Tag Archives: timing

Locations, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Color is Right Around the Corner

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It is still summer here in the San Francisco Bay Area — but something changed this past week, and it is clear that summer is on the decline now. Autumn, my favorite season, arrives in a matter of a few more weeks.

We have had some very hot weather here in the West, but this week things were different. Although the smoke of western wildfires is still adding haze to our air, the edge is off of the heat here. One morning the furnace actually kicked on for a few minutes before I woke up and shut it off. About a week ago sunset was earlier than 8:00 PM for the first time in months and the rate at which daylight hours shortens continues to accelerate. Over the weekend we walked to a nearby store to get ice cream in the evening, and we wished we had brought jackets. (As a long time California resident, I’m not completely fooled though. Even though the signs of change are here, I know we still have more hot spells ahead of us.)

Red and Orange Aspen Leaves
Intensely colorful red and orange autumn aspen leaves in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

Right on schedule, photographers’ thoughts turn to fall colors. In the last week I’ve seen a substantial increase in the number of shared photographs from previous autumns, featuring those beautiful colors that we hope to see again this year. People are starting to post questions — where is the best color? what is the best time to go? what will happen this year? Reports of “the earliest color ever!” have started to appear — as they do ever year at about this time! Continue reading Autumn Color is Right Around the Corner →

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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