Tuesday, September 12, 2023
I’m pretty sure that the Summer of 2023 will go down in the history books as the busiest I have been with a camera. Not only have I been on more treks than normal, I have also captured more photographs, and I’ve shot a ton of portraiture during the warmer months of the year. I had told Toni after my mentorship morning last week that I was going to need to slow down with the photos as I was getting way far ahead of myself when it comes to new imagery. Of course, I can’t just decide when the photos happen as it is usually up to a variety of variables that have to work together. I have to have that creative urge, the appropriate weather, the time, and I need to have something worth communicating through the photos. All those elements have to line up, so when there is a lengthy period when they do, I have to be very thankful about it because I know at some point part of that equation will fall apart. When that happens, I will be looking at weeks, or even months of not feeling like doing much photography. Those are not fun times, so I take advantage of the times when I can be productive with a camera.
This is obviously one of those times, and I think I proved that when I took a photo of my wall yesterday morning. That was such an impromptu photograph, but yet it satisfied that urge to be creative. There happened to be another concept for a photograph that I had been working on for about a week or so. Having driven by Doughton Park a while back, I saw that the meadows were looking rather shaggy which made the trails stand out a bit more than usual. I was picturing this setting under some dramatic skies and was hoping that we would get some storms coming through where I could maybe work at the beginning or end of them to capture the meadows in a way that I haven’t done in a long time.
That weather system finally looked promising this afternoon. The morning was mostly sunny, with some clouds moving in after noon, giving way to some showers and storms for a few hours in the late afternoon. If I was lucky, I would be able to capture some magic light with the clouds rolling in while the landscape was still bathed in sunlight. The transition was looking to be around 1-3pm, so if I left around noon, I should be able to get in position before the clouds really started to get interesting. Since I was pretty much caught up for the day, that became the plan of action.
All the way up to Doughton Park, I had my sunglasses on because the sun was pretty bright, and the sky was mostly clear. The further up the mountain I went, the more clouds I was seeing. They weren’t dramatic like I had hoped, but they did have some texture which was good. All I needed was a few breaks in the clouds for the sunlight to shine through and a little more density as they built up. When I arrived at the park, the light was harsh and not particularly flattering for the landscape. It was right at the middle of the day, so this was not unexpected in the least. I had plenty of time to work on finding a composition it looked like, so I grabbed my tripod and bag before setting out on a lazy hike through the meadow going to Alligator Back.
It was this side of the park that I have not been frequenting much over the last decade or so. It was the side that I had the best luck with when I was starting out with photography, but the trees have kind of lost their structure and things are just not as interesting on that side anymore. I was hoping to see things differently on this trip so I took my time and looked at all the angles. The field was looking great with a lot of Goldenrods and browning grasses mixed in with the tall grass. The field itself was very interesting, but I couldn’t find anything to anchor the photo other than some trees that were just not photogenic at all any more. I went the entire length of the meadow without finding anything compelling to shoot before turning around and going back to the parking lot to see if there were some compositions with the old fence by the meadow.
I saw some potential there, but I again ran into the problem where there wasn’t anything truly interesting to anchor the image and I didn’t want a photo with a great foreground and nothing to look at in the distance. I did file the basic ideas in case the sky turned interesting, but for the time being, the sky was still bright with just some hints of clouds overhead. I could see more clouds moving into the area which had me feeling hopeful though. I took the time I had left to go over to the other side where I have been spending most of my time here lately to see if I could figure out some workable compositions without going to my tried and true options.
As I was walking up the path, I was seeing several groups of bushes with yellow flowers blooming which looked really good with the bluish hues of the mountains in the distance. I kept looking for an angle where I could capture an image that included both the flowers and the mountains. Eventually, I did come upon that perfect area and started to evaluate what I was looking at. It was looking like a good potential photograph, but I had to make sure that the mountains appeared large enough to garner a good amount of attention within the frame. This was going to mean using a telephoto lens for a bit of compression. I pulled that lens out of the bag and mounted it to the camera before working my way through the scene to see where the composition was. In a few minutes I had a basic composition set up and I got everything dialed in as the clouds started to come over the scene. I had a mixture of sunlight and shade depending on when I released the shutter. I found out quickly that I had a breeze to worry about and since the little flowers were my foreground, I needed to have them sharp and frozen in the frame. I didn’t try to ease into a fast shutter, I just dialed in ISO 800 and found that I could get a shutter speed of 1/200 of a second with a suitable depth of field. I fired off several exposures as the breeze died down and managed to get a few different lighting scenarios during that time.
