Thursday, April 20, 2023
It almost feels like cheating on my decay subjects after I went so hard and heavy on them last Fall. It would almost seem like a switch has been flipped in regard to my photography this month. I’m sure you have come to expect treks like when I finally photographed my Buick, or maybe a full day of a rust safari in a junk yard. Yeah, those kinds of blog entries have been the norm for more than six months now and quite frankly, I’ve come to expect them as well. April has been a rather different month for me though; and starting off in the first few days of the month, I was jokingly saying that I was giving up on landscapes. That blog entry was a little bit tongue and cheek as I had to laugh at myself for having such a good time shooting landscapes at Doughton Park again. I followed that up with a really successful trek to Price Lake at sunset where I tried to get a little hint of the Spring season. Even most recently, Toni and I went out to the Parkway once again at sunset to capture one of my favorite views along the roadside. After a very slow start to the year in general, I am really beginning to pick up the pace with the treks. I think that it is only fair to give credit to the fact that I’m really feeling shooting landscapes at this point.
You see, when I shoot the decay subjects, there is a lot of scouting that goes on and most of the time that I dedicate to the capture of the various scenes is me driving around looking for them. Currently, I don’t really have a long list of places to go for these subjects so my routine has to slow quite a bit until I can find some more potential out in the wild. This wouldn’t normally be a problem for me as I typically would be working on my portraiture skills or dealing with the repairs/remodel on the house. As luck would have it, the house is fully under control at this point, and we are just waiting on the siding to be installed in the next couple of weeks. The portrait photography has fallen off here lately for reasons unknown. My last shoot was a test shoot with Toni back in mid-February and the only session that I have in the books currently is an engagement shoot in Surry County next month. That leaves me with some extra time on my hands for the first time all year it seems. This might be the first Spring, in several years, that I have been able to get out and really take advantage of the seasonal shift. It is usually a time that I am working on workshops and struggling with a bit of a creative slump. With the workshops not really getting traction this year, I’m left with the ability to get out and enjoy Spring which is what I’ve been doing so far.
As you can tell, I’ve really been in the mood to work with landscapes here lately but I’m not a fan of working with clear skies. That is what we have had more often than not for the past few weeks. For me, clouds are the key to a good landscape. I love adding drama to the scene with some dramatic clouds, but I realized that I was starting to get into a rut with lighting. The dramatic clouds have become my favorite lighting for just about anything that I shoot, and I see the need to break away from that from time to time. My next favorite light is a partly cloudy sky with a low sun. This works very well with landscape photography, and it gets me thinking outside of the box I have put myself in when it comes to light. Since I’m very happy working with the landscape right now, I started to look for the right conditions to go out in. When I looked at the weather last night, I was seeing about 30-50% high clouds during the morning hours along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
This was a pretty good setup, but I wasn’t sure where to go, and was a little concerned about the thinning of clouds right at sunset before they built back up. My fear was that I wasn’t going to have any clouds in the sky to reflect any color or provide interest for the photos. Honestly, I would have probably forgotten about going, or picked something else to shoot, but there was a slight catch. You see, Adobe just released a new update for Lightroom that added an ACR feature allowing me to use the curves adjustment within the masks. I have been looking forward to this update since it came out for ACR (which I don’t like using). I had it installed on the computer but needed some new photos to try it out with. Knowing that I was wanting to spend some time editing with the new software, I pushed myself to go out and get some new photos.
By the time I went to bed, I had narrowed my choices down to either Jumpin’ Off Rocks which was close to home off of Hwy 16, or Rough Ridge, which was a bit further near Linville. My thought was I would get up early enough to make it to Rough Ridge, and I would have the other as a backup location. This meant that I was going to wake up at 4am which is getting rather early for me since I’ve been very happy sleeping in much later than that for a while now. It is one of the lousy parts of being a landscape photographer, but some of the best conditions are at first light, and I like the lack of people at that hour.
