And so we close our visit to Custer State Park with a rock formation under a little smear of clouds and a gibbous moon – the exact same moon that produced the recent solar eclipse, as hard as that may be to believe.
I’ll use this image to illustrate a basic trait of photography: photos always have increased contrast over what our eyes see at the time, which is why it’s important to pay attention to how bright and sharp the light is. See that dark cave in the rock face? If your monitor is adjusted properly, you should be able to just make out that it’s not a cave at all, only a shadow of the boulder to the immediate right, but there’s a good chance all you see is blackness there (especially if you’re viewing this on a phone or some other piece of shit that doesn’t allow you to adjust the dynamic range usefully.) Standing where Jim stood, you would likely have been able to see that it was just a shadow, but the darkness was increased within the photo – not by anything that Jim did, but just by being a photo with a limited range of light available. Looking into the real sky would probably also make you squint a bit, but the photo doesn’t hit you that hard, does it?
If it helps, here’s an inset of that same shadow, brightened considerably – proof not only of the lack of caves, but that the scene managed not to exceed the range of the camera, even when it got damn close. It can be easy to lose detail within shadows in such light conditions, and for brighter areas to bleach out to pure white as well. Which is why I always say that, with high-contrast light (bright with distinct shadows,) look for low-contrast subjects – in other words, not brilliant flowers, and not zebras. And not people, on the whole – the shadows makes faces almost into caricatures. Plus there’s the squinting.
I think we’re still in Custer State Park, and I’m not going guess at the process that formed these distinct rock towers – oh, hell, yes I am. It’s likely layers of a harder stone, formerly sedimentary, that got uplifted by geologic folding and then weathered away. But that’s not important (sorry geologists.) More useful to us – since you’re on a nature photography site – is the way the light works. Textures like these beg for sharp and distinct sidelighting, which emphasizes their coarse nature. Direct light, such as immediately behind the camera, wouldn’t make these half as forbidding. High contrast light can have a negative effect on many kinds of photos, but it’s situations like this where it works very well, throwing all of those edges into sharp relief. And the framing with the tree layers really kicks it, too, providing a lot of depth to the scene while mimicking the rock formations. I like it.
When skimming through the slide pages looking for this week’s submission, I came across a couple of different slides of brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis,) which started me thinking. Many years ago, in need of something with which to brand my letterhead and envelopes that said “nature photographer” (other than, you know, the actual words, “nature photographer,”) I settled on a particular pelican image that seemed dynamic yet simple.
Embedded photos don’t reproduce well on most one-color printing systems unless you either change the printer settings, which affects the entire page and greatly slows down the print job, or convert the image into halftone. ‘Halftone’ is the process of reducing the image to dots – the denser the dots, the darker the portion of the image. It means a hit to resolution but actually much better results than trying to produce gradient tones from any printer that has two options: put ink down or don’t.
Thinking, Hey, that was a cool photo, I should feature that!, I went looking for it. And thought I’d found it with the above image, but after scanning, I could see the wings were different. Yet I never did find the original. Either I was blowing past it (I have several hundred slides in the Bird category, so…) or I’d shot it on negative film, longer ago than I thought. Or I lost it entirely, which is really damn hard for me to do, since the slides remain in sleeve pages unless actually being scanned or submitted, and I know when I’ve submitted them. Right now I’m going with blowing past it, so maybe it’ll appear later on when I go through the pages again while paying more attention.
But I can tell you, it looks good on the envelopes!
I don’t care how the stupid song goes, this is not an antelope – there are no antelopes in North America. This is a pronghorn (Antilocapra americana,) more closely related to giraffes than antelopes. I expect you never to make that mistake again (or suffer the wrath of a nature photographer – you know how we get.)
Meanwhile, Jim’s got this thing about his subjects facing right. It probably says something deep-seated and psychological about him. Walk around to the other side, Jim! It looks like the light was better there anyway…
This, and the last few days worth of Jim pics, were all from Custer State Park, where apparently there are a lot of wild donkeys or burros. Something vaguely horselike, anyway. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of white ones, which makes this pair notable at least, but seriously, most of my attempts at elaborating on these images are going to be wrong to some degree, so we’ll just hope that Jim happens along with more accurate details. Or a more interesting fabrication. Whatever works.
So, it was time for another mountain trip. It had been a few years since I’d been last, to the Blue Ridge area in NC, but over fifteen since I’d been to the Lake Rabun area of Georgia. This time around, I was accompanied by The Girlfriend and The Girlfriend’s Sprog, neither of which had been to Lake Rabun. We only had time for a brief trip, but it was enough time to see what we were after. The audio tells the story a bit better.
