Story Behind the Image-Sunrise at Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Park 1991: It rained the night before. Not the light sprinkling of rain the desert was used to. Not the soaking rain that brought the brown dormant plants back to the green color of life. It was a "once a decade" gully washer. It was the kind of rain that moved boulders and changed the paths of riverbeds. It was the kind of rain you that made you hope you were at home, snuggle up with a book, listening to it pounding on the roof.  Instead, I lay in my tent, watching the leaks drip from the ceiling and wondering why I ever came on this class field trip to begin with.

I could hear voices from the other side of our group campground. Commiserating with friends sounded better than trying to sleep under the constant threat of water torture. I bundled up, unzipped the tent and ran through the downpour to meet up with my classmates and instructor. Ten of us piled into an ancient VW van that night. We told stories, we shared snacks, and a we passed around a bottle of Southern Comfort until it was empty. Sometime after 1:00 in the morning, the rain stopped drumming on the roof of the van and we piled out and made our ways back to our soggy tents and sleeping bags.

The cold front came through sometime between the time I went to bed and when the alarm went off at 5:00 in the morning. I wanted to sleep in but knew the only way to stay warm was to get moving. I climbed into my car and slowly made my way past my companions still bundled up in their tents.

I parked the car beside the road and slowly made my way along a jeep trail into the desert. The landscape was quiet, dark, and encased in ice and frost. Every step I took on the frozen ground sent the sound of cracks and pops shouting across the desert.  I finally found the spindly Joshua Tree I was looking for and set up the camera. As I waited for the sunrise, I pace back and forth on the trail, occasionally skipping and jumping, to keep warm. Finally, the color of the coming sunrise began to color the lowest margins of the sky. The warm color on the horizon bled to purple then to blue and finally back to the black of night directly overhead where the stars still twinkled in the darkness. At that moment I knew I had my image. I've seen more incredible sunsets and sunrises at Joshua Tree since that morning. I've seen skies that seem to catch fire from the setting sun. I've seen fog cloaking the landscape at dawn and I've seen clearing storm send shafts of light blazing across the landscape. Still, no photo in the park has ever captured a moment for me like this one, perfectly catching the contrast between the last lingering cold of the night and the hope of the warm rising sun of the day.

Change

Three years and some months ago my life was turned upside down. A new addition to our family arrived. In the blink of an eye, my life jumped from a planned and orderly existence into the realm of splendid chaos. In the process of learning how to be a parent, I set my photography career aside and concentrated on trying to understand the needs of a little human. It wasn't easy, but I failed, learned, and adapted. The other day, while my son was at preschool, I found myself in my office, holding onto the camera and staring through the window at a tree outside. I suddenly realized that I have a little time to spend on myself again, a little time for photography.

Much has changed in the industry in the last three years. Some of it can only be described as a great leaps forward. Some of the change, however, makes it difficult to make a living as a stock photographer. This is the basis for my new business philosophy. I want to make this fun. No preplanned production shoots with a minimum number of images to achieve. No endless rounds of submissions to busy editors to try to get an image published. I just want to enjoy my photography again, the way I did when I first picked up the camera. I want to share my life and experiences with nature photography with you and I hope you will share your experiences with me. On this blog you will find out how my images were made, What and who inspires me and interesting tips and tricks to make you photography more enjoyable and successful. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions. I'm excited to start this journey and thrilled to be involved in photography again.

If you would like to see more of my work, please visit my website.

Food For Thought

Quote of the day:

It's weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don't even amount to a couple of hours. ~James Lalropui Keivom

Camano Island

As I have mentioned before, Camano Island State Park is about an hour north of us and a great place to go when the winter weather starts to break on short notice. Clearing storms almost always create the best light for me. There is a clarity to the air and the light that rarely happens at other times. Since these periods happen in Washington for only an hour or so, I generally keep all my equipment packed and the truck gassed up to take advantage of a storm breaking up around sunset. Of course there is the evening commute to deal with heading north out of Seattle, but that is another story.

Please remember all images are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission.

From the Files

As I mentioned before, I'm in the middle of the long and somewhat tedious process of scanning most of my old film images. This involves long hours in front of the computer not only scanning, but touching up dust spots and keywording the images. Most of the images I remember, but every once in awhile one comes across my desk that I completely forgot about.

Bodie, California is a great ghost town, arguably the best in the western United States. Run by the California State Parks, it is preserved in a status of "arrested decay". Most buildings are sealed off but the Miller House is open to wander through. At a fairly high elevation and frightfully dry and isolated, the town is worth the effort to get to for anyone interested in history or someone who just likes to explore.

Please remember all images ar copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission.

The Ferry at Mukilteo

My wife Merril has a term she coined to describe a certain type of light at sunset. Right after heavy overcast, the sun will break through and illuminate everything in the foreground very brightly while the scene in the distance will remain in deep shadow. It is a lighting effect we saw very often when we lived in Portland, so it is forever referred to in our house as "Oregon Light".

I always love when this happens, so Tuesday as I was poking around the Mukilteo Ferry dock and the light broke through, I worked quickly, knowing it wouldn't last for long. As predicted, the light only lasted for a minute or so before dipping back into the overcast. I managed to shoot several images of the ferry illuminated by the sun before the entire scene faded to a soft slate blue. I ran under some abandoned docks I had found earlier and shot several frames on the small waves swishing around the abandoned coloumns.

Before I left, I noticed the lights of the ferry were contrasting with the stormy sky to the north. Another few frames of rather long duration finished the evening. Cropping the image to a panoramic format helped create a more dynamic image.

The best part of the entire shoot was not a single image required any adjustments in photoshop beyond tweaking the exposure or cropping.

Please remember all images are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission.

Coal Lake

All the effort required to get to Coal Lake is in the car, slogging up a dirt road. Once you reach the trailhead, you are within a hundred yards of the lake. A classic Cascades lake with heavily forested shores and rocky cliffs. The way it is situated, late afternoon light rarely reaches into the valley of the lake so you are left to shoot during the brighter portions of the day.

Digital is perfect for this type of contrasty photography where the shadows and highlights are too extreme to be recorded properly on film. I used to use a graduated neutral filter to help but here it would be useless with the dappling of light and shade.

Enter the world of digital. I shoot in RAW mode which allows me to record the entire tonal range of the scene. from black to white. I then processed the image twice, once for the shadows and once for the highlights. Using Photoshop I layered the light exposure on top of the dark exposure. Wherever I thought the image was to light, I erased the top layer to reveal the darker exposure down below. After I was happy with the results, I flattened the file to create an image that had good tone in both the shadows and the highlights.

There are many ways to achieve this result. Some are probably better, but this way is very intuitive and works well for me.

Please remember all images are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission.