filter back in the holder. I framed up the original composition once again and started to make new exposures. The difference here was that the shoreline was getting better light and I could see the top of the mountain since the clouds were starting to lose their grip on the peak. There wasn’t any color to the sky now, but the clouds were more interesting which prompted me to want to give it a try.
I probably shot another dozen exposures as the light changed and the shadows moved across the background. There were around 70 or so images that I had shot of this very composition spanning nearly two hours of the morning. I was really hoping to get at least one good image out of the bunch and if I was living right, I would have two images with different feelings that I would keep and process. Well, when I got the images home, I ultimately ended up selecting two different files from this composition. Both of them were from the initial attempts right at sunrise. The latter ones lacked the interest because the color was so flat across the scene. The one that I decided to process the first because it was the most interesting was one that I had shot right after sunrise when the distant mountain was bathed in that magenta light. I worked on this one for a while and got it to where I was reasonably happy with it. The sky was not all that great, but the cloud picked up this wonderful pink hue that I really liked. The last image that I processed from the batch was the earlier one from before the sunrise. It was much more subtle in hues and softer overall, but it had a more interesting sky, and the cloud actually popped more in the natural white tones. The more I looked at the two images in comparison, the more I felt that the first one I had processed was a bit too complicated with the light present and I much preferred the softer and quieter pre-dawn image which is the one that I have decided to keep out of the entire slew of images with this composition. The more I look at it, the more I like it. It is my style for a sunrise image and is much calmer than the later variation which just didn’t quite fit my view of the scene.
The decision came down to selecting an emotion rather than a photograph. The one with more dramatic light would probably be the better photo, but when I started relating the photo to my experience that morning, it just didn’t fit. In fact, it was in total opposition to the experience. It had been totally quiet except for the occasional splash of a fish jumping out of the water. Even the other photographers out there were very quiet. The breeze came through without a mention and it was just a totally peaceful morning. That was what I was trying to capture with my camera, not the views. As I was looking through the other couple of images that I had processed from the morning the theme was there of quiet solitude. The sunrise image didn’t fit and the more I looked at it as a part of the overall story, the less I liked it. The transition between blue hour and golden hour has always been my favorite time for landscape photos and that was what I wanted to go with for this trek.
As the sun had come up, the light was changing for the worst at this point. I decided to pack it up and head home. I had worked in about a 12 square foot section next to the railing for over two hours at this point. I had captured 90 photographs in that time, and I was hoping for about four of them to turn out. It had been a successful morning, and I was happy to head home and get ready to go to Winston. I set my course North on the Parkway towards Old 421 feeling content with the morning. It didn’t take long before my feeling of contentment turned into sleepiness though. Before exiting onto the highway, I decided to take a quick detour and go by a barn that I had shot here recently to see if there might be any other way to photograph it.
The barn wasn’t looking interesting to me at all this morning so I continued down the road to see where it would lead me. The more engaged I was in the surroundings, the better I was able to stay awake. I just drove down the road and realized that I was on a road that I had never been on before. It was a quiet little two-lane street that snaked through the mountains in a series of twists and turns. I eventually came to the end of the road and got turned around. I hadn’t seen anything that had caught my eye on the way up, but I looked from the opposite direction just as intently. It was a good thing that I did because off to the right, I saw an old Dodge tow truck sitting up on a hill between some trees. It was obviously yard art, and I was really surprised that I had missed it on the first pass through here. It was definitely good enough to stop and try to photograph so I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out where to put the truck. The shoulders of the road were basically ditches and the only places to pull off were driveways which I didn’t want to block. Figuring that I had been up and down the road and hadn’t seen a single other car, I decided to get as much out of the road as I could and just leave the truck partially in the roadway. It certainly wasn’t ideal but figuring that there was little to no traffic it wouldn’t cause any problems.
I didn’t want to hang around here too long since I was in the road, but I also felt that the neighbors would all be watching me. I had no reason to get in close to the truck, so I was very happy to just stay on the shoulder of the road. I picked out my 24-70mm lens which is my go-to lens for doing this type of photography. I added a polarizer and set it all up on the tripod. I worked my way back and forth to get the elements to align correctly and then started to make exposures. I had a lot of things to deal with for this scene. I had to make sure that the trees that surrounded the truck all made sense in the composition, but I needed to keep the bright sky out of the frame as much as possible. There were also lights hung from the trees that I didn’t want in the photo. There was a fence that I wanted to keep out of the middle of the frame, but below the fence was a nice field of beige weeds that I felt tied in with the color of the rust very well. I wanted to keep those weeds in the frame, but I had to find a precise balance between the weeds and the truck while making sure that fence didn’t bisect the scene. I tried all sorts of compositions here as well as aspect ratios. It was actually a 16:9 ratio that I felt fit the scene the best. It allowed all of the things that I wanted in the frame to be included while minimizing parts that I didn’t want. Those lights that were strung from the trees were partially cropped out with this ratio, but the lower strand and the tail of the upper strand was still visible. This was going to be a job for Photoshop to get the lights removed as they added nothing to the story and were a serious distraction. that process went much easier than I had expected which was a good thing.
At the conclusion of shooting this old Dodge, I had 99 frames captured for the morning. It was time to get home so I could catch a quick nap before heading out to Winston with Toni. I somehow managed to stay awake during the ride home, but I don’t remember any of the trip after coming down the mountain. When I got home, I put a battery on the charger and uploaded the files to the computer before stretching out in my recliner for a midmorning nap that actually felt quite nice.
I do hope that you have enjoyed the trek and the photos. It was a fun morning and I think I captured a series of images that reflect the day quite well. If any of them speak to you and you would like a print, I do offer prints in many sizes and media. You can view the stocked sizes here, but I can outsource the printing for just about any need. There really is no better way to enjoy a photograph than to see it in its intended form.
Until next time….
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