Snow is Awesome

That's me, just south of Fox Hunter's Paradise

 

With a little work, snow can be(and always is) a wonderful thing.  Sure, we have to sometimes live without electricity, water, internet, or other amenities.  We have to shovel our driveways or get stuck, we have to brush off our satellite dishes to restore entertainment, we sometimes have to light a candle to create enough light to play scrabble.  I mean, it can be a very traumatic experience.

 

I for one, absolutely love snow.  The more the better.  I love the change in the landscape, the ice natural sculptures of ice, and the crunch under my feet.  I also love how snow can bring on an absolute quiet. 

 

I started my day getting dressed at 4a.m.  Since my area recieved over 6" of snow the previous evening, I new that I was gonna need a good head start to make it to Fox Hunter's Paradise by sunrise. 

 

The county road crew came and scraped our road(with an actual constuction scraper), creating a huge pile of snow at the bottom of my driveway.  I thought I could get a little speed and blast through the snow in reverse, but of course I got stuck.  I don't own a shovel, so I found myself trying to dig my car out with a utility rake.  I had been digging for about ten minutes when my neighbor, a local mail carrier who was on his way to work, came up behind me and offered a push.  This was critical in getting me to the parkway on time(and keeping my car from blocking half of the road).

 

I then drove to the Highway 18/Blue Ridge Parkway Junction and parked my car in a safe spot on the side of the road.  It's just shy of 2 miles to Fox Hunter's Paradise, and since a few 4x4's had driven the parkway the night before, I was able to walk in thier tracks:)  I made it to the overlook at the beginning of blue hour, with stars still showing. 

 

While I waited for the sun to rise, I snapped a few predawn shots before heading down the parkway just a little ways to capture the sun breaking the horizon.  The air was coooooooooooold before sunrise.  I tried to clean my graduated filter by breathing on it and wiping it off(I know, not the best choice) and all I got was bits of ice on my filter as it froze immediately.

 

After sunrise walking back to the car, I decided to stop into gully creek, but the rhododendrons that were pushed down by all the snow made navigating the creek very difficult, so I didn't hang around long...

 

Enjoy the image below, and click the link to view the full gallery from Friday's fun.

 

 

Click Here for the Full Gallery



 

 

 

The Sun breaks the horizon near Pilot Mountain 

 

From Gemini with Love...

I recently had the opportunity to photograph the Geminid meteor shower.  I was in luck because the skies were set to be clear here in southwest Virginia.  I chose to shoot at a small field near the Blue Ridge Music center on the Blue Ridge Parkway just north of the Virginia/North Carolina line.
After showing the final photo, some people were curious as to how I managed to capture all the meteors in one frame.  What follows is what a person needs to know should they want to do this themselves.
The items I brought with me were as follows

Canon 5d Mark ii
Canon 17-40mm f4L(your widest lens is recommended)
Tripod
Intervalometer or Cable Release.
Extra Battery(a battery grip would be perfect for this)
A smart phone with a stargazer app.
A good radio station or an mp3 player with 4 hours of music:)

I knew that the Geminids were going to peak around 2am on the night of the shoot.  So I left the house just after midnight to head to my shooting area(about 20 minutes from my house).

Upon arrival, the first thing I needed to do was find out where in the sky the meteors were going to come from.The Radiant(the constellation in the sky that they seem to fall from) this night was Gemini constellation.  Once I found that constellation on my smartphone I had a better idea as to where to point the camera.  It is not recommended to point your camera directly at the radiant point because a falling metoer hitting your lens can cause serious damage.  Just kidding, the closer the meteors are to the radiant, they shorter they appear(think of someone shooting an arrow directly at you from 100ft away, and then someone shooting an arrow to a point 50ft to your left.  The arrow travels the same distance, but you can see much more of it when it is viewed from the side)

From here on out, all that mattered was how I was going to compose the scene.  I opted to put a tent into my scene, so I placed a light inside the tent to help me compose my scene in the dark.

Once my camera was composed, I set the camera to shoot 30 second exposures at 3200iso, 17mm, f4.  I used the intervalometer as a standard cable release and just locked it down.  If you are shooting with a lens around the 24mm length, I would recommend a shorter exposure time, as the star movement will be more apparent on a longer focal length.

Then, all you do is enjoy the show.  I ended up with several meteors showing up in the resulting images.

Before I packed everything up and left, I needed to capture an exposure for the tent.  You can get really creative here if you would like, with any sort of foreground.  For mine, I stood behind my tent and shined the light for a few seconds.

Since I had been shooting for many hours in the early part of the morning, my camera, tripod, and tent were covered in dew and frost!

Now for the boring part....

It's really easy to blend all the exposures together properly.  First I find my tent picture, adjust the white balance to the light of the flashlight, and save it(note that this will look terrible on the top half of your image)

Then I find all the images that have meteors in them, like this...

 and this...

 and this...

Once I have found all of the metoers, I adjust the image for contrast, sharpness, and very importantly, white balance(from here on out you will be working with jpegs), then save all the images in full resolution.

Next you will need to 'blend' them all together.  This is really easy, just a little time consuming.  If you are not familiar with using layers in photoshop or the gimp, make yourself familiar, then keep reading(sorry no screenshots)

I use the Gimp.  It's free, easy, and exactly like photoshop for the things I do.  All I really use it for is layers and masking, all my other edits are completed with Lightroom and Lightroom plugins.

I opened up all the images as seperate projects(you can open them up as layers if you like working that way).  I like working on them one at a time so I keep them seperate.  Then I copy and past one of the images onto another image and add a full transparent layer mask(make a note of where the meteor is in your image before adding the layer mask, because it will disappear).  Then I use the 'lighten only' brush and draw a thin line over the meteor's trail.  This will expose the meteor, and some surrounding stars, so keep it tight!  Flatten your image, rinse, repeat until all of your meteor trails are displaying nicely in one frame.

Then grab your tent image and add it as a layer.  Using the same principle as before, I added the tent into the scene.except I did not use the 'lighten only' brush, I used 'normal').  Since the treeline in my image was black in both the photo shot for the tent, and the stars, blending them together was easy.

There you have it,  an image with two parts.  The bottom part a tent with a white balance set to the flashlight, and the top part a bunch of meteors raining down in a nice cool blue sky:)

Oh and if you take all those photos from your night and blend them together with star trail software, the results are cool as well:)

One Red Morning

An awesomely red morning on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The sun produces an awesome glow just before sunrise, and is a wonder red orb low in the sky just after.  Then the color goes away and I head in to work:) 

Pilot Mountain Pre-dawn



 

Happy Sunday, thanks for looking. :)

The last of the Fall Color at Stone Mountain...

For the second time in as many days, I went to Stone Mountain State Park in North Carolina.  The fading fall color brings a bit of sadness to my eyes. All of this vibrant color is now dwindling to nothing more than brown sticks reaching for the sky... I guess we just need to enjoy it while it lasts and prepare for winter!

Looking up at a backlit red leaf

Just off the trail near the summit of Stone Mountain.  Rain and flowing water leave thier mark down the mountain.

A view from the homestead

A group of buzzards swooping around and acting like the juveniles that they are

Looking up at Buzzards above Stone Mountain

It's all about TIME

I don't want to complain to you, but I must tell you.  I have had the last three days off of work.  These were beautiful fall days with lots of sunshine and a nice breeze.  They were perfect for, well, anything other than what I was doing.
My sinuses have been giving me a bit of trouble lately, and ever since the repair man came to fix our oil furnace I have had a debilitating headache.  Possibly the worst headache I have ever had, and it didn't quit for over 3 days.  I gotta say I get depressed when I can't be outside on a gorgeous day.  When I am stuck inside(or just limited to what I can do) I feel like I am wasting my most valuable resource... Time.
I find it funny how much we as humans waste time.  More time is not guaranteed, nor is it ever able to be replenished, yet, we waste it like crazy.  Whether we are watching mindless tv, looking at facebook(biggest time killer ever), or just being lazy... we waste TONS of time.  Even right now as I write this, I am essentially killing time.  I don't have anywhere to be so I sat down and edited some photos from this morning.
Editing photos becomes cruising the web, reading news.... killing time.

In Edward Abbey's 'Desert Solitaire', he talks about a place where the days are long, and time seems to creep and last forever, just as it should be.
I couldn't agree more, it's hard to find that anywhere but the desert but I think it's still worthwhile to look.

Time is an enemy in life.  work deadlines, sales quotas, retirement funds, savings accounts, all things that take up multiple resources including time.  I think it's important for all of us to find time to escape time.  For me, photography gives me a sense of that peace.  Like today, for example.  I knew exactly when the sun was going to rise, I showed up early and set up different compositions, took some test exposures, adjusted my polarizer, and waited for the sun to rise.   I start shooting like crazy, hurrying from one composition to the next... and just like that, the sun was up, and the shooting was over.  But I didn't just walk back to the car and leave, the moment just after the sun comes up out of the clouds is my favorite.  It's when I turn the camera off, put the lens cap on, move the tripod off to the side, and just watch and feel the warmth.  For a moment there, I really stopped caring about the time, and that right there is a little slice of heaven.

Fall color near Fox Hunter's Paradise on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

White Oak Canyon Fall Color - Shenandoah National Park

 Fall is such an incredible time of year.  It's a wonderful time of year for photogs and non-photogs alike to enjoy the cool mornings, warm days, and some really intense color in the trees.

Shenandoah National Park has just about as much fall color as a camera sensor could handle.  Sometimes too much...  Now, I realize that this is probably not true, but I do feel as if camera sensors don't always do justice to the scene. Yet, other times, a camera sensor brings out more than the human would have seen anyways, so finding the balance can be tricky.  For example, if I tried to make the colors as vivid in the below photo as they were in real life, I would have some very funky, over-saturated images. 

But maybe it's a good thing that cameras only tell part of the story.  If we were able to fully satisfy our thirst for wilderness with a photograph, there might not be any desire to actually be IN the wilderness!

Oh well, until then I guess we as photographers(and many more successfully than I) will have to keep attempting to recreate the beautiful, colorful 3d world into a 2d format that is very unforgiving of your mistakes.

Both images below were shot with the same focal length(17mm), using much different perspectives.
Both images were shot at waterfalls in Shenandoah National Park,  about 18 hours apart.
At this time of year, the waterfalls in the area aren't exactly roaring:)  They more or less trickle down the rocks in tiny streams, dreaming of a day when they can be big and strong again!
 Because of this, the focus really isn't on the falls themselves, they merely play a part in the photograph.

In the top photo, the waterfall takes part in a colorful, yet stark scene of fall color, grey hemlocks, and bald rocks.
In the below photo, the fall color takes the stage in the form of a beautiful reflection.  And the only part of the falls that's visible is simply a shallow pool at the bottom.  
In both photos I used a Kenko Zeta CPL.  I like the Zeta line of polarizers because they are multicoated, reducing flare, and don't detract from your image like a cheap filter will.  They also are affordably priced at around $160(some polarizers can be well over $200).
In the top image I used the polarizer to remove the reflection from the water around the fall, adding to the contrast of the scene with the waterfall 'popping' out a touch from the dark rocks.
In the below image I used it to enhance the reflection of the trees.  This brought out not only the fall color, but rich blues from the sky as well.

 

Prepare For Luck (I'm Turning over a New... Moon)

Luck favors the prepared.  At least that's what most people take from Louis Pasteur's quote "In the fields of observation, chance only favors the prepared mind".

But sometimes, it's luck that makes you prepared in the first place.  Like this particular evening.

I was in Shenandoah National Park for the second time in less than a month.  I came here a few weeks ago with the gf, and loved it so much I knew I had to return for more fall color photography.

Upon my arrival, I had a two small hikes planned, and then figured I would catch the sunset from one of the park's 75 lookouts.  Easy... right?

Well, it's hard to plan photography sometimes, because we photographers are constantly finding different things to photograph.  A mile long walk through nice looking moss and leaves can take hours, and that's all before we get the our intended destination.
So there I was on the last hike of the night, heading for White Oak Canyon Falls.  A nice waterfall in a canyon full of fall color.  My award winning guidebook(which cost me $2 at the Big Meadow Visitor Center) said the hike round trip was 4.6 miles.

Off I went, I was about a half-mile into the trail, at about 4:45pm when I crossed an intersection with another trail where a man was sitting.  I nodded 'hi' and kept moving, until he shouted "Hey, you going all the way to the falls?

"Yes" I said,

"You gotta light?  You gonna be coming back in pitch black!"
In my head I knew that I would have to walk about .5 miles per hour for me to take that long, since civil twilight provides a little bit of light after sunset.

"Really?" I said, "My book said it's only 4.6 miles round trip"

Shaking his head he said "no, more like 4 miles one way"

"ok, well I guess I will just give it a shot!"  I smarted back to him as I walked away...

As I was leaving I could hear the man's wife mentioning to him that the trail was in fact, only 2.3 miles one way.

As a continued down the trail, I kept thinking to myself "man that guy was a Dbag, just because it takes him 2hrs to walk 2 miles doesn't mean it's gonna take me that long"

But for some reason, this interaction with this man made me hurry.  I kept looking up at the sky reassuring myself that I had plenty of time.  But my reassurances were short lived, I started to run.

And run I did!  I ran pretty much all the way to the falls, cutting out a TON of walking time.  Just before I got to the falls, I checked the sun calculator on my phone, and found out that the sunset was MUCH sooner than I expected.  For some reason I thought it was to be around 7pm, when it was closer to 6:30pm.

I took a look at the waterfall when I got there, snapped a photo or two, then made my way back.  I wasn't really concerned about the sunset, just getting out before pitch black, like the guy said earlier.

As you know, since I am typing this, I survived the dark abyss of the White Oak Canyon Trail.  I got in the car and made my way back towards Big Meadow.  As I passed the first overlook, what I saw was the tail end of an incredible sunset over the Shenandoah Mountains.  The layers of mountains and rich color were quite the sight to see.

And then I remembered a blog post I had read earlier in the week from a photographer mentioning that a very, very young moon(super skinny crescent) would be visible just after sunset.  I looked around for it but couldn't see anything, so I got back into the car and started eating an incredibly delicious turkey sandwich made with Earth Grains 100% Whole Wheat Bread.  The texture of the bread and the taste of the Miracle Whip and thinly sliced turkey were truly amazing... but then, I saw it, the moon.  It was behind a layer of clouds and falling fast.

I raced out of the car and started firing away, and just like that.... it was gone.

I then thought back to the man who told me to hurry, and how lazy I thought he was.  I'm glad that the part of me that controls my legs actually listened to him and ran the first half of the trail.  Otherwise, not only would I have been walking out of White Oak Canyon in the dark, I would have missed this awesome sliver of a moon.  I most likely would have been mauled by a pack of juvenile black bears as well.  :)

A young crescent moon sets over Shenandoah National Park