Printing the Image - Alabama Hills Morning
As I mentioned in the blog post about our trip, we tried to make our run from Springfield to Phoenix as much a photography trip as possible. That meant early mornings for photographing. Fortunately, our morning at the Alabama Hills was a pleasant one, complicated only by some low-hanging clouds in the east that made for some tricky image-making in the transition between dawn and sunrise. Still, it was well worth the effort of getting up early and fumbling around in the dark hoping you’ve got your camera pointed at something interesting. Fortunately, we were both successful. But while Ann wasn’t feeling quite ready to print anything, I had three images, taken in fairly quick succession, that I wanted to see on paper, so here they are.
The first image was a grand landscape. It was taken from the location we decided upon from our quick scouting drive-around the previous afternoon. The advantage to this site was there were a couple of flat rock outcroppings you could go to for an image - each presenting very different foregrounds. I chose one that had rock formations on either side, with a gully to lead the eye into the distance. Photographing very early in the morning presents problems on-site with trying to get good focus in what is essentially the dark. Cameras don’t autofocus well in the dark, so you have to do it manually and trust your eye on a screen struggling with light noise to project a clear image. Then, if you’ve been successful, it comes time to print the image. There it’s easy to make the image too bright and lose that sense of early morning light. It’s not easy getting a print to look “right.”
As I mentioned, there was a low-lying bank of clouds to the east. At one point it created the oddity of a soft glow streaking across some lighter rocks in the middle ground (enhancing them even more) as well as the generally brightening light making its way to the mountain tops. As I was waiting there I thought I noticed that happening, so I made an exposure. Apparently there had been a gap (or thinning?) of the clouds in an area on the horizon because the images I made in the few minutes afterwards don’t have that slight mid-ground glow. Unsurprisingly, the image with the glow was the one I chose to develop.
I guess if I’d had more patience, I would have waited longer for a bit more color to come to the mountains, but there was another image I’d imagined from the previous afternoon’s visit, so I decided to pack up and quickly move over there.
By then the pinkish glow of dawn had started hitting the mountains. This spot was only about 50 feet away from where I’d been, but it made for an entirely different image. It was a real struggle to get everything framed in the image just right - to include the plant on the bottom right but not clip the grass on the upper left. The location from where the image was made was on a narrow rock ledge running along the length of the frame. One tripod leg was on the ground and two extended off the sides onto rocks for stability. My backpack was atop a rock that formed a wall at that spot. I couldn’t move forward or back, so I had to make it work
I’m lucky it all fit within the frame. Focusing was a pain as well. Again, I lucked out - the background is not as blurry as I’d feared. I guess focusing on that odd plant-looking stain on the rock to the right was correct.
The third of the shots was a spontaneous image - totally unplanned. When I climbed up from the rocky area where I’d taken the above image, I stood up and started looking around for just one more image before the sun popped over the clouds to wash everything in bright sunlight. As I slowly turned around to face north - there was the obvious subject. Now to make something of it. Knowing such images are transient, I worked as quickly as I could. As it was, the pink in the clouds faded significantly from the time I set up my tripod and the time I pulled my camera out of my backpack and locked it on the tripod head. I quickly composed, focused and rapidly snapped two images.
I quickly rotated the camera on the tripod for a horizontal image and saw on the LCD screen that the cloud had lost all color. I looked up to confirm what the LCD was showing me. Still, I composed a horizontal image and waited a few moments, but to no avail. Eventually the blaring sun hit the mountain tops, so I made the image, but the clouds were . . . less. Beautifully shaped, but less. Lifeless. But I had the vertical image! And I was feeling fortunate that I might have had three decent images in one morning’s shoot!
The print session went well. The hard part had been to develop the images well (the foregrounds were all way too dark - the camera does not see like the eye). But with today’s technology, there is enough information in the dark areas to bring out what you saw at the time of making. We do live in fortunate times. I printed the first image, the wide, narrow landscape, on a larger A3 paper (I thought we had a few sheets of A2, but alas, no). The bottom 2 images I printed 11”x14”. They all printed well with lots of detail, texture in the rocks and depth to the landscape.
You really can’t ask for more from a few prints made in a quick printing session.