Big news! My new website is live, so I can now officially announce Rock Light Photo Tours! I now offer customizable half-day, full day or multi-day private photo tours in Moab, Utah for individuals or small groups. Excursions are designed to match your experience level, physical abilities, and interests. With input from you we can create a tour that suits your needs to get the shots you want!
I am a fully licensed and insured tour guide in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Other locations can include Dead Horse Point, Fisher Towers, Castle Valley, rock art sites, cottonwood canyons, and many other hidden gems in the area. Utah’s Canyon Country has some of the best light for landscape photography in the world, and the area is also famous for its dark night skies!
On the tours, I offer hands-on instruction on how to read and shoot the light to make your red rock images pop, and get the most of your Moab photo tour experience.
Tour Options
Soda Springs Basin in Canyonlands National Park, Utah
Full day tours include sunrise/morning and afternoon/sunset sessions totaling 8-10 hours with a mid-day break. 1/2 day tours include either sunrise or sunset. Any of the following can be included in your tour options. Assume 1-2 locations for a half day tour, and 2-4 for a full day tour. Have specific destinations in mind not shown here? Please let me know! Once you have dates and some itinerary ideas in mind, fill out the contact form to Book a Tour, and I will get back to you ASAP with some possibilities.
Suggested options to include in your photo itinerary
Icons of Arches National Park (great introduction to the area)
Epic Canyon views from Canyonlands Island in the Sky & Dead Horse Point
White Rim Colorado River views in Canyonlands
Dead Horse Point – you simply have to see this!
Castle Valley, Fisher Towers, and the Colorado River (any West World fans out there?)
La Sal Mountains (good for a hot summer day or fall Aspen color)
Ancient Rock Art & Ruins in and around Moab
Bears Ears & Cedar Mesa ruins (full day – hiking required)
Night Photography
Explore the tour options, and send us the contact form to book a tourwith your favorite dates and tour site requests, and we will endeavor to put together a unique Rock Light Photo Tour that will have you coming back for more! Bring along a friend to make your tourmore affordable!
It was only a few years ago that professional and amateur photographers had to make a crucial decision at the beginning of a day of shooting regarding what kind of film they would shoot. Color film? Black & White? Slide film? Today, we can save those decisions until days or even weeks after we capture an image, and decide whether the final product will be a color or black & white digital photograph. While this can make processing more complicated, it also opens up another layer of creative choice that we used to have to make in advance.
Capturing the Image
‘Marching Men’ in front of the La Sal MountainsMarching Men Black & White
The first step is image capture. Even if you choose a monochrome setting in camera, as long as you shoot in RAW, all of the color information will remain in the photo’s file, untapped. Of course, the reverse is also true. In the field you might be intent on capturing a beautiful color landscape image, but upon reflection, a conversion to black and white might be your ultimate choice. Occasionally, I will get a client who asks if I can print a given color image in black and white, or vice versa, and I am able to make that happen.
This photo of the Marching Men in Arches National Park is a great example of an image that works well in color and black & white. It is all about personal preference.
Lightroom Processing
Kaaterskill Falls Frozen Amphitheater
When I process images in Lightroom, I often hit the ‘Black & White’ button to temporarily convert the image. For me, this serves two purposes. First, it is often helpful to see an image in grayscale in order to adjust contrast, shadows, highlights and brightness. A super colorful image can sometimes obscure these details, and in fact I may work in black & white for several steps before restoring the color. As long as I work in RAW, the Lightroom ‘Black & White’ and ‘Color’ buttons toggle color information on and off, non-destructively. Once I have the tonal range I want, I can restore the color to see the final image.
Kaaterskill Falls Frozen Amphitheater
The second reason I convert to black & white is that it can reveal something about the image that more powerfully conveys the scene, and it helps me decide if in the end it will be a black & white digital photograph.
Silver Efex Pro
Once I have decided to create a black & white image, and have the image adjusted for contrast and exposure in Lightroom, my next step for image processing happens within Photoshop Elements – specifically with the Silver Efex Pro plug-in. Silver Efex Pro 2 is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool for processing digital images into fantastic black & white images. Originally created as part of the Nik Collection of plug-ins, it was bought by Google. You would think that it would mean it is now more expensive, but the opposite is true. It’s free! (thanks Google!)
Heart Lake Dock Black & White
Unless the image is intentionally soft or out of focus, the first tool I utilize is the Structure tool, which adds local contrast to the images to really make the details pop. Think of Structure as Lightroom Clarity and Photoshop Midtone Contrast, on steroids. Next I adjust brightness and contract, and can tweak the tonality curve if necessary. Then there are fun and powerful tools like color filters, that mimic the effects of the yellow or red color filters we used to use on the lens for black and white film.
Finally, if you are a fan of Ansel Adams’ Zone System (and who isn’t), there is an interactive graph that visually shows you which parts of the image are in which zones.
