Saturday, May 6, 2023
As I start typing this entry, I am still waiting for one of the photos from the day to finish saving. The eight-frame panorama has been trying to save for an hour now and I am kind of tired of waiting for it to do so. In order to pass the time, I figured that I would get started with the entry and hopefully it would be ready to get resized for the web by the time I need to insert it into the blog.
To bring you up to speed, it has been a while since I last went out after a pretty regular schedule of treks. The last one I went on was a dreary evening trek to Beacon Heights that turned out pretty good. I didn’t have the color that I was hoping for but made use of the low clouds for some moodier landscapes. Since that time, I have been looking for another opportunity to go back out and capture some interesting skies over our mountains. The weather has been relatively stable over the last week with bland skies for the most part. There is a front moving in and there was a chance for some low to mid-level clouds just before sunrise into the mid-morning that got me thinking that there would be a decent chance for some interest in the sky right around sunrise. It wasn’t ideal as the cloud cover was forecasted at only about 40% coverage. If I was lucky, there would be enough clouds overhead to reflect some of the warm light from the sun beneath the horizon. If I wasn’t lucky, I would be stuck with an empty sky with no interest and very little reason to get up early.
How early is early? Well, I had to figure out where I wanted to go first. I started to go down my list of places that I like to shoot at sunrise which were mainly along the Blue Ridge Parkway. That seems to be my favorite place for landscapes simply because there are so many unspoiled views to choose from. I’ve been making my rounds to all my old favorite haunts, but the two locations that I decided to entertain for this trip were going to be lesser visited places. My first choice was a small little location near Aho Gap which I have shot only once before with pretty good success. The other, was Jumpin’ Off Rocks which is just up the road off of Hwy 16 near the Jeffersons. Looking at the weather the clouds were going to be similar between the two areas, so it came down to what kind of view I wanted.
As I was getting the trek planned in my head, I asked Toni if she wanted to go along with me. She started out by saying “no,” which I couldn’t blame her for saying. It was going to be an early morning and I’m not a lot of company when I am working a scene. However, in short order she changed her mind and decided to go along with me. Cool! I like having her with me on these treks, and she loves the landscape which makes it a bit more interesting for her as compared to rusted cars. Now, I had to figure out when we would need to leave. My first option was a 40-minute drive with a view right off of the road. The second option was about 15 minutes away but would be a short hike to the overlook. There was also a view right off of the parking lot if I needed to move quickly which was a good safety net. Between the drive and hike, both locations would require a similar departure time. That made it really easy since I could decide where to go in the morning while waking up at the same time for both.
We turned in early and the clocks were set for 4am. The goal was to leave no later than 5am so we could be up there in time for first light. In both cases, I would be shooting mostly towards the East which gave me the opportunity for some blue hour images if the clouds were good enough. Just before I closed my eyes, I looked at the weather one last time to see if there were any changes. Nothing was showing differently with the clouds. There wasn’t going to be many out there, but what was there would be at a workable altitude which was all I really needed.
At 3:30, Toni and I were both awake, but I was able to go back to sleep. She, on the other hand, remained awake until the clock went off. I did my normal looking at the weather. The current report was clear skies all over, but the clouds were supposed to start picking up at sunrise. Looking at my cloud app, there wasn’t much change in the sky from the night before. I wasn’t really feeling like getting up for something that had such a high chance of turning out blah, but since Toni was willing to go with me, and was awake because of the trek, I decided to give it a shot. It wasn’t a long-distance drive, and the hike was simple which meant that there wouldn’t be that much at stake if things didn’t turn out.
We got ready and I did my morning work on the computer while she was finishing up. Then we were in the truck and headed North. When we arrived, there was already a car in the parking lot with a driver inside waiting for the sunrise we assumed. Looking out over the mountains, I could see a very slight inversion going on, but just enough to give some good separation between the rolling hills. I wanted to see if we could get a better angle up higher, so we set out on the short hike through the woods. Note to self: even if Toni declines her own flashlight, give her one anyway. Yeah, the trail was very dark and there were lots of tripping hazards along the way. I used my light for both of our benefits as we walked down the trail and through the spider webs.
