Wandering the Shoreline
I took advantage of the nice weather Sunday evening to photograph sunset out at Tuttle Creek Lake. I’ve noticed that almost all of the photography I have done this winter has been “waterscapes.” I’ve always really enjoyed photographing water but this winter it seems that I’ve only really been inspired by water. I’m sure once things start to green up this spring I’ll be drawn back out into the Flint Hills, but for now I guess I go where the inspiration takes me.
I wanted a location on the eastern side of Tuttle and a quick check using The Photographer’s Ephemeris revealed that the sunset would be lined up nicely with a small cove not far from the dam at Tuttle…a perfect location for what I had in mind. This cove, like the one I recently wrote about, is only a 10-15 min drive from home and there is a short hiking trail in the area. A short hike to the cove seemed like just the thing for a nice Sunday evening.
When I got to the cove I decided to walk down to the shoreline and photograph sunset using the rocks along the shoreline as my foreground subjects. Often you will read about the importance of the foreground, middle ground, and background in landscape photography. Some people seem to dismiss the sky as a “background” and maybe you can do that when shooting in the mountains or even out in the Flint Hills, but on this evening, the sky was my only background (and a pretty one it was too!). It was a fairly still evening and the reflections of the sunset in the water made for an interesting middle ground and helped tie the water to the sky.
Pebbled
(click on any photo in this post to enlarge it)
I started in the cove itself using the small rocks along the shore as my foreground. To really make these rocks noticeable I selected a low shooting position. I decided to make a panorama of the cove to be able to show the entire cove with one photograph.
Wandering the Shoreline
After photographing the cove, I wandered down the shoreline toward the dam. It was fun to walk along the edge of the lake composing various photos with the different groups of rocks I came across.
Sunken Treasure
The water was clear (really clear for Tuttle!) near the shore so I also composed a few photos using the rocks under the water as my foreground.
Jumbled
I suppose it may seem boring to some people to walk along the shore just photographing rocks but there was a huge range of shapes, colors, and textures in the rocks to photograph.
The Last to Melt
At one point I came across a small ice formation left from the last (and only) snow we had. The ice made for an interesting subject and I spent the last of the remaining light making a few photographs of the ice.
Just me
My last shot of the day was a bit of a self portrait. I initially started to make these photographs a few years ago as a way to remind myself to take a break from looking through the camera and make sure I spend some time just “being there”. Unfortunately I haven’t been remembering that much lately so I’m going to restart making these photographs. I really do not like having my picture taken, even by myself…the lengths we go through to try to become better people…
Technical stuff:
All of the photographs in this post except for the last one are HDR’s from 3 to 5 exposures. Even the pano is made up of HDR shots. The pano itself required 3 photographs to span the entire cove and each section of the pano is an HDR made from 4 exposures. Shooting directly into the sunset meant that the dynamic range of the scene was too high for my camera to record with one photograph (but not at all too high for my eyes to see). Unless I wanted to settle for completely black foregrounds or blown out skies the only options available are HDR photographs or split neutral density filters. I used wide angle lenses for these photographs and low shooting positions to emphasize the foreground subjects and high f-stops (18 to 22) for enough depth of field to keep everything sharp. Of course in this low light at f18 and f22 shutter speeds were slow so a tripod was a must. I bracketed my shutter speeds for the HDR’s in manual mode.
Fly Me To the Moon…finally a moon rise!
As you might have guessed from past posts, I have a mild obsession with photographing the (near) full moon rise. I try to get out a day or two before each full moon and photograph the moon rising over the landscape. Around the full moon, the moon rises near enough sunset that you can photograph both the landscape and the moon and record detail in both. My last several attempts to photograph the moon rise didn’t work out so well including a trip to the Flint Hills and an attempt at Tuttle Creek Lake. My last attempt at Tuttle Creek Lake was at a cove I’ve photographed several times now both at sunrise and my last failed moon rise outing. I really wanted to photograph the moon rise at this cove so with conditions looking good I headed back to the cove to try again.
Fly Me to the Moon
(click on any photo in this post to enlarge it)
Persistence (that’s such a much nicer word than stubbornness) paid off this time. No clouds to hide the rising moon and still conditions…perfect. As an added bonus several birds (gulls mostly I think) were flying around the cove and made for some great subjects to pair with the trees and the rising moon. As the moon first came over the horizon I composed the moon with some interesting trees and then waited for birds to fly by.
Over the Cove
As the sunset started developing in the west, the sky in the east, where the moon was rising, started picking up color as well. With the still conditions I has some nice reflections to work with. A colorful sunset is always good to photograph, but the other side of the sky will often be just as dramatic.
To The Moon and Back
With the all the interesting trees out in the cove I had lots of compositions to work with just by working along the shoreline of the cove.
Veiled
As the moon continued to rise it started moving behind some clouds on the horizon which I thought made for some interesting photographs, especially with the birds still flying around the cove. I had envisioned photographs of the moon rising above the trees in the cove, but had no idea the birds would be in the area. I was glad they were and glad that they stayed out the entire time I was photographing. They really added to the photographs I was making.