I would like to say that I got to sleep early, which I kind of did. I was in bed shortly after 10pm which was much earlier than normal. The problem was, I had a very hard time getting to sleep, and it was well after midnight before I started to drift off. It was really one of those cases of saying “if I fall asleep right now, I will have exactly four hours of sleep.” The longer I was awake, the more I considered just turning the alarm off and not worrying about it. I also thought about getting a very early start and just getting up. Somehow, sleep won out and I managed to get a few hours of rest. To quote Gavin Hardcastle, I had a face like sandwich found at the bottom of a bookbag when the alarm rang at 4am. I did my normal look at the weather and saw that the conditions were roughly the same between the two locations. In order to maintain the most flexibility with compositions, I chose to go with plan A at Rough Ridge. This was an hour away, and I wanted to give myself 30 minutes to get into position since I wasn’t sure which of two locations I wanted to set up at.
I didn’t exactly jump out of bed, but I did manage to get my feet on the floor and get started with the day. It was not a fast-paced process by any stretch, but I did make it out of the house by 4:45 which was my intention. I didn’t even look up at the sky because I knew that it was mostly clear, and I didn’t want to get discouraged by seeing stars which do a lousy job of reflecting the sun’s color. I remember thinking to myself that I was under no pressure to get anything captured and was going to be happy if I got a single photo from the morning that I could work on in Lightroom. These kinds of treks are generally low stress and very enjoyable for me since I just get to enjoy being out with the camera. I was happy that I was going somewhere I knew well because I already had an idea of the compositions that I wanted to capture.
When I arrived at Rough Ridge, I was right on time with my estimates. It was still completely dark and sadly, I could see stars in the sky above. I was thinking that the chances of me being able to get a colorful sunrise were slim, but I was here so I was going to make the quick hike to find a spot. There were no other cars in the parking lot which was a nice change from the last time I was here when I remembered having to share the rock with another photographer. The hike went well considering it had been almost three years since I’ve been on the trail. When I arrived at the first location that I was considering working from, there was not a sound other than animals and insects. I stepped out to see what I had to work with. I could tell that the sun was going to be coming up behind the mountain which was ideal as it would keep the brightness at bay much longer than if there was nothing to hide behind. There were some thin clouds streaming from the mountain which I thought might make for a decent bit of color. I didn’t think that it was going to be a great sunrise, but I did see that there were a good many Spring colors to be found around the area.
I considered my options for a bit. I could continue on for another 10 minutes or so to get to the jagged rock outcropping that I was considering as an alternate. I had shot this in fog and rain before, but never on a clear day. I was struggling to remember which direction it faced, knowing that if I was going to be shooting East, the light was going to be all wrong. Not wanting to chance missing out on what I thought might be the only color of the morning, I decided to set up shop right here on the viewing rock that I have shot from so many times in the past.
Before getting the camera out, I walked around and tried to figure out the angles that I was going to need to work with. This was the most important part, because the decisions that I was going to make here would dictate what lens I used, and how I was going to capture the first image of the day. It only took about 5 minutes to get a plan in my mind. I was going to take full advantage of the clouds coming off of the mountain, and I was going to use the rock that I was standing on as a foreground to help frame the boardwalk. I was just hoping that the light levels would work out for what I was envisioning. I knew that I was going to need filters, but I chose to wait on adding those until I started to see workable light happening. The lens that I was going to need was my wide-angle 16-35mm which I have used successfully here many times before with variations on this composition. Before I mounted the camera, I made sure that the tripod was level. I’ve been bitten by the pronounced slope of this rock before and didn’t want to have another lens do a nosedive after a gust of wind hit it. Once I was sure that the tripod was level and stable, I mounted the camera and started to form up the composition in the dark.
I wasn’t getting anything exact, but I wanted to get a rough placement of all the elements and get the camera in close to the right position for what I wanted to capture. I was up and ready to go before first light actually hit which was nice. I just sat there for about 15 minutes until the light levels started to come up. At this point, I started to make test exposures to see how things were looking. I could tell early on that the sky was going to be way too bright as the sun increased strength. To counter that, I slid in a 3-stop soft edge ND Grad slightly diagonal to follow the main mountain. This helped things quite a bit, but before too much longer, I was seeing that the main portion of the landscape was getting too dark in order to keep the sky exposed correctly. I went back to the bag and grabbed a 2-stop hard edge that fit in right in front of the other filter. This one followed the diagonal of the mountain pretty precisely with the soft edge filter providing a blending of tones across the scene. I knew that I was still going to have to fine tune the tonality in post, but I was happy that I was very close to what I considered a final exposure.
As the sun continued to rise, I added to the frame count. There were no changes to the composition after the initial adjustments were made, so I was just getting different light quality for each of the frames. Each time I pressed the shutter, I was sure that this was the best light that I was going to see. Then the light would get better and I would snap another one. Eventually, the quality of light started to fade and I looked at my watch. Official sunrise was just a couple of minutes away. I was hoping that the sun was going to cast a warm light on the rolling hills in the distance, and possibly give the sky a bit more color than what I had seen leading up to sunrise. Right at 6:47, the sky turned a golden hue and the distant hills started to show off their textures. This was what I wanted to capture and I cranked off a couple of frames before the light levels increased too much to keep the exposure where I wanted it on the landscape. This composition was finished and it was time to move to another concept. I had toyed around with shooting the boardwalk from an elevated position which was what I planned on doing at this point, however, I saw some things that redirected my attention. The sunlight was casting some very nice shadows on the hills in the distance. I knew that this was going to be short lived, so I decided to change things up to be able to capture the event.
I stripped off the filters and pulled the wide-angle lens off the camera in favor of my telephoto lens. I didn’t bother with any filters for this phase because I didn’t really see a need for any since I was going to be minimizing the sky in the compositions. I moved the camera around a bit until I found the angle that I wanted to shoot with the right elements in the frame. I made some quick shots in the morning haze, hoping that something would come out. Looking at the LCD, I wasn’t all that hopeful since it was a very flat and desaturated picture that I was seeing. I knew that there was going to be some post work with these should I decide to keep them. I really didn’t think that any of these would amount to anything, but when I was showing the 3-star images to Toni before I started the editing, she was very impressed with how they looked and hoped that I would be able to work them out so I would keep at least one of them. That was enough for me to really try to make one of them pop. I chose the one that had the most texture to it and started the editing process. It took me some time, and quite a few tricks to get some visual interest back into the file. I had to really pull on the colors to get them how I had visualized them at the time of capture. When it was all done, I had Toni give it a look. She loved it, so I was happy to put this in with my other keepers from the day.
While I had been shooting isolations with the telephoto lens, I realized that I didn’t have quite the reach that I wanted to have. I went to the bag and grabbed my extender which turned my 70-200mm lens into a 140-400mm lens. I started to work the rolling hills with a much tighter crop, but then noticed that the sunlight was hitting the boardwalk. Right where the sun was the strongest, there were a couple of small trees that were resplendent in Spring color. The light was magical, and I had to get a photo of that. I dialed in the composition quickly and realized that this photo would benefit from a polarizer. I added my Color Combo and dialed in the right amount of contrast to the scene. I grabbed a few shots with slightly different framings so that I had some alternatives to look at when I got home. I loved the structure of the tree to the right of the boardwalk, and the difference in color of the wood was just amazing when combined with the blooms on the trees.
In my quest for a better composition, I moved onto the boardwalk and started to look down the walkway as I had planned on before, only I was using a very long lens instead of the standard one I had anticipated. This was not the composition that I had in mind earlier anyway, so I was happy to have this particular combination on the camera. Instead of looking for leading lines, I decided to focus on the colorful tree and the sun splashed wood in opposition to the shaded wood that matched the tree trunk. I chose to incorporate some funky geometry with the boardwalk to create some drama and visual interest. I’ll be the first to admit that this is unlike my usual photography, but it just felt right when I was framing it up.
I stayed with this feature until the sunlight started to fade and the awesome warm glow turned more neutral. When that happened, I was left with finding something else that I wanted to shoot. Looking back out over the vast hills, I could see that the sun was still making some very nice shadows on the various ridges in the distance. I wasn’t really seeing anything that I wanted to capture as an isolation, so I backed up and looked for another grand composition. One of the boulders that I had used earlier for a foreground element with the boardwalk was looking good surrounded by the blooming trees. I decided to make that a subject, but the telephoto lens was not able to work with this scene, even with the extender removed. I went back to the bag and swapped in my 24-70mm lens which officially meant that I had used my trinity of lenses for this location. It is silly, I know, but I always get excited when I am able to use all three of my zoom lenses during a shoot. I feel like I have accomplished something and had been motivated to let the scene dictate how it wanted to be photographed instead of just using a standard focal length and shooting it all within those confines.