When we arrived at the overlook, we were greeted by a largely clear sky with just a patch of clouds above us. It wasn’t quite what I had hoped for, and far and away what I had dreamed of, but they were moving towards the East which in time would put them closer to the horizon. If things worked out right, they would be in the right position when I started making exposures. I took some time to refamiliarize myself with the landscape before deciding on a course of action. I then pulled the camera out and set it up on the tripod well over to the left. I went ahead and leveled the tripod because I was pretty sure I was going to attempt a panorama here.
As the light levels increased, I could make out the shapes of the hills in the distance and I was able to start picking out some compositions. I had the 70-200mm lens on because there was just not going to be enough interest in the sky to justify anything wider. I used that long lens to pick out bits and pieces of the landscape that I found interesting which were captured one at a time. I wasn’t getting anything that I was particularly excited about, but it was something in the bag which is always the hardest part of the day. As the conditions improved, I wanted to see how the pano would shape up, so I flipped the camera and fired off a six-frame series from left to right. It seemed to work out great as far as the composition went, but I was really lacking interest in the sky. I went back to picking out single scenes along the stretch of mountains and would fire off an exposure from time to time when I thought it was right.
I was still not landing on anything that popped out in my mind, so I settled back in on the panorama that I had been working on. I started to do more sweeps, but I was hitting seven and eight frames per series at this point which made me wonder what I was doing different from the test pano a while back. Whatever I was doing different, it seemed to be working just fine as the images smoothly progressed in the image playback. The sky was finally starting to pick up a little bit of color as the clouds neared the horizon as I had figured they would do. Looking above, there were little to no clouds anywhere else to be seen. The luck of this didn’t escape me as I knew that the scene would be very boring without these few clouds. The light was starting to change very quickly at this point, and even Toni was realizing that fact. A couple of times she would look down at her phone and when she returned to the light show to the East, would immediately notice a difference in the quality and intensity of the light.
The quickly changing light forced me to act very fast moving through the different groups of exposures. By the time I finished one, the light had changed, and I would start another. To give you an idea of how the morning was going, I had shot 52 frames without a single keeper. With the pano series starting with image 53, I had begun the last sweep before the light got too bright to work with. It was that last sweep that gave me my first keeper of the day which appears above. The clouds were in the right place in the sky to keep them related to the landscape, and the color was intense, but not over the top. When I finished with this one, the clouds were starting to wash out which meant that I was going to need to think smaller again.
With the combination that I had on the camera, switching compositional ideas was simple. I just rotated the camera back to horizontal and twisted the ND Grad that I had attached about midway through the panos that I was shooting. From here, I just started panning through the scene to see how things lined up for a composition. The sky was looking really good over to the right which was far away from the rising sun. This gave me better light to work with, but the tradeoff was a very tall tree that filled a good deal of that area. Around 15 years ago I had shot a sunrise here with a wide-angle approach that included that tree. Since capturing that image, I have wanted to avoid the tree each time I’ve shot here. With the sky looking like it did, I had the change of heart to include the tree again, but to do it in a different way which would give it more meaning.
Instead of getting so much of the tree and the very dead one next to it, I decided to stick with the long lens and just grab a bit of it for a foreground interest, anchor point, and source of texture to the composition. Being careful not to include too much of the tree, I decided to select a 16:9 crop for the image so that I could see how that would look as far as framing went. I liked the aspect ratio and felt that the entire scene came together as a cheater pano. The exposure was dead on with the ND Grad filter, and I shot only a couple of frames of this to make sure that the leaves were still. I felt pretty good with this one, so I didn’t stay here for long as the light was continuously changing in front of us. I went back to surveying the scene to find more patterns that worked well together.
I found that I was at pretty much 200mm for everything that I was looking at which meant that I needed to slip in the extender which would give me a 400mm reach. I left the one filter on because it was giving me nice colors in the sky while still retaining detail in the mountains. With this combination I was able to pick out all kinds of scenes within the landscape. Something that I realized for the first time was that you could see Pilot Mountain from this overlook. It was one of the tallest peaks in one of the sections which made it a focal point for several compositions.
I concentrated on that mountain and tried to organize a workable composition around that landmark. For those that are familiar with North Carolina, this is something that is almost immediately recognizable, and it is something that I don’t believe that I have photographed from the Blue Ridge Parkway before, or at least not in enough detail to readily pick out. Since the exposure was very simple with the filter attached, I didn’t have to do but one attempt with each composition. That allowed me to move along really quickly through different ideas.