Sticks and stones
I ended the evening with some wider angle shots of the moon over the cove. Most of this cove is pretty bare right at the shoreline, but at one point there are some rocks near the water’s edge. I liked this composition with the rock in the foreground paired with the moon on the other side of the frame. I thought it made an interesting composition, especially given that the moon is just a (really) big rock in the sky.
This was another great trip out to Tuttle and a very peaceful evening. And all this only about 10-15 min from my house. It took me several trips to this cove to get the moon rise photographs I had visualized but it was worth it. Going back to a location over and over again may be necessary to create the photographs you want. I think this is more common in landscape photography than many people think. I’ve read stories of people hiking several miles to mountain lakes before dawn for several days in a row before they get the conditions they wanted. A lot of times you get lucky and conditions are great when you are out with your camera, but there is a degree of persistence required… to make time to go out with your camera at the right times and to also be willing to revisit locations again and again. For me, and I would imagine most nature photographers, revising locations is not much of a sacrifice, it is actually a joy.
Technical Stuff:
I used a couple of different lenses for these photographs ranging in focal length from 24mm to 250mm. I was using my telephoto lens to isolate tree trunks and the moon while waiting for birds to fly by for the first photograph and a wider focal lengths for the landscape type shots such as the last photograph. The contrast range of the light wasn’t that wide on this evening so I didn’t need to use HDR for any of these shots. HDR’s would have been difficult in any case with the birds moving in and out of my shots. I started the evening with my ISO set a 100, but later as the sun dropped and it got darker I had to bump the ISO up to 400 so the birds flying through my scenes weren’t blurred especially on more landscape style shots were I needed a bit more depth of field than I could get with my lens wide open. Stopping my aperture down to f8 or so meant losing a bit of light and thus a slower shutter speed. Increasing the ISO let me “buy” back that shutter speed.
Sticks and Stones Pano
In: On Location · Tagged with: birds, moon, moonrise, Tuttle Creek Lake
Changing Conditions And Paying Attention
A couple of weeks ago I was driving back into Manhattan at the end of a long day (up at 5:00 am, yuck!) and I had a good chance to watch the clouds changing in the west. It was late afternoon and the clouds were really forming some interesting patterns and textures. Not too much cloud cover and not really solid in anyone spot…ideal for a fantastic sunset to photograph.
I didn’t have much time so I had to pick a location close to home. It was a still evening which would mean there would be a chance for some nice reflections shooting over water toward the west. A nice location that was close and would let me shoot over water facing west was Stockdale Park….just what I wanted. I’ve written before about the benefits of knowing the area close around your home base…it really pays off in situations like this.
Clouding Over
So I’ve got my camera and tripod in the car and I’m heading to a great location and I’m thinking this is going to be great! However, in the short time it took me to get home, get my gear and get back in the car the clouds had really moved in to the west, to the point where the entire horizon was solid overcast. Not good for my sunset photography plans. I was amazed by how fast the sky had changed. I was also struck by the fact that I was paying such close attention to how the sky was changing. Paying more attention to the natural world around me has been one of the best things that I have gained from photography.
Breaking Up
Just as fast as the cloud cover had increased it started to break up as the sun was setting. Maybe I was going to get my great sunset after all. With the cloud cover opening up some, I spent some time working up and down the shoreline looking for interesting foreground compositions in the rocks and ice.
Sinking Lower
As the sun was just sinking below the horizon the colors of the sunset really picked up. The lake was still so I was getting nice reflections in the water. It was getting colder as the sun got lower, but it was still a beautiful evening. Still, quiet, very peaceful. I recently ran across a blog post “For Great Photographs, ‘This is What I Saw’ Isn’t Enough” which discussed trying to create more with a photograph than simply the light that was recorded. That might sound strange given that photography is about recording light, but I really liked this blog post. It put into writing something that I haven’t been able to very well (I did try once with this post, but I don’t think I got the point across well). Creating a photo for me means more than simply trying to record light…I want to convey what it was like to be there, a sense of “wow what an evening to be alive!” For the photograph above, I hope viewers feel a sense of calm, maybe a feeling that it was cold that evening and also a feeling of “wish I would have been there”.
Afterglow
All in all another great evening out in nature. And a good feeling about noticing that I was noticing nature more, that I was paying attention to something other than my to-do list, responsibilities, etc. Who says art isn’t good for the soul?
Technical Stuff
All the photos in this post were made with an ultra wide-angle lens (16-35 mm full frame equivalent). All are HDR (high dynamic range) images. Why HDR’s in this case? That was the only way I could record the range of light in these scenes, the difference in light between the foreground and sky was too large for my camera to capture it. I could have used a split neutral density filter, but I prefer HDR. Not that HDR is any better, or worse, than using filters it is just the tool I prefer to use. I selected low shooting positions to emphasize the foreground in these shots and tried to select compositions with the foreground scene “pointing” more or less toward the sun. I used f-stops ranging from f11 to f18 depending on how close I was to the foreground. I needed everything in the photo sharp, but I wanted to use only as much f-stop as I needed so I didn’t lose sharpness to diffraction.
In: On Location · Tagged with: Stockdale, Tuttle Creek Lake
