More November Adventure - Four Images and One I Regret Not Making
On the third day of our November adventure, I thought about something that struck me during our fall trip (like, whenever someone would walk up next to our tripods and press the shutter of their DSLR, which was in sports rapid fire mode so they would fire off 20 or so images within a couple of seconds and then just walk away). Compared to a lot of photographers, I don’t make a lot of images when I go out. That doesn’t mean I don’t make a lot of exposures (I habitually take at least 3 frames of each image that I want to photograph - a habit from my film days when a film holder could have a light leak or a negative could get scratched when being processed). And, of course, if I’m photographing moving water I make a lot of exposures just to get the timing and texture of the water right. But in the end, I often don’t make that many different images in a day, even if I’ve been out photographing for several hours. Sunday I made 4 images, though I should have made 5 and even made a test image for that last one. I’m going to show you all of them!
Having decided not to photograph at Smith Rocks again, Ann and I were at a bit of a loss of where to go next, so we didn’t have a pre-dawn location set for the next morning. That allowed us to take our time in the morning and, while it was still fairly early when we rolled out, the sun had already risen. Our goal for the day was to wander the area around Mt. Bachelor to photograph at a couple of locations we’d been to before and perhaps explore some others.
Our first stop was Sparks Lake, which has a view of the South Sister and Broken Top to the north. We ran into patches of ice on the Cascades Lakes Highway and when we arrived at Sparks Lake it was frozen over and very, very low. Ann and I decided to walk around a bit and quickly realized that the exposed lakebed pretty much made many of the types of images we made previously visually unappealing. Although the crackling sound of settling ice was pretty cool. Still, we wound up hiking around a bit more (to parts that are harder to get to when the water is high) and I found an image that warranted a trip back to Beast for the camera gear.
It’s a simple image, reminiscent of my old B&W days and that’s how I saw the image. Fortunately it was on the shady side of a bunch of trees because it was a very clear day. There’s no way I could reproduce the silvery skin of the tree trunk if sunlight was hitting it.
One of my photographic goals this trip was to be very intentional in my image-making. Actually, I try for that to be the case all the time, which is why I make so few images in an outing. But sometimes I get carried away by the place and start making images before I really think about them. So having found this one image, I was reminded that I wasn’t going to just make images because I was there.
In any event, I walked around for a bit more after making this first image (Ann was elsewhere scoping for images, not wanting to walk back to a location she’d already scoped out) and realized that I had a lovely landscape image of Broken Top from a location not far from my tree. Since another of my goals this weekend was to try and make what I consider to be landscape images (instead of my usual compositions) I was pretty stoked. I walked the shoreline to find a spot that added some features in the foreground, and was fortunate enough to find two rocks protruding from the ice where I could brace two of the three legs of my tripod, with the third securely on the shoreline.
Afterwards I scoped out and decided against a few other images at Sparks Lake - nothing else compelled me visually or emotionally to make an image. Which meant I should not make the image. As I said, I wanted to be very intentional in my image making that day. When Ann was ready, we headed off down the road.
After a failed effort at checking out a new location - an unknown (to us) dirt road that was quickly covered in ice and snow called for discretion over valor, especially since we’d left the shovel and max trap at home - we wound up heading to Dillon Falls along the Deschutes River.
We hiked about a mile down the river scoping out locations. I wasn’t seeing much, but Ann said she thought there were things to photograph, but probably under different lighting conditions. As we were making our way back, I suddenly saw an image that I hadn’t seen the first time we passed by it. I told Ann I needed to get my camera and we could come back later too if that’s what she wanted. So we tromped back to Beast to grab our gear.
As I was setting up the tripod, I realized how to make the image I was wanting to make even better. So after a single shot to confirm composition, I put my polarizing filter and multiple neutral density filters on my camera so I could vary the exposure times of the image. What captivated me was the frozen ice on the stranded log, and the rush of flowing water around it. The challenge was to isolate the hanging ice.
This first framing was in keeping with my efforts to make landscape images, though I must confess that there really isn’t much landscape context around the log. Still, it was what I saw and it’s what led me to go back and get my camera. And while I made 29 exposures, two initial test exposures and 9 sets of three exposures each at different shutter speeds, I consider the various exposures of this one subject one “image”.
Having made that image, I told myself it was ok to go follow my usual inclination, which is to get closer. I considered several different lenses for isolating the log (face it, it wasn’t like I was going to walk out into the freezing water to get closer) and settled on one that gave me the ice and a bit of context around it. Plus, as I was making the image I was convinced that this one should be rendered in Black and White.
That evening while I was working on the images I realized that the wider image of the whole log also works well in Black and White. But the distinction is that I saw the detail image in monochrome and intentionally photographed it with that in mind.
With that second image of the tree done (and as a shadow made its way across the tree, dulling the glow from the hanging ice) I decided to call it a day. I walked over to Ann to see what she was working on, discussed things with her a bit, and then made a tremendous mistake.
As Ann was packing up, I was looking around and an image caught my eye. I walked over to grab my gear to “check it out” while Ann was packing. I made a quick image of what I thought I was seeing, and made the mistake of not trusting my eye or my camera. When I looked at the image on the rear LCD, the light around me was too bright for me to properly evaluate the image and to see that, yes, the sensor did capture what I was seeing. So I told myself that pulling out the camera 5 times to get 4 decent images isn’t bad, dropped the idea of working more on this image and packed everything up.
The thing was, I should have been more careful in my inspection of that last image. If I had I would have seen that the lit tree and the lit spray did indeed come out, even though I’d drastically underexposed the image to keep the water from totally blowing out (going absolute white).
I should have done exactly what I did with the ice and the tree - put on a polarizing filter (which helps reduce glare from non-metallic surfaces) and neutral density filters to control how the rushing water appears. It would have required quite a bit of experimentation because not only would the varying shutter speeds effect how the flowing water would look, it would have also impacted how the spray would look. Was there a perfect shutter speed that rendered both the water and the mist in the way I wanted? I’ll never know because I didn’t try. I screwed up. A lapse in judgment cost me a potential image.
Yes, I should be satisfied with four decent images in a day, but I still regret not continuing with that one!
And yes, I’ll be returning to our 2018 Grand Fall Adventure after this post (at least I think I will). What can I say?