As I was getting more and more familiar with the composition, I started moving the camera around slightly to capture some different combinations of elements. What I found was the latter compositions turned out better than the first ones, but the lighting was better on the earlier ones. I ended up having to choose between composition and lighting which will usually go with the lighting being the winner. This time, it was the latter composition that won out because it was just so much more dynamic than what I had started out with. The lighting wasn’t bad at all, I just didn’t have quite the same sunlight on the foreground, but the shade from the clouds made it so I didn’t have to worry about the flowers blowing out.
I worked this scene for a while until I figured I was at the point of diminishing returns. The light wasn’t getting any better, nor was the sky. I had reached the best composition based on what I was seeing as important at the time. There was no sense in staying here any longer because the sky was getting a little more interesting in other directions. I wanted to try some more compositions before I had to call it a day when the rain showed up.
I continued up the trail for a bit longer and came to one of my favorite areas, but from a different angle. Normally shooting from the lower part of the meadow lacks the visual interest that I need for a photo, but with the way that the grasses were looking, I had a lot of variation in textures and tone to focus on from this angle. I found a section that was framed by a bare rock and worked out a composition that mated that rock with the outcropping along the ridgeline that I will usually photograph from the top of the hill. The large tree gave the image a nice framing element and I found an angle to where the grasses held the most interest in the frame. I positioned the camera pretty low to the ground to get the right relationship between the foreground and background as well as allowing me to get enough of the sky in the frame to add a contrasting texture to the grass.
The exposure was nearly the same as it had been with the last scene. I still had the issue of the grasses moving in the breeze, but it wasn’t nearly as critical as it had been with the flowers. I probably could have reduced my ISO, but with the light levels being really good still, I wasn’t too worried about noise in the image. In my old age, I am getting more and more comfortable with shooting at higher ISO values, and 800 isn’t one to cause me any problems unless I am shooting something in the shade.
I only made a couple of exposures here because I was pretty sure that the composition was going to work out, and even if it didn’t, there wasn’t much need in repeating the exposure as nothing was changing. I still hadn’t found that great composition that I was after, and I certainly had not been able to resolve what I came out here to capture in the first place. I wasn’t letting any of that get to me though because I already had two compositions in the bag, and I was feeling decent about things thus far.
The thing that I was most happy about was the fact that the grass was no longer a uniform green. That is the part of Summer I really don’t like. Everything is green, and there is just no contrast to anything. This time of year, the greens give way to beige and brown and I happened to catch it at a time when nothing had been cut back. The wild look of the scene really fit what I wanted to capture and the stories that I wanted to share from this location.
I continued up along the trail to the top of the meadow where my favorite tree lived. I thought about photographing that tree but decided against it. I have a metric ton of photos of that tree, and my favorite ones are always when the leaves are off of it. Since the leaves were all still in place, and moving in the wind, I didn’t see much reason in photographing it yet again. What I did want to capture was the grass that was going dormant along the row of rocks. This has been a favorite scene of mine for the last four years or so and I’ve shot it many different ways but have yet to land on a photograph that I absolutely love. I took a quick look at the scene knowing that I had shot it with each of my zoom lenses over the years. With how the sky was looking and the way I wanted the background to present, I opted for the telephoto lens that was still attached. This was going to give me the scale that I wanted for the scene to keep emphasis on both the grass and the mountains. The rocks would appear smaller than I have shot them in the past, but they were just a supporting member to this composition.
Those of you paying attention up to this point will realize that I have not even thought about using a filter which is odd for me. The truth of the matter is, I had thought about it with the first composition, but decided against using a polarizer because the nearly two-stop light loss was a problem with the wind. I needed things to be sharp, and I needed to keep the noise to a minimum which negated the use of a polarizer. It really wouldn’t have done much at all since I was shooting with the sun pretty much overhead anyway. On the next composition, I could have dealt with the light loss, but checking the filter to see the effect showed so little change in the scene that it wasn’t worth the loss of light into the lens. Those concerns carried on through this next image and I didn’t bother adding a filter here either.
I just framed up the image and started making exposures. There were points where I would change up the composition, or the placement of the camera in attempts to improve on the scene, but I kept things mostly the same through the different exposures. I was glad that I had opted to keep the long lens attached because the distant mountains were a very big part of this photograph, and they played off of the grass very well. Usually, I would prefer using a wider angle lens and making the rocks bigger in relation to the rest of the scene. That wasn’t going to work for this photo because I really wanted more emphasis on the mountains in the distance.