With the standard lens now fixed with the polarizer attached, I was able to compose the image the way that I saw it unfold to my eyes. This photo was going to be all about the textures and the Spring colors popping out. The sky was doing me no favors at all with nothing but haze present at the horizon. I needed to include a bit of sky for the sake of scale, but I didn’t want to include so much of it as to create negative space which would actually become empty space. I played with the framing until I had something that I felt would work out well enough. This was not my favorite way to shoot landscapes because I rely on clouds for so much of what I do. To not have them really felt odd, but I was committed to the composition.
In fact, this was one of the few compositions that I stayed with for more than a couple of exposures. What I wanted to happen was the sunlight needed to hit the top of the boulders for a bit of separation. That took some time, and while waiting for that to happen, the shadows on the rolling hills started to shorten as the sun rose into the sky. I kept shooting until I was sure that the lack of shadows was hurting the image more than the added sunlight to the rocks. It took maybe 10 minutes to get to this point where I felt that I had the best possible light for the image.
I still liked the view, and wanted to do another variation on the original composition that I had started the morning with. That was a shot down the boardwalk from the elevated point of view. I had the right lens on the camera for that idea, so I moved around on the boardwalk to try and find the right angles and position to make the image work. I still wanted to get the Spring colors and the shadows over the distant hills were still interesting. It was almost going to be another grand landscape, but with a very prominent subject in the foreground.
I had lost the warm sunlight, but the sun and shadows on the boardwalk were still very interesting to me. I had to figure out how to deal with the fact that the boardwalk exited from the frame to the left which was a distraction. I chose to keep the crop close, and I would darken that portion of the boardwalk down in post to minimize the distraction even more. I also planned on flipping the image horizontally so that it read better left to right. I felt that by moving the boardwalk to the right of the frame, the primary focus of the composition would become the landscape, not the walkway.
As an interesting aside, I also flipped Viewing Infinity horizontally as well since I felt that it read better in that direction just like this one. These are subtle changes that I make when appropriate to increase the ease of viewing. In both cases, I removed the visual barrier to the landscape by placing it on the right side to keep the eyes from leaving the composition. Since our eyes read from left to right, this is a technique that I use rather often, especially with a landscape where there isn’t much to dictate left from right.
When I was done with this composition, I felt that the usable light was pretty much gone. The warmth was no longer present, and the light was getting rather harsh. I had been at Rough Ridge for just under two hours and had shot 77 frames. It had been a great time, and I was hoping that I would have about three images out of the bunch to process and try the new editing tools in Lightroom. I went ahead and packed up the camera and made the short hike back to the truck. I set my course for home and let Toni know that I would be there soon.
Well, just when I thought that the day was done, I drove past Raven Rock where there is a large tree that I have been interested in trying to photograph for some time now. The light was on the right side, and the sky was largely devoid of distractions. It seemed like a good time to get the shot, so I pulled off on the overlook and grabbed my camera. This time, I used the 14mm prime which was the last bit of glass in my bag. I had already decided to use this lens a long time ago and I had an idea of how I wanted to capture the tree already. I got things positioned and a composition framed up. I had high hopes for this photo, but the images weren’t really looking all that great in the image review. The sun might be too high in the sky for it to work, or the greenery that was growing in might have spoiled the structure. Either way, I was not convinced that I was going to keep any of these photos.
I shot another 8 frames with different angles and camera elevations in an attempt to get something to work. The more I shot, the less impressed I became with the tree and eventually decided to give it up. I packed it all back into the bag and set course for home once again. I took note of how the sun was looking at several other locations just in case I wanted to come back on another sunny day. I reflected about the day and really felt good about having come out on a less than ideal weather day for me. I’m starting to realize that I was actually missing landscape photography. Sure, it is not nearly as unique as my decay work, but there is just something relaxing about going out in nature and photographing beauty. I feel rejuvenated each time I come back from one of these landscape treks, which is not always the case with my decay photography.
Hopefully, you have enjoyed this short trek and all the photos that resulted. As always, if any of these images strike a chord with you and you would like to have a print of it on your wall, just let me know. You can also order directly from the website store if you are just wanted stock sizes. Anything larger or on specialty media will need be ordered directly through me so I am sure to get the right combination for you. There really is no better way of enjoying photography than seeing it in print, in the form intended when the shutter button was pressed.
Thank you for joining me, and I hope to see you back here soon!
Until next time….
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