Wednesday, September 4, 2024
So, here’s the situation. After my last quick trek the other day, I was starting to feel like a photographer again. I mean I really liked some of those photos and it energized me to want to go out again. I needed to figure out what to shoot first, and the best way of figuring that out is to look at the weather. Since I got some more bits and pieces in yesterday for the truck, I was looking to be free today and Thursday. The weather was looking pretty similar between the two days with high clouds and partly cloudy conditions. Seeing a bit better coverage on Wednesday prompted me to start looking at possibilities. It wasn’t looking like a good day for decay, but there was a really good chance for some color at sunrise as well as some defined clouds in the lower atmosphere during early morning. That pretty much set the stage for doing a landscape shoot. This worked out well because I have been wanting to do more with landscapes since the early Spring. Had things not completely derailed for me, I suspect that by now I would be looking to transition away from landscapes, but the hiatus that I have been on for most of the Summer and Spring has left a void in my landscape photos from the year.
Figuring that the leaves are starting to get wound up, this was as good a time as any to get out and start looking for some good landscape opportunities. Fortunately, looking at the weather across the area, there was really no real difference in conditions from Linville up to Laurel Springs, so I had plenty of options as to what to shoot. I was looking for a location that was a bit different and one that I hadn’t shot recently, or multiple times. That pretty much ruled out Doughton Park, Price Lake, Rough Ridge, Beacon Heights, and numerous other overlooks. I was actually having a hard time figuring out where I wanted to go since it has been a very long time since I’ve planned a sunrise shoot. One place that I wanted to check out was a pair of trees on the Parkway in the area of Boone. One of the trees is still standing behind a broken fence while the other has long ago fallen. Yes, I have shot this quite a few times, but I’ve never done it at sunrise, and I thought that it might work if the sky was right. At least I knew the compositions that I could shoot there, and I knew that the lighting would be totally different from anything that I had done there before.
It would take me about 30 minutes to get there from home and I wanted to get there about 30 minutes before sunrise which meant that I needed to leave at 6am. That actually wasn’t too bad considering the last time I went out for a sunrise trek I had to wake up before 4am if memory serves. I’m not a morning person, so this is never a fun experience and any chance to leave later in the morning is welcomed. The more I thought about it though, the more I wanted to get a little wiggle room in the schedule. If I left at 5:45, that would give me time to go with a plan B if things didn’t look good at the trees. That was still not too bad and to give myself time to do morning things, I could sleep in till 4:30.
I did the responsible thing and went to bed around 10:30 looking at getting six solid hours of sleep. Well, as luck would have it, that didn’t happen. I was on and off awake until something like 2am when I had all but decided to just forget the whole thing and get some sleep. However, the clock rang at 4:30 and after I cussed at it, I checked to see if Toni was going to be OK if I left. She said that she would be fine, and I reluctantly got up and ready for the day. Surprisingly, I wasn’t groggy and felt decent for it being stupid o’clock. I stuck to my schedule and was on the road at 5:45.
As I was trying to get to sleep, I was pondering my plan B, which turned into a location that I had tried to shoot at some point last year in the afternoon, but it hadn’t really worked out at all due to the lighting. The only other time I had shot it was many years ago and it turned into a print that hung on my mom’s wall. I had gotten the idea to try and do it better with different light but hadn’t seen a better option than sunrise. The location wasn’t too far from the two trees that I was headed to which kind of made it a perfect option in case the trees fell through. There would be plenty of time to make that call when I got up on the Parkway.
When I arrived at the first location, I pulled off on the side of the road and looked at the sky. There were a lot of clouds, and I suspected that there wouldn’t be a lot of color since the sun was about 90 degrees off to the right. Things didn’t look all that photogenic either. Since I had shot this a bunch, I really wanted to go with something a bit different. The sky was likely going to be better at the other location since I would be shooting on the opposite side of the sun. There was still plenty of time to make the 10 mile drive down the road and give it a look.
When I arrived at the alternate spot, I immediately saw color in the sky with the first blush of morning. I had made the right choice!!! The door was swung open, and I hopped out to get the camera out of the back. It was still very dark, and my attention was all directed at the horizon where the color was, but I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone out there. I got the tripod set up and started to pull the camera out, but wanted to see what lens would be best. My attention turned towards the fence that I wanted to include in the foreground, and I began estimating the effects of the wider-angle focal lengths when I saw that I had sensed upon getting out. There were three cows laying down on the grass just on the other side of the fence. One of them was starting to stand up, and then I realized that the direction that I was going to be shooting was being called home by another dozen or so cows laying down. Of course, all my activity and the lights from the bed of the truck were getting the cows interested which meant that most of them were starting to stand up.