Feeling like I was pretty satisfied with what I had from an isolation standpoint, I looked and had 68 frames on the camera. Looking back, I am really impressed that in less than ten frames, I had another two keepers. There were a lot of throwaway frames to get the day started, but once the light hit, things started to get pretty easy. It was just a matter of picking out the right compositions which is a bit harder than you might think from this overlook. The sun was well up at this point and the sky was starting to wash out. Even Toni agreed that the color was nearly gone. I still had the extender on which gave me some unique isolation possibilities, so I started to look at things with a very narrow field of view.
My attention started to turn to the trees near the overlook which I had been avoiding for much of the morning. The top of the tree to the right was still a little interesting to me and getting more interesting by the minute with the increasing light on it. I considered what it would look like as a very simple composition focusing on a small section of it while using the mountains and sky as a blurred backdrop for it. It was worth a try, so I pulled off the grad filter and framed up a shot that omitted as many of the distractions as possible. Since the breeze was starting to kick up, I didn’t bother with a polarizer because I wanted a fast shutter speed and was at the limit of what I was willing to use already. I doubted that it would have really improved the scene that much, and at least looking through the image review, the colors all looked good with minimal glare.
This was more of an experiment than anything because I just don’t typically shoot this kind of image, but there was something about it that just wanted to be photographed. Seeing it on the computer screen made me appreciate the colors that were present and how they all seemed to work together. There was plenty of warm and cool tones to keep it all balanced, and the limited depth of field (even at f/16) showed just enough detail in the background to give this image a proper sense of place. It was a fun shot that turned out to be a keeper.
The last six frames that I shot, bringing my daily total to 75, were of the tree to the left of the overlook. With the sun out very bright at this point, the warm light was bathing the fresh leaves in an almost Fall hue. I spent a minute or so looking for an interesting structure to this tree and once I found it, I dialed in the composition and exposure values until I was happy with what I had captured. This composition was one that I really liked the concept of but was afraid that by the time I got it home and looked at it I would be less than impressed with it. I am happy to say that after the culling process, this was the first image that I started to edit because it had a lot of qualities that I really liked. By the time I finished with the edit, this was a rather simple photograph that had a lot of pop which I enjoyed sealing its fate as a keeper from the day.
At the end of it all, I had five images out of 75 which I thought were good enough to add to my catalogue. It seems like a low percentage, but if you take the panorama sweeps out of the equation, I actually only shot 30 images which gives me a really strong hit rate for this trek. I think that Toni and I were out there just about an hour which certainly makes for a quick trek. I don’t think that she even got (too) bored with the process which is easy to do when you aren’t the one taking the photos. I will admit that she brought me luck because the only clouds in the sky were positioned right where I needed them to make the images work. Had they been further to the West, I couldn’t have used them due to too much separation. Had they been further to the East, they might have blocked the color of the sun, or just muddied up the horizon. Too much either way and they would have thrown the compositions out of balance. In short, given this small amount of clouds, I would have placed them right where they ended up.
I do hope that you have enjoyed the trek as well as the resulting photographs. As always, I would love to match you up with a print of your choice with any of the images that I capture. Either let me know directly, or you can order stock sizes from the gallery store. Trust me, there is no better way to enjoy a photograph than to see it in a physical form which is the last step in the creative process for the photographer. When you purchase a print, you are also helping to fund my photography business and allowing me to be able to continue to go on these treks. Even more than that, you are supporting my artistic endeavors which feeds my soul.
For those of you who read this blog that are photographers, keep in mind that I do offer many levels of mentorships which will help you along on your own journey. I do currently have an opening in my advanced mentorship program which is a great way of learning a lot over time. If you are not ready to commit to that kind of learning, I also offer mentoring by the hour and even image/portfolio critiques. The goal with any version of the mentorship is that I help you achieve your goals as a photographer. I’m not here to teach you to be me, I want to make your own voice stronger than it ever has been before.
Now that it is getting warmer, you might be wanting some new photos of the family, or maybe you have gotten engaged recently. This is a great time to book me as your portrait photographer! There is no limit to what we can create with full access to my studio as well as any number of locations you might want to choose. With the house finally getting finished up, my calendar is starting to free up quite a bit and I would love to work with you to get those perfect photos created. Just let me know what kind of shoot you have in mind, and we will get started with the planning.
Until next time…
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