Walkabout podcast – Yeah, me too
The opening image, by the way, is Looking Glass Falls in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina, near the town of Brevard – definitely the easiest waterfall to access that I’ve come across. As empty as it seems here, it was actually a busy day down there, and I waited until several people were out of the frame before snapping that one; a couple of minutes later, several more visitors decided to swim in the pool directly underneath the falls, which doesn’t create the ideal shot. I spent a little time chasing frames of opportunity.
But our key destination was still over an hour south into the mountains of north Georgia, because we had to get into the path of the total solar eclipse. Did you really expect otherwise from me? Well, you could have been wrong, because it wasn’t going to take much to convince me not to bother, for reasons stated within the podcast. I had also been considering meeting up with Jim Kramer (that name may sound familiar,) since he lived very close to the path of totality in Kansas and I’d been looking for an excuse to get out there anyway. But I also considered the possibility that the weather would go bad in any particular location and there would be little or nothing to see, and figured that if we each remained (more or less) in our own areas, we’d double the chance of one of us, at least, getting useful viewing conditions.
Jim, unfortunately, did indeed run into some adverse cloud conditions, though he still got a few worthwhile images:
As you can see, the weather wasn’t quite cooperating where he was.
A quick note here. Jim splurged for a dedicated solar filter intended for photography, an expensive little bit of equipment useful primarily for eclipses and sunspots. I, on the other hand, am a cheap bastard, and I fashioned a solar filter from basic materials, which I also provided to the Indomitable Mr Bugg, who also ran into clouds, right before peak coverage in his area, though he’d gone out to Myrtle Beach where the eclipse wouldn’t be total, just 99%.
But here’s another example from Jim, showing what a dedicated solar filter will do:
Curiously, the edge of the moon is quite sharp, but the edge of the sun has a peculiar effect which I’m putting down to the exposure that Jim used, or possibly clouds. He may come along and correct me.
In contrast, here’s what I was accomplishing with my homemade filter:
I didn’t really get much edge detail from the moon, but it’s not as bad as I’d feared, and I still captured a couple of sunspots on the sun’s limb. And don’t ask me why astronomers use the word “limb” in this manner. Or why I bothered to perpetuate something I find so silly.
Now I take a moment to sidetrack for a curious observation. It could be noticed that the light wasn’t quite as bright as the eclipse moved towards total, but it was much more subtle than I imagined it would be and could easily be missed if one wasn’t alert. On a whim, I set the second, unfiltered camera manually for ‘Sunny 16’ and snapped a couple of frames, then did some at full auto exposure. Here’s my comparison:
On the left is the kind of exposure that Sunny 16 should produce on a clear day, while on the right is what it did produce as totality loomed a few minutes away. The actual settings for the left side of the frame was 1/10 second at f4.5, a couple of minutes before totality, which is seven stops less light than an unobstructed sun, or 1/128th the amount of light. The darker frame on the right was actually 13 minutes earlier than the one on the left, when the sun was less covered. While standing out there, as I said, it didn’t really seem that dark.
I did a sequence of frames every minute leading up to totality, but as it closed in I went for the thinnest sliver of sun I could manage. Which wasn’t too shabby, despite some filter fudging.
To the naked eye, this would be producing the ‘diamond ring’ effect; totality occurred a scant second later. And then I could remove the filter and shoot direct, which allowed some better detail.
See the pinkish blobs around the lower and right edge? Those are actually solar prominences, or ‘flares’ erupting from the surface of the sun, and yes, they were just barely visible to the naked eye. I’m quite pleased.
By the way, this is 1/50th second at f11, ISO 100, which would have been enough to slightly overexpose a full moon, just to understand the brightness of the corona.
While I was playing my games, The Girlfriend was snapping away with her own camera, without the benefit of a tripod and trusting auto-exposure – not the best approach, but I was quite busy and she hadn’t asked for guidance ahead of time. One of the frames she got produced a great effect, so I have to share:
Seriously, we didn’t touch this except to crop in tighter. What happened was, she moved the camera during the exposure, and the ‘cat’s pupil’ was the section of the eclipse in the middle that didn’t get bleached out by the corona – kind of a Venn diagram of the overlap between both ends of motion. If you’re not understanding what I’m saying I won’t blame you – I’m having a hard time describing it succinctly even when I understand just how it happened. But here’s another that she got when the motion was virtually absent:
And yes, that’s a star at upper left – Regulus, to be specific. I regret now not zooming out a little when doing my own shots, because my frames were too tight to capture it. As has been said, the period of totality is very brief – 140 seconds where we were – so there’s not a lot of time to experiment and arrange tricksy shots. While the long lens was aimed at the sun where the sun had been, I was shooting other frames with a shorter lens at the surrounding landscape, trying to get both the eclipse and some kind of foreground in the same frame. I barely managed it, insofar as one frame shows a black silhouette of trees against an almost-black sky, but the light levels weren’t cooperating in this regard any more than they do for a sunny day, and to get more I would have badly overexposed the corona and obscured the blocking moon. I also realize now that, to get a decent pic of the ‘diamond ring,’ you have to shoot without any filters exactly during emergence, or the bare end of totality. Maybe next time…
The brief period of totality, along with the difficulty in seeing anything at all wrong with the sun during partial phases, leads me to question the various accounts of natives that supposedly freaked out during eclipses. You’d barely get a good froth going before the sun re-emerged, so I suspect few, if any, primitive cultures actually reacted as the European accounts relate. And bear in mind, the Europeans were the ones that engaged in witch hunts, so…
[While driving through the mountain roads to get on location, we passed a church that had offered a “special eclipse service” the day before. I’m left wondering what possible way they managed to make an astronomical event something to build a sermon on. But it couldn’t be just crass opportunism, I’m sure.]