As they say in horror movies, I was not alone. Here I was looking at cows moving around and being curious right in the area that was going to be my foreground. You are probably thinking that this was great fortune because I was going to have a more interesting foreground with all these cows. That might have been the case with better lighting, but the reality of the situation was that I was looking at black cows, well before sunrise which were moving. I knew that my shutter speeds were going to be around 20-30 seconds to start with and there was no way I was going to be able to freeze cows at that speed. Not only could I not freeze them, but I also wouldn’t be able to expose correctly for them while getting the colors in the distance. I had to make a decision, and I had to make it quick.
If I stayed, I would be relegated to shooting with a long lens and just getting the mountains in the distance which were supposed to be my background. There would pretty much only be a single shot available to me and that was only if I could shoot over the cows that were now migrating towards me. My other option was to abandon this location and go back to the trees and hope that the color happened during the second blush. The chances of that happening were slim, so I decided to go with the shot that I had rather than hope for something to work out later on at another location.
At least the lens choice was simple here. I grabbed the telephoto with the 2.0x teleconverter which would give me a reach of 400mm if needed. There was no need for any filters as I just wanted gradations of shadows on the mountains. I got things built and set up about 10 feet from the fence so as not to be bothered by the cows. The tripod was extended to the limit of what I could reach to see through the viewfinder. This was the only way to really figure out the composition because the live view didn’t show me the shadowed details at all. Once I had the composition set, I figured out the exposure and let the first frame go.
It looked OK, but there wasn’t enough visual direction in the scene, but I was able to see better how things were going to expose which made it easier to set up the next shot. I fined tuned the composition several times before I was happy with everything. Once I was, the camera was locked down and I fired off frames as the light changed. After about a dozen shutter activations, the cows were all huddled between me and the mountains. I was starting to get ears in some of the frames, which just came across like a blurry apparition since my shutter speeds were only 10 seconds at the fastest.
No matter how much I bargained with the cows, they refused to move over 20 more feet to the right and give me a clear shot of the scene. That was the shot that I had been after, but I was pretty happy with the long range composition that I had just finished shooting. There was no way to tell if it was going to be a keeper yet, and I didn’t know how it compared to what I could have shot there without the cows. It was going to be the only composition that I shot here so it was going to have to do. Looking at the sky, there was still about 15 minutes before actual sunrise and the colors were fading quickly. There was a chance that the second blush would light up the dark clouds above, but I felt that they added a really nice balance to the mountains below. It was decision time again, I would wait here for the second blush, or I could do something that I never do and abandon a location right in the middle of a sunrise to drive somewhere else.
Thanks to the cows getting vocal, and several of them proving that their bladders are much larger than I would have suspected, I figured it was time to go. As I was breaking the camera down and putting it back in the truck, I heard what could only be described as rapid-fire snowball hits. Yep, one of the cows was taking their morning constitutional. My welcome had ended, and it was certainly time to move along. The return trip wasn’t going to be too far and the light was building which meant that I would be able to light the foreground better than I would have been able to before sunrise.
When I got there, I pulled off the road and grabbed the camera. While I was doing that, I noticed about 30 cows in the field to the right of the truck. That was great, they could stay there all they wanted as I was shooting on the other side of the road. That field was empty, and I was happy about that. The color was still not trying to show up, but I knew that there were a couple of compositions that could work if the color happened. Being familiar with this location, I pulled out the standard zoom as opposed to the telephoto because I knew that I wanted to capture the fence as a foreground and leading line. This lens was also the best choice for including both trees in the composition.
Once the camera was built with a polarizer clipped on, I moved over the fence that I was going to include and framed up a shot that had a lot of triangles in it. The exposure was dialed in, and the polarizer adjusted for the best contrast in the sky. I clicked the remote shutter release and looked at the resulting photo on the LCD. There was a blur on the horizon that I couldn’t identify. I looked at the scene and saw that when I had pressed the button, a cow had come over the hill to see what I was doing. The three second exposure captured the crest as a blur. Now that I looked, there was another cow behind the fallen tree, one laying on the ground to the right, and now there were two which had come over the hill and were in front of the tree. It would seem that I was not going to get away from cows at all today.
Fortunately, the light was improving, or at least getting brighter so my shutter speeds were getting quicker and quicker by the minute. I altered my composition a bit and waited for the cows to stop moving before I fired off the next frame. Fortunately, they stopped moving when they were out of the frame, and I was able to a shot of just the field with the fence and trees as I had hoped. Once that one was in the bag, more cows started to come over the ridge and the one that was behind the fallen tree had gotten up and moved over to the left. The composition was no longer going to work, and I needed to get a tighter crop on the frame if the cows were going to be a part of the photo.
