Yellowstone Mystic Falls
I’ve returned to working on more of my images from last Fall’s trip. This time, I decided to select a folder that only had a date, unsure of what precisely lie within, to choose my images to develop and then post. I was surprised at what I found - material enough for two posts! One post I knew I would do the day I was photographing the images (the subject of the next post), but the other set (this post) came as a surprise.
To give you a bit of context, we’d planned our day to do our normal get-up-early morning shoot, and then, after the sun rose and we had breakfast, to head over for a later-morning hike to explore a new area for us in Yellowstone. The hike was up the Little Firehole River to Mystic Falls. And given the fact we had very clear (read: cloudless) sunny skies, we really weren’t expecting much photographically. But hey, it’s tough to beat a nice hike up a river to see some waterfalls and since we’re photographers, you gotta bring your camera gear. So that’s what we did.
The reason we didn’t expect much photographically is that, as I’ve mentioned before, bright sunny days brings all sorts of contrast problems with landscape photographs. While, bright sunny days are great for family snap shots (and vacations in general), to say it’s difficult to make compelling images in bright sunlight with blue cloudless skies is an understatement. That’s why I was surprised when I realized as I was reviewing the images that, despite the extremely contrasty conditions, I’d managed to make some interesting shots. To be honest, I’d forgotten I’d made them. I don’t know if it was the capabilities of my camera sensor (compared to that of film) or Capture One (or both), but I was able to work with what was there to bring out what I’d been seeing that day.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about concerning exposure issues, here is an out-of-camera, unedited image of the first image of the bunch (actually, it’s the very next “negative” on the “roll”). As you can see, the shadows are dark and very deep (near-black) and you can hardly see into them. This is exactly what happens with shadows in bright sunny conditions. Then look at the sunny areas where there is whitewater. Same thing but on the opposite end of the tonal range - seemingly total white with none of the texture you see in real life. Getting the best exposure possible means getting as much details in the high values as possible without totally blowing them out (once you hit pure white, any additional exposure doesn’t give you additional details). It can be a very tricky thing, so you always take a variety of exposures giving a bit more and a bit less than what you think is right just to be sure. Better safe than sorry. Consequently, the other exposures I made that same time have a bit more detail in the shadows have absolutely no detail in the sun-lit whitewater areas.
To me, the water on the rocks at the bottom of the image is unappealing.
The reason photographs are different than what you experience when you’re there is because the eye sees very differently than the camera. As one looks from the whitewater into the shadows in real life, the eye automatically compensates for the change in brightness. You’re never looking at both at the same time, so it appears as if everything is easily seen. On film (or sensor in this case), you have to figure out how to get that wide contrast into a single exposure. It’s not always possible, but is totally impossible if you don’t technically expose your negative well.
This is where developing your image comes into play and the capabilities of your sensor and processing tools weigh in. There are limits to what you can do, but there is often a lot of “information” in both the shadows and the high values you can work with, if you expose your “negative” correctly. That’s what I mean by the “best” exposure - the one that has all the information I’ll want to use later. Also, I use the term “develop,” others use the term “post-processing,” which I don’t really care for. Post-processing sounds to me as something done after-the-fact without the intention of having something in mind while creating the image. Perhaps it’s just semantics, but for me, I understand that I’m trying to capture as much information as possible on my “negative” so that I can have the maximum amount of flexibility when I develop my image at home. There is no “post-“ anything, it’s all part of one continuous process from seeing to having a finished image. Without the developing of the image, it’s often not very appealing straight-out-of camera.
Anyway, the purpose of this first image is to show you what the conditions were like that day, and a provide a photo of our destination, Mystic Falls. This is what I “saw” when I was there.
While it’s a decent image of Mystic Falls, I wouldn’t say there’s anything exceptional about it. I did enjoy though, working to get the water the way it “felt” at the time I was photographing, and coming up with a framing of the landscape that has some depth and flow to it. When you’re out in the field photographing, you can still learn a lot (and gain a lot of joy) from making images you know aren’t going to be stellar.
Back to why I decided to do a post of these afternoon images. I mentioned my surprise in finding images from the ones I made that afternoon and the surprise came in the form of two sets of images from the hike. The first was a series of water compositions I made earlier in our hike, downstream from the falls. I had a variety of images to work with, with some of them extremely abstract. However, I’ve decided to show one that has one foot in reality (the above-water rock to the right) in the midst of the abstract water forms.
Again, I had a blast not only finding interesting water patterns to compose within the frame, but manipulating my shutter speed (through the use of polarizing and neutral density filters) to find just the right shutter speed that captured the feeling of the water. In this instance, the bright sunlight really helped by giving me spectral highlights and patterns on the water surface that I would not have otherwise gotten if the skies had been overcast (other whitewater patterns would have been there regardless). Plus, the intense sun lit the rocks on the bottom of the riverbed, to add more interest to the image. It’s the subtle brown coloring of the rocks that made me decide not to make this a black and white image, although it appears nearly to be just that.
Believe me, there were a lot of images to pick from and I suspect I’ll be going back to work with (read: play with) some of them.
The other image that surprised me was an image taken not far downstream from the falls, in a transition area from the rocky falls to the wider, more flat river. When I first came across it on my monitor it looked so “off” that I told myself I really couldn’t be that bad and there had to have been something there that led me to set up and photograph it.
Once I realized that I’d seen the image in a square frame and I cropped it accordingly, it all came rushing back to me. I immediately turned it into the black and white image I’d imagined when I made the image. Once I did that, then the developing of the image became obvious, even though dealing with the sun-lit highlight areas was a nightmare.
The image turned out better than I thought it would.
It just goes to show that you can make good images under any conditions. You just have to open your mind enough to see them. And pray you’ve done everything right and have the technical skills to overcome the problems of photographing in bright sunlight.
If you’re reading this the day it’s posted, have a Happy Thanksgiving!