Tag Archives: sense

Commentary

I Feel Fall Coming

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It happens every year at about this time, close to the middle of August. Even though I have learned to expect it, I’m still happily surprised when it occurs. There is inevitably a day when I am outside and I sense something different in the world and I know (really know, not just know by looking at the calendar) that the seasonal trajectory is now beginning to leave summer behind and head inevitably toward autumn.

This is not a bad thing, by the way. I happen to love autumn.

Dry Creek at Fletcher Lake - A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.
A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

It often happens for me in the Sierra. I usually spend weeks there between June and October – the time of year when camping and backpacking are possible. The beginning of the season is marked by tremendous changes. Snow melts, rivers rise, meadows flood, plants emerge, flowers bloom, campgrounds open, trails clear, tourists arrive, plans are made and executed and many things are new, or at least new once again. Then on that August day, something changes. I cannot put my finger precisely on the nature of the change, but it is unmistakable and it often stops me momentarily in my tracks when it happens. For some reason I often associate it with the way the air seems to move and with the way it carries sound – I may notice something different in the sound of the breeze or the way it amplifies the sound of a cascade across a valley. There is something about the light that I think of as a kind of soft quality and a feeling that the color of the light might be a bit cooler. At about the same time I often notice certain other more concrete indications for the first time, too, such as the way that more of the corn lily plants start to become brown or even yellow and that grasses are less and less green and more and more brown.

I was not in the Sierra when it happened this year. This year, the past few months have not been a time for a lot of travel to places like the Sierra. I have only been to the Sierra on a single multi-day visit, and that was over a month ago. (Don’t worry – I will be going back soon!) So this year it happened at home, on a morning earlier this week – my birthday, actually – when I walked into our yard in the morning to take a look at the vegetable garden, and I notice that vague but unmistakable quality of light, quietness of the breeze, and softness of the atmosphere.

The calendar may say summer, and for more than a month to come, but I’m ready for autumn.

© Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Equipment, Technique

Yet Another Reason to Like Live View – Shooting in the Wind

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I have posted in the past about some of the advantages of having a live view feature on your camera, especially for the types of photography that I do using my Canon 5DII. This past week I discovered another use, and an unexpected one at that – shooting in conditions of gusty winds.

I most often work from the tripod, and I usually use a pretty large and stable tripod in the context of shooting a full frame DSLR camera. But in some very windy conditions putting the camera on a tripod is not sufficient to stop camera motion and the consequent blur. This is especially a problem when you are shooting in low light or otherwise need to use very long exposure times, and it becomes worse when using long lenses which will catch more wind and magnify vibrations. There are a bunch of tricks that you can try in order to keep the camera steady, but in really strong winds the camera is just going to move, especially if you have a very large lens attached.

One way I try to deal with this is to time my exposures for moments when the wind may momentarily decrease. This can require a lot of patience – sometimes I’ve had to wait several minutes for a very brief halt to the gale, during which I try to make my exposure. But even in this case, you have to make sure that the camera vibration stops completely if you are using a long lens. Ultimately, you have to simply trust that the camera really has stabilized since there is no way to tell directly. Last week, as I was using live view to focus a 400mm lens on a distant subject and again noting that 400mm plus 10x software zoom in live view makes the camera very sensitive to vibration. In the past I have noted this mainly in the context of how darn hard it is to manually focus a big lens this way! But this time it occurred to me that I could use this in my favor.

With the 10x live view magnification enabled, the display is very sensitive to camera motion from the wind. I realized that by leaving the camera in the 10x magnification setup after composing the shot that I could simply watch this display, with its magnification of motion, and wait until the image stabilized during lulls in the wind to take my shots. If the display isn’t bouncing at 10x, motion blur is not going to be an issue. Problem solved. More or less.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.