The clouds were staring to break up now, but there was still no color to the sky. Judging from the bright spot in the clouds to the right, the sun would not illuminate the bottoms of the clouds after this point, so there wasn’t going to be any color. The contrasts in the clouds were providing some visual interest though, so I stuck with the idea. The shutter speeds were starting to really come online for capturing the cows with fractions of a second becoming easily attainable. The tighter crop made the cows more visible in the scene, so I just had to keep pressing the button when they go to a good spot in the field and appeared to be still. Almost without exception, the minute I would fire off the shutter, a head would move, or a tail would swish. I could have boosted the ISO, but I knew that I was going to be pulling a lot of information from the shadows, and I needed the cleanest possible starting point.
Out of the roughly 15 frames that I shot of this composition, there was only one where all the visible cows were listening to direction and were behaving. This was the photo that became the hardest to process. I started out doing it as a color image because the colors seemed to help define the different spaces better than black and white. I worked with it for quite a while and just never really liked it. Not wanting to waste the work on it, I made a duplicate copy of the photo and tried converting the edited photo to black and white now that I had established some more contrast in the scene. This time, the black and white looked much better than it had before. I made a few changes to the base edit and then began to work the image up as a black and white.
When I was done with it, I liked it a little more than the color one, and it felt like it needed to be a keeper. However, when I looked back at the color version, I made a few more changes which helped it some. I still thought that the colors defined the spaces better, but the black and white felt like a stronger photo. This left me with only one option…to call Toni in for her opinion. I kind of figured that she would go for the black and white since that is what she usually leans towards, but if she liked the color one, that meant that it was the strongest of the two. Well, she loved the black and white one, and when I showed her the color one, she actually liked it too, almost as much. It would appear that she was having the same problem as me determining which was actually better. We were both leaning towards the black and white, but I was seeing more potential left in the color one.
Taking some things that I had learned about the photo from processing it as a black and white, I made a few adjustments to the color photo and went in a slightly different direction. In about 10 more minutes, I had a much cleaner looking color image that felt the way that I wanted it to feel. Since Toni and I had both liked the black and white, and she had even mentioned wanting me to do a print of it, I decided to keep both versions as keepers. They are very different images when it comes to the mood associated, and they will fill two different walls equally well.
There had only been 33 frames exposed during the morning and I felt like I still wanted to capture more. Realizing that the light was no longer improving at this location, I chose to load up and go searching for a better lit location with less cows. For the next 45 minutes I drove around and tried to find something interesting to shoot. There were plenty of pretty scenes, but nothing that I wanted to put in front of the camera. I did recall that there was a new addition to the location that I had shot a couple of days ago that might be worth working with near home. The light was about right for working with old cars at this point, but it was certainly not working for landscape photos.
Back down the mountain I went.
When I got to the salvage yard, I saw the car on a trailer parked in-between two rows of cars. There were power lines and tree limbs above it and no way to get the ground beneath it. I didn’t feel that it was going to be worth the time until it found a home not on a trailer. It was worth checking out though, but the clouds were now clearing up a lot leaving harsh sun, and not great light on the landscape. It was time to get gas and return home to start editing.
The morning had been fun, and rather relaxing standing there in the quiet with just the cows. I wished that they had moved to the places that I suggested, but I’ve found that cows rarely listen to the photographer and tend to do their own thing. Working the landscape was a nice change as well considering I really haven’t done that much landscape work this season. Hopefully, I will be able to get out during the Fall and get some colors while they are still on the trees, but I know that fighting the traffic in the mountains will not be fun at all. that usually keeps me from hunting Fall color and pushes me further into the decay side of things where there just aren’t that many people around.
I hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the photos that resulted. Out of the 33 frames, I ended up with three keepers, four, if you count the color/b&w pair based on the same photo. Considering I was going to be happy if I got two keepers from the two locations this was a pretty successful trek. Remember, if any of these photos speaks to you, I do offer prints which turn out exactly as intended unlike what you are seeing on your computer or phone which is totally out of my control in terms of color calibration. There is just something special about holding a photographic fine art print knowing that this is exactly how the photographer wanted the work to be seen and appreciated. There is just no comparison considering that the image files are compressed to go online, then compressed again once uploaded depending on the platform. The colors are changed during that compression, and then the device that they are being viewed on will have the final word on how the colors and even brightness are displayed. A physical print takes all of that out of the equation and has been printed from the full resolution image file on a calibrated printer so there is no discrepancy in colors or intent. Let me know which photo you are interested in, and we will get that order started.
I’m hoping that I’ll be getting out again here maybe this weekend or early next week. Keep your fingers crossed that I get inspired once again to go out and create photographs. I am truly enjoying being an active photographer once again, even when it includes waking up so early. It won’t hurt my feelings if my next outing is a bit later in the morning though.
Until next time….
