Zabriski Point, Death Valley

Zabriski Point is a well known viewpoint at the eastern entrance to Death Valley. It is a part of the Amargosa Range in Death Valley, and is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago. This part of DeathValley is noted for its erosional landscape, composed of sediments that were collected at the bottom of the lake in the form of saline muds, gravels from nearby mountains, and ash falls from the then active Black Mountain volcanic field. (Wikipedia: Zabriski Pont) What is striking about Zabriski Point is the colour of the landscape. This image was post processed in Photoshop to create the effect that I was looking for when I actually took the photograph. I de-saturated the blue background and the reddish foreground, which enables the viewer to focus on the yellow band in the middle distance. It becomes the central focus of the image.

Morning at Lipan Point, Grand Canyon

This shot is a good example of waiting for the right moment. I had had arrived at Lipan Point at the Grand Canyon early in the morning, just before sunrise. It was very windy, and some hikers nearby were just preparing to go down into the Canyon on a hike, but they were hesitating due to  possible inclement weather. A dark cloud was behind me, blocking the sun and it looked pretty well like it might be time to pack up. Just as I started walking back to the car, the sky cleared, and bright sunlight broke through. I took a few shots and ended up with a few keepers, one of which I posted here. I always keep in mind some advice I received from a friend of mine, that bad weather can result in good photography. This is especially true at the Grand Canyon, where the weather can change dramatically, and very rapidly.

Sunset Mather Point

Grand Canyon at Mather Point, standing in the middle of at least 100 people, most of them shooting with their I-phones, trying to capture the whole vista on a 2" screen. Of course there are a few shooting with tripod and high end Canons, as there always are at the Canyon. It's a bit uncomfortable trying to muscle your way in for your own shot. I didn't have enough room to use my tripod, but I was able to get a decent shot. No vibration that I could detect in the image. Rangefinders (my Leica M9) are a bit more forgiving as far as shooting in low light at a slow shutter speed, since the rangefinders do not have a mirror like DSLR's, which cause a lot of vibration at slower shutter speeds, say at less than 1/45 seconds. Shooting with a DSLR with this kind of light necessitates using a tripod and usually a cable release. The light level when I took this shot was very low. Using an ISO value of 400, I was able to get this exposure at 1/45 second at f13. However, the bottom 2/3 of the frame was very dark in the raw file. Using Photoshop, and the fact that it was a raw file, I was able to extract the colours in the bottom of the frame. Raw files enable you to extract an amazing amount of information and data that normally would be lost in a jpeg. I made the mistake once in Yellowstone, shooting with my Nikon all in jpeg mode rather than raw. When I started to process the images, I realized my mistake. A lot of images were over or under exposed that I probably could have recovered had I shot them in raw mode. Most of the images that had a broad dynamic range were not recoverable. I guess you learn by making mistakes.