After working this scene for a few minutes, I started to feel rain drops falling. That didn’t bother me too much, but I did decide to cut this composition short. Since I was pretty familiar with it, I didn’t need to spend much time on it. I would rather get another view in the bag before the rain forced me to leave the park. I grabbed a lens cap and put it over the lens to keep the drops off the glass. I started to look around, and further down the trail for other compositions. I wasn’t seeing anything that jumped out at me though. The longer I looked, the heavier the rain started to fall. Since I wasn’t really finding anything else over here, I figured it might be time to go back over to the other side of the meadow and try that composition that I had spotted earlier in the afternoon. To keep things simple, I went ahead and packed up the camera in case the rain got harder. That only took me a couple of minutes and I was back on the trail heading to the parking lot.
When I got to the parking lot, the rain had almost stopped, but I could tell it was the calm before the storm. I didn’t know how much longer I was going to have out here, but I wanted to make it worthwhile. As I was walking across the lot, I was looking to see where the clouds were most interesting. It appeared that to the North was where I needed to be aiming the camera. That was not quite the direction that I was going to be working with the fence and other meadow. However, I did see a lone picnic table in that direction which caught my eye. Yeah, I know that a table is not really a landscape, but it is an interesting visual anchor for an image. I moved over towards it and started to look at it critically. As long as I didn’t get too high up on the hill, the table appeared to be right at the crest of that hill and therefore it was making a nice minimalist composition. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but I felt that I wanted to give it a try. It was a more effective composition than what I had scouted earlier, and with the clock ticking, I wanted to go with the stronger image, even if the concept wasn’t a sure thing.
I found the right point on the hill to place the camera and chose to go with the 24-70mm lens as I didn’t think that I needed the reach of the long one. Again, I chose no filters, but not because of any light loss this time. There was nothing in the frame that I was worried about blowing in the breeze. I knew that there wasn’t much I would gain from a polarizer with the elements in the scene, so having the filter on would just complicate matters once it started to rain again. Having no filters would allow me to work quicker, and there really wasn’t anything that I would be sacrificing by not having any filters.
I started to frame up the composition and found that I was at the 70mm end of the lens starting out. I probably could have used the long lens, but since I had this one on, I worked with what I had. It was going to come down to a matter of steps forward and backward to make up the difference between the lenses. There was a whole lot of back and forth as well as left to right until I found the right composition for this subject. To make matters worse, the rain was coming back, and it was heavier than it was up on the hill earlier. I had to use my hat to shield the lens from drops as I changed up the composition slightly to perfect how things were looking.
I was shooting exposures here and there of the bench as I wasn’t sure what was going to look the best when I got the images home. I also didn’t know when I was going to have to call it quits. There was little doubt that this was the beginning of the strong rains which would make me leave for the day. The only question I had was how long I had before that happened. The thunder told me that it wasn’t going to be long.
It wasn’t. About the time I landed on the right composition, the clouds started to lose their texture and the darker portions were pretty much on top of me at this point. I managed to get a quick grab shot of the final composition before the clouds moved out of the frame. I was left with what I was hoping would be some subtle textures in the clouds for a black and white photograph. That only lasted a couple of frames before the rain started to get heavier than I wanted to both with. I quickly pulled the camera apart and grabbed my bag. Three steps later and the bottom fell out. Fortunately, I was about 200 feet from the truck, and I got there before I got too soaked.
With the camera safely in the back and me safely in the driver’s seat, I started on my way home to see how the photos turned out. I had shot a total of 43 frames during about forty minutes of the afternoon. It was more than I had thought there were, but apparently my shutter finger had been busy. I knew that there were four different compositions that I had shot, and I was hoping for a couple of keeper images out of those 43. I was honestly surprised that I had four keepers out of the batch to edit. Overall, they came out better than I had expected. The table that I had shot last was supposed to be a black and white image to emphasize the feeling of loneliness that I thought the composition suggested. However, after a complete edit in black and white, I felt that the effect was just too flat. I moved it into a color profile and saw more potential. I shifted it to that profile and worked it a bit before abandoning that altogether. I started fresh with a different color profile, and you see the result above after a second complete edit.
I do hope that you have enjoyed this trek and the photos that resulted. I love this time of year when the greens start to fade, and the weather gets cooler. I hope to get out many more times over the next couple of months to capture the change. It will be up to my creativity levels though, and I don’t know how much longer they can go on like this. It really has been a fun Summer photographically, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to bring you along with me.
Let me know if you are interested in having prints of any of these photographs to hang on your walls. I love sharing prints with clients because it is a way for you to have a little piece of me right there. There is also no better way to enjoy my photography than seeing in on a specifically chosen medium like fine art rag, metal, or canvas. Not only do you get a piece of art to call your own, you will also be helping me to do more treks like this and create more photos to be enjoyed.
Thank you for tagging along with me, and I hope to see you again soon.
Until next time….
