A Night at the Trona Pinnacles

The lunar eclipse between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.

Somehow, I've never photographed a lunar eclipse. I've seen bits and pieces of them over the years, but I didn't make the effort to record the experience. So when I learned a total eclipse was coming up for last night, I decided I had to finally push my ass into a car, drive out to the Trona Pinnacles and see what I could do to contribute to the thousands (millions?) of chronicles of the event.

I came semi-prepared with data that the wonderful photographer, Michael Frye, had put on the Internet for anyone who wanted shoot the moon, so to speak. When I got there, I first thought I wanted to compose an image with the moon coming at me with one of the pointier pinnacles in the foreground. I began to suspect it wouldn't work, but I waited for the moon to show me its intended path and I could then always revise if necessary.

And then an SUV drove up. A man got out and breezily greeted me. "Here for the lunar eclipse?" I asked. Yes, he said, and walked up to me. It was the man himself, Michael Frye. He introduced me to his wife, Claudia, and we talked for a bit. While I expressed my  appreciation for his work, Frye held up an iPhone with an app that showed the moon's path across the sky. (The app I had wasn't quite as explicit, plus I didn't have cell phone reception there.)

The rising moon three hours before the eclipse.

Based on the information from his app, I moved the camera to another location. Frye decided to look for another spot. He had never been to the Pinnacles before and he apparently wanted to scout around before settling on a shot. Before the eclipse began, I changed my position two more times and finally got the combination of foreground and moon path that seemed good to me.

The picture I came up with is a blending of many exposures. The foreground was shot before the eclipse and illuminated both by moonlight and a flashlight painted over the pinnacle on the left. The eclipse sequence was done by photographing the moon every ten minutes (I first intended on doing it every 20 minutes, but after a couple of tests, the separation between each picture of the moon impressed me as being too much). The final picture was combined in Photoshop after adjustments in Lightroom. I'm now hooked and have ideas for the next eclipse which is coming up this October.
 

Imaginary Accidents, part 1

Lately now, I've been hankering to do something completely differently photographically without worrying whether it receives approval or not. (I probably should take that attitude more often, but the desire for compliments is regrettably strong.)

What this emerging contrarian streak means is I've been fascinated by the skid marks we all see on roads, sometimes around intersections and sometimes in the oddest places. What happened? I ask. Was there a serious accident or just a close call? So for the past few years, whenever it's convenient (and safe), I'll stop the car, plant myself more often than not in the middle of the road and photograph the skid mark.

With any luck, there might be someone out there who looks at the pictures, which I'm titling "Imaginary Accidents", and also wonder, "What happened?"

Owen's Valley

Mountain Avenue

Reseda Boulevard

Contest Winner

I just learned that Backpacker Magazine chose the picture below as the winner in their "Adventure Travel" photo contest.

I have mixed feelings about this shot. Above all else, I'm proud of it and really like the contrasts between the pillowy snow above, the chunky rock, and the silky water. But behind all that is tragedy. The story: I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with my wife, Gloria, and a friend who had come down to California from Tacoma. On the second day of a five-day trip, we were walking through the Desolation Wilderness (west of Lake Tahoe), swatting mosquitoes and feeling a little broken down, not quite trail hardened. And then we saw this cave where the creek had carved a tunnel through a snowbank. I suppose it's fortunate that I was going old school that trip and brought my Mamiya 7II medium format camera loaded with Kodak Portra film. Nothing else would have preserved the huge dynamic range of the scene quite like print film. So I plunged into the cave with a tripod and 43mm lens on the camera and worked the scene, shooting low angles, high angles, looking down one direction, down the other. Had a hard time protecting the camera from dripping water and I was always conscious of how slippery the rocks were. I took this shot as I was exiting the cave and turned around for one last look. The exposure time was about five seconds. I knew this was probably the best of the best and in a stupor of self-satisfaction I stepped outside the cave and promptly lost my footing on a wet rock. I dove into the creek which was deeper than it looked and could feel my body being swept downstream. I managed to jab the tripod into the creek bottom and stand up. The first thing I looked at was the camera. The lens had smashed on a rock and the body was soaked to the point of being inoperable. And then I looked up to see a group of hikers staring down at me flabbergasted as if they couldn't figure out whether to help me out of the water or laugh. They did neither.

I had to go the rest of the trip without taking pictures and I was miserable.

But at least I got this picture . . .

Little Santa Anita Canyon

 

Little Santa Anita Canyon is lovely little stretch of rappelling goodness in the San Gabriel Mountains. Just hike 1.5 miles up the Mt. Wilson trail from a neighborhood in Sierra Madre (try not to suffer too many pangs of house envy there—the homes are spectacular) until you hit "First Water" and take a short spur trail down into the canyon. Thanks to the local drought, the canyon had a little bit of shin-deep water in its upper reaches, but dried out past the midway point. Too bad. There's a fun pothole at the end that, when filled with water, makes for a nice splash. Our little band of canyoneers have done this canyon at least four times and with the exception of one of us once dislocating a finger in a, let's just say, freak accident, the trips have always been relaxing and a respite from all that's urban and routine.

We had with us two irregulars, Kirk and Cammy, and at the first rappel, we met a couple—engaged to be married this summer—who were contemplating going back up canyon because Christina had never rappelled down a waterfall before and was intimidated by the notion of stepping over the edge. Her fiance, Steve, had just taken up the sport last year and thought it would be a great activity to share with his sweetie. Hmm. Good intentions but not such a great idea to do it alone. Either she had to go down first, doing something she had never done before with a dozen unknowns, or trust that she could hook up to the rope correctly and follow him down. (And if she lost her nerve and stayed at the top, he wouldn't be able to go back up.) Rich convinced them to tag along with us for that safety-in-numbers sort of thing, and she soon became at the very least more comfortable going down a rope. Our merry, nine-person group swooped through the canyon in just four hours.

One technical note: I've been experimenting with shooting the action using HDR (five exposures ranging from under-exposed to over-exposed shot in a quick burst) and blending the pictures together. This helps overcome the huge brightness differences you get in a canyon from deep shade to bright sun on nearly white granite. I started doing this on our Hades Canyon trip and refining it since. I took two of the pictures in this post using this technique and with any luck no one would be the wiser if I didn't say something first.

Rich gearing up in the upper canyon. He had just donned a wet suit, which became quickly unnecessary.

Christina on her first-ever rappel.

Steve on one of the wetter rappels.

Rich plunging down a water slide while Kirk waits to see if he survives.

A camouflaged frog, one of many there. I guess that's a sign of a healthy canyon.

Kirk working his way past an overhang with Rich acting as "meat anchor," a technique that's used when you can't find anything to anchor the rope and the last person down is able to safely down-climb the section. Rich is simply tied into the rope—a human anchor—and braced against the boulder.

Kevin helping Rich past the overhang.

Little Santa Anita Canyon does end with one slight indignity: one has to climb over a government fence at a flood control dam before walking through the neighborhood back to the car. I haven't heard of anyone getting impaled on the spikes, but, oh, would that hurt.

Stoned Sunset

Trust me, I'm not going to get all elitist and apologize for taking a picture of a sunset. Like a lot of photographers, I can't resist them. But I wouldn't show the whole world the shot unless it had a nice feel to it. And I liked this grab shot from the night before up in the Santa Monica Mountains. Just two guys smoking a joint and watching the sun go down.

Hanging

As I've lamented in the past, it's really difficult getting a decent angle to photograph canyoneering trips, especially people on ropes as they rappel down a cliff or waterfall. I'm either shooting down on their heads or up at their butts. And neither view is all that exceptional. On a recent trip to Coffin Canyon in Death Valley, I had a rare chance to go down a separate rope, lock off (meaning, wrap the rope around my rappel device in such a way that I'm basically stuck there) and photograph my friends as they went by. This meant having to carry a (really heavy) 300-foot rope up a long, steep approach to the top of the canyon and using one of the few permanent anchor bolts in the entire park (they're illegal, actually, but this one has survived). 

Considering this was a nearly 200-foot rappel, there was plenty of dramatic air underneath them and canyon in the distance for good shots. Even rarer, I got pictures of me dangling from the rope as I was doing all this. I had to bring a second camera body and long lens just for that purpose (ah, the things we do for a semi-selfie). The lens I used on the rope was a 16-35 set as wide as possible because I was pretty close to everyone as they rappelled past me, plus I wanted to get as much of the canyon in the shot as possible to show just what a spectacular place it was. If I hadn't gone for the wide shot, it would have just been a picture of someone on a rope with no context. Big deal. 

So there I am dangling about 180 feet above the ground, I'm finished shooting and I have to release in order to go down the rope. My camera was hanging off my hip with a Black Rapid strap and vulnerable to whacking against the hardware on my harness. But the bigger thing is yanking the rope out from the rappel device so I can slither down the rope. When you do that, you jerk down a few inches, just enough to scare the bejoobies out of you, especially when, as I said, I was hanging 180 feet off the ground. My suggestion to anyone who wants to try this is practice, practice, practice before getting into extreme canyons like this. Just a suggestion.

There I am on the right, braced against the rock as I shoot Annette on the rope. It looks comfortable enough, I guess, but remember, I'm high off the ground.

The resulting shot. The sun visor on her helmet is a handy add-on she wears. I was so close to her, you can see my pants leg in the lower right corner.

Jerri on the same rappel. Notice how Rich who's belaying her at the bottom is teeny weeny tiny. Directly below her is a vertical wall of rock that turns into an overhang.

Revisiting Old Photos

There's an interesting contradiction about photography. On one hand, making a picture can be a once-in-a-nanosecond opportunity where the action or the light is so ephemeral, if you miss it, it's gone forever. (Of course, there's something to be said for having memories that exist no where but in your brain, full of emotions and movements that no camera can duplicate.) On the other hand, once you've nailed that shot, you can reinterpret it over and over, changing the artistic emphasis with everything from color balance (including going to shades of gray) to lightening some elements and darkening others to cropping to even changing the sharpness. And let's not forget the manipulations that involve cloning out unwanted distractions or combining exposures to compensate for extreme contrasts in the scene.

And there's certainly nothing wrong with going back to a photo when I realize it can be done differently, perhaps better. Sometimes this is because my artistic vision has evolved or maybe it's just because the processing software has improved to the point where I can accomplish a look that wasn't technically possible before.

For years, I went out to various wild locations to photograph moonlit landscapes. I published several how-to magazine articles for people who wanted to try it themselves and a couple of travel pieces for those who just preferred to experience the calming, occasionally introspective nature of sitting under a full moon without worrying about camera gear.

The other day, I came across some scans of this old work, shot on a Bronica SQ-A medium format camera and transparency film. At the time of the first prints I made, I was somewhat pure about the final product, finishing the picture so that it looked like the original film version. With a 20-minute exposure, I was usually able to get a picture that looked vaguely like a daylight scene but not quite (star paths don't appear in the sky at two in the afternoon.)  This worked for me at the time because the pictures had a weird sense of place that was partly literal and partly mysterious. But now I'm not so sure I like that interpretation and I redid some of the pictures. I like them better with a definitive look of nighttime.

What I did was import the tif files into Lightroom, increased the blacks and clarity, decreased the highlights and added a light vignette. Much better! (Of course, five years from now, I might change my mind and do something else.)

"Devastation Trail, 8:45 p.m." The difference is from the original isn't huge but to my eyes it looks more like how it felt to stand there at night.

"Near Hidden Valley, 10:15 p.m." I wanted to emphasize the lit rock juxtaposed against the bright star path so I darkened the exposure, added black and a heavy vignette.