Photoclubalpha

The family drug the Airstream to Bryce Canyon for the 4th, to escape the heat. Spent several days there. I'm still in awe of what turned out to be an epic sunrise one morning....

Hope ya'll enjoy.



Focal Length 16 mm
Shutter Speed 1 sec
Aperture f/22
ISO 160

That is an epic Sunrise. Is it a single shot or any bracketing/HDR involved? Just curious.

Sury

Simply beautiful.

Nice!

sury wrote:That is an epic Sunrise. Is it a single shot or any bracketing/HDR involved? Just curious.

Single exposure with a 3 stop reverse GND filter. Very little other processing was done. I texted a couple of my buddies a cell phone shot of the back of my camera. Here's that image....

That's a wonderful view, Lonnie, and I especially like the flowers in the foreground. It is an epic sky!

Wow! What vivid colors in that beautiful landscape. Thanks for sharing!

One thing about Bryce that makes it "difficult" for my preferred style of shooting is often times the foreground elements leave something to be desired. They aren't very "clean". The "solution" to that "problem" is to switch to a little bit longer lens and leave out the dominating foreground elements. One then makes the mid-ground work as a foreground, the "background" work as the mid-ground and the sky work as the "background". That works very well and and I've got lots of shots like that from this trip and others. Often times what "troubles" me about those shots is that due to the nature of the landscape you get distracting elements that pop in on the edges of the frame. Trying to frame them out of the image simply results in losing some other area of drama in the composition. That's simply the way it is at Bryce.

With that being said, my #1 goal for this trip was to make a "dramatic" composition with a very strong foreground element. The morning I took this shot, I found this spot well before sunrise (I had been shooting the milky way about 90 mins before sunrise and the sky had gotten bright enough that the milky way was no longer clearly defined). I snapped an image of this in the pitch black and moved on. The farther around the Rim Trail I traveled, the more my mind kept coming back to that spot. So after about 15-20 mins of exploration along the Rim, I went back to this spot. It took me about 5-10 mins of recomposing the image for me to get it where I was happy with it (I kept running into the issues above, along with where to place the sun in the scene). At that point, it was just waiting for the sky to become "right". Fortunately for me, during this image, the sun went behind the closer stratus clouds while continuing to illuminate the altocumulus clouds high in the sky. It made balancing the exposure (which was challenging as I was shooting pretty much direly into the sunrise) way easier. I still had to use a 3 stop revers GND filter to balance the exposure.

With that back-story, there are alot of "design elements" that I intentionally utilized in this photo. All of these are present in this photo in some way:

Contrasting colors: Orange/blue are on opposite sides of the color wheel. It's why even though This Image has a "better" sky, I personally prefer the one in this post). The natural red/pinks/oranges of the rocks in this part of the world, will often naturally provide this contrast and it's why Southern UT and Northern AZ are mecca's for landscape photography.

Congruent elements/Juxtaposition of elements: The light colored flowers and the light clouds mimic each other in color, luminance and form.

Leading lines: The different sedimentary layers in the hoodoos and the altocumulus clouds direct the viewers eye towards the center of the image.

S-Curve: The green trees moving thru the middle of the image work similarly the leading lines above. It also proves as sense of "movement" in the image.
Intersecting layers: See "deep space" below.

and my favorite "Deep space" (the sense of "infinite" depth in the image). The foreground, mid-ground, background and sky IMHO, work together very well in this image to provide a sense of vastness to the landscape.

There's alot going on in this image that the casual observer might not pick up on.

mvanrheenen wrote:Wow! What vivid colors in that beautiful landscape. Thanks for sharing!

Bryce Canyon is a photographer's paradise. Stand in the same spot and the colors will change constantly as the light changes with clouds in the sky and motion of the sun. It's only a three hour drive from the North Rim of Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon, so it's easy to go to both places on the same trip. Personally, I prefer Bryce Canyon to Grand Canyon, but either one is definitely worth a visit.

There are also some great shots when you walk the trails that wind down among the colored rocks (known as "hoodoos"). However, you should be in good health if you walk the trails, as the rim of Bryce is at almost 2500 meters, and there is significant elevation change when you walk the trails. Even someone in good health will be breathing hard when walking back up to the rim.

- Tom -

Lonnie,
Thanks for the background. Very fascinating and at the same time edifying to me. I haven't heard about reverse GND filter till you mentioned and now I am curious in a want to learn way, as to why you chose a reverse GND? What was about the scene
that called for filtering out the middle portion? I could see the value of GND being some what familiar with the terrain, having
visited parts of Utah and Arizona but am baffled with the use of reverse GND.

With best regards,
Sury

Sury,

Usually, Reverse GND's are most useful with flat horizon lines like near water. They are used when shooting directly into the the light source, most frequently the sun, and the light source is almost at the horizon and the sky is still light enough that it won't blow out the image. As I'm sure you know as the sun rises/sets the farther up into the sky you look the darker the sky becomes. To the reverse GND tends to balance the entire sky. They are most effective on UWA lenses where you have a very wide view of the sky.

This is in contrast to "normal" GND filters where the strongest darkening is at the upper end of the filter. I find these most effective when shooting away from the light source.

Here's a video from Sign-Ray that gives a very good explanation of these filters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qDHxWvK5F0

Lonnie,
Thank you for taking time to explain. Much appreciated. I learned something today.
After reading your first post, I did search on reverse GND but could not figure out its application.
Now I know. I did use a regular one for sunset in the past but that was at ocean so aligning the transition
line was not that challenging. Now I am off to acquiring one of those to experiment and learn something new.

Sury

Lonnie, A beautiful shot of Bryce Canyon. Made my first visit there just over a week ago as part of an organised tour of several of the national parks and can really appreciate the amazing nature of the place.

Ossie