Category Archives: Commentary

How Fast Can the Light Change?

Lighting can change a lot at different times of the day, but sometimes it can change so quickly and so radically that it is almost unbelievable.

In July of 2006 I was in Tuolumne Meadows shooting the sunset from the west end of the meadow. Among the photographs I took that evening were the following two – shot from about the same spot within a five minute span:

LembertAlpenglow2006|07|23: Lembert Dome Alpenglow, Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite National Park. July 23, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.    keywords: lembert dome alpenglow tuolumne meadows mount dana dusk sunset yosemite national park color photograph

Lembert Dome Alpenglow, Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite National Park. July 23, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

TuolumneAlpenglow2006|07|23: Tuolumne Meadows Alpenglow. Yosemite National Park. July 23, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.    keywords: tuolumne meadows alpenglow sunset vivid colors lembert dome mount dana yosemite national park color photograph

Tuolumne Meadows Alpenglow. Yosemite National Park. July 23, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

What happened on this evening was a phenomenon that I’ve seen more than once in the Sierra at sunset. On a partly cloudy evening the sun drops towards the horizon and as the sun passes behind the clouds and the color fades you begin to suspect that it will be a mediocre sunset. But then the sun drops to very near the horizon and its light turns red and shines upwards at the bottoms of the clouds to the west and overhead – and the most unimaginable wash of color appears for a few short minutes… and then is gone.

That’s OK, I didn’t believe these colors either and I was standing (crouching, actually) right there as it happened… :-)

Card Corruption – Not “If,” But “When”

A post at The Luminous Landscape today includes the following:

Just as the question with hard drives is not will they fail, but simply, when, a corollary to this is that if you shoot a lot, at least a couple of times a year you’ll end up with a corrupted memory card.

This happened to me yesterday when I was shooting a seminar session being put on at a local studio. When I got back to my own studio in the evening to copy the files to disk, I found that the card was corrupt. I have no idea why, or how it happened, but there it was. My Mac couldn’t even see the card and mount it, and in the camera (Nikon D300) the display said, no directory, no images.

Rather than despair I simply ran PhotoRescue overnight, and this morning had every single file recovered, including every file that had been on the card from my previous shoot, before I had formatted the card in camera yesterday morning. Simply amazing… [The Luminous Landscape – What’s New]

I’ll second both points. Like hard drives, memory cards do get corrupted and you need to be prepared for this eventuality. When it happened to me – twice this year- PhotoRescue recovered my photographs from the corrupted cards.

(In my case, as soon as I had tried to download the photos using Adobe Bridge, the files all disappeared and it looked like there was only a single file left on the card! As reported above, PhotoRescue not only recovered the photos that I had just made, but even turned up a bunch of older images on the reformatted card! In the end, my “bad card” was actually a problem with a separate firewire device that I had left connected to the computer.)