Afterward – actually, while still during the partial phase but you couldn’t tell from the light – we went only a few kilometers away to Minnehaha Falls, another easy waterfall to reach and much more dynamic than Looking Glass – I’ve done it a few times before; in fact, I have a series of seven or eight frames that I use with students to demonstrate how one should ‘work’ a subject and examine different perspectives, angles, and possibilities. Again, I was a bit limited this time around, primarily because of the eclipse – not because of the light, which actually helped, but because there were a lot more people in the region and very quickly the falls looked like a playground. It was time to start the (ridiculous) drive back, but I’ll close with another shot from The Girlfriend, capturing some dipshit playing in the water and getting into the frame of her own compositions. Some people just have no consideration…
This is not a buffalo, but an American bison (Bison bison – no, really,) and by saying that, I am perpetually reminded of a B.C. comic strip by Johnny Hart that dated from my early childhood. One of the caveman characters was perusing a dictionary and came across the entry, “Buffalo (noun) – See Bison.” He flips a few pages and reads, “Bison (noun) – The second largest city in New York state.”
Anyway, they’re pretty damn impressive ungulates, you must admit. Note the horns, with the wear areas on the tips that show this specimen has been sharpening them against whatever surface it could find. Take the hint.
There are not a lot of reasons to visit South Dakota, and the previous Daily Jim pic was about a third of them. This will eventually be another, but it’s been in progress for a long time now (since 1948) so, you know, maybe not for next summer…
This is the Crazy Horse memorial, intended to depict one of the most influential Native American leaders, most known for defeating Custer at Little Bighorn. Part of the reason that it’s been taking so long is that it’s a private, non-profit foundation that’s driving the project, not a government initiative, and so there are no fund allocations or major promotional campaigns. Nevertheless, as can be seen by the equipment in the shot, it’s moving along.
It helps to know what it’s intended to look like:
Once completed, it should be pretty impressive, but unless a major funding breakthrough comes along, I’m not going to see it. I also have mixed feelings about memorials of this kind. Like yesterday’s example, there’s a certain level of recognition and reverence that such things foster, which is fine: “Gosh, people were impressed enough to do this big project, the person(s) depicted must have been pretty badass!” But it says nothing whatsoever of who they were, or why they received this attention, and so on. For that, we need dedicated education efforts – which can be undertaken without any sculpture at all. What percentage of people visiting Mt Rushmore cannot even name all four of the presidents depicted, much less tell us their major accomplishments?
I’m not one for hero worship; I know that everyone has their good and bad points, and it’s not the person so much as their particular accomplishments that deserve the attention. Right now there’s a bit of push, mostly on college campuses (imagine that,) to take down statues and/or rename various memorial halls featuring Thomas Jefferson, because he owned slaves. I think that knowing he owned slaves is a valid concern – and so are the countless efforts he made to establish our system of government and its underlying values, which have lasted longer than the majority of governments across the planet. That’s the man. But the good things are what we should be highlighting, regardless. They don’t weigh against one another – we have no reason to pass judgment on the person themself.
If it helps, here’s an inset of that same shadow, brightened considerably – proof not only of the lack of caves, but that the scene managed not to exceed the range of the camera, even when it got damn close. It can be easy to lose detail within shadows in such light conditions, and for brighter areas to bleach out to pure white as well. Which is why I always say that, with high-contrast light (bright with distinct shadows,) look for low-contrast subjects – in other words, not brilliant flowers, and not zebras. And not people, on the whole – the shadows makes faces almost into caricatures. Plus there’s the squinting.
Thinking, Hey, that was a cool photo, I should feature that!, I went looking for it. And thought I’d found it with the above image, but after scanning, I could see the wings were different. Yet I never did find the original. Either I was blowing past it (I have several hundred slides in the Bird category, so…) or I’d shot it on negative film, longer ago than I thought. Or I lost it entirely, which is really damn hard for me to do, since the slides remain in sleeve pages unless actually being scanned or submitted, and I know when I’ve submitted them. Right now I’m going with blowing past it, so maybe it’ll appear later on when I go through the pages again while paying more attention.