Grain & Toning
Speaking of black and white film, there are adjustments that mimic the contrast and grain of several types of black and white film. (Many of which aren’t even made any more!) These are handy if you are trying to match the results of your favorite film, or just trying to add a bit of grain to make the image feel more ‘authentic’.
For a final touch, you can add toning. I added a bit of sepia tone to the heart Lake Dock image, to give it a timeless, Adirondack feel. You can also add Selenium (great for winter scenes like the Kaaterskill Falls photo), copper (nice for red rock country images), and several others, all without the nasty chemicals!
Which Photos Should be Black & White?
I admit, I hold some nostalgia for the days of processing photos in my kitchen darkroom. I spent many late nights dodging and burning, watching images slowly revel themselves in developer, working to get that perfect print. Because of that experience, a black & white image sometimes reveals itself to me in a color digital image. Printing in black & white is obviously a personal choice, so there is no right and wrong about which images should be color or not.
Buddha Beach Rock CairnsBuddha Beach Rock Cairns – B&W
Take the rock cairns photo above. When I capture an image with a lot of great texture, like that in the sandstone cairns, it is often complemented in black & white. In the color version, the dark green trees in the background are a bit distracting to me. When I covert it to black & white, the texture pops (using Structure in Silver Efex Pro), and the focus on the foreground rock cairn, rather than the background trees.
Conclusion
Like most things in photography, you will learn much more by doing and repetition than by just reading a blog. Go out, shoot some images, and play with converting them to black and white. Go back to some of your favorite shots that contain good contrast and interesting textures, and play with converting them as well. Make color and black & white prints of the same photo to see how they turn out (and play with different papers while you are at it. My favorite papers are rag papers for black & white). Finally, if you have never worked in a darkroom, your Lightroom skills will improve immeasurably if you take a darkroom printing course.
As always, I’d love to hear your comments. What topics should I address next?
People often ask me “how do you capture the water like that?” Perhaps you too have seen waterfall photos with the water flowing like a silky dream, and wondered how the photographer got that look. This post will focus on waterfalls photography, including my tried and true techniques for capturing photos of both serene silky cascades and powerful torrents.
No matter how steady your hand, and how good your camera or lens claims to be at Image Stabilization (IS*), the longest you can possibly expect to hand hold your camera without obvious shake and blur is 1/15th to 1/8th of a second, and probably less. Since moving water in waterfalls requires anywhere from 1/10th of a second up to several seconds to get that silky water effect, you simply must use a tripod (or a flat rock) to steady your camera for those long exposures necessary for waterfalls photography. And since you are shooting on a tripod, make sure to also eliminate camera shake from itchy shutter fingers by using a remote shutter release or internal camera timer, and live view or mirror lockup to remove shutter shudder.
*(VR) Vibration Reduction for you Nikon shooters, (OS) Optical Stabilization for Sigma lenses
Shoot in Manual or Shutter Priority Mode
Digital cameras are smart, but they won’t intuitively know that you want to shoot a long exposure unless you tell it to. Plus, in fully automatic mode, some cameras know you can’t hand-hold a long exposure, so they often won’t even allow you shoot a long exposure unless you are in Aperture Priority (Av), Shutter Priority (Tv) or fully Manual (M) mode. Every camera is different, obviously, so get out your camera manual and play around a bit to get the hang of the different modes. It really is worth spending some time, as moving from Automatic or Program mode to manual is the biggest hill to climb to get from novice to photographer. Going completely manual requires you to read your camera’s light meter to get the appropriate exposure, but using shutter or aperture priority does that work for you.
Keep in mind that for digital cameras there are 3 different variables that each affect the other: Shutter speed, aperture & ISO. For now, shutter priority is a good choice for waterfall photography because the shutter speed makes a huge difference in the look of the final image. If you want to ‘slow down’ the water to make it silky, drop the ISO as low as you can, which in shutter priority mode will make the aperture smaller (the f-stop will increase), giving the photo greater depth of field.
Sidebar: There are lots of advantages to shooting longer exposures: Long exposures => smaller aperture => greater depth of field + lower ISO => less noise/grain + silky water
Experiment with shutter speed
1/200 sec f/6.3 ISO 2500
Now that we’ve mastered how to get cool, silky shots, let’s mix things up, shall we? As we’ve already discussed, the shutter speed can make a huge difference in the look of you image, even if the exposure is exactly the same. Sometimes, especially when the subject is a large waterfall, with a lot of water, I play with shorter exposures to capture the power of a strong falls. Let’s take a closer look at several images of the same falls, taken in succession on the same rainy morning.
Detail at 1/200 sec
Notice in the detail of the first image, which was taken at 1/200th of a second shutter speed. See how the flow of water, which in real-time looks like a continuous stream of water, is in reality a collection of individual water drops. Fascinating, right? At longer shutter speeds, generally at least 1/10th of a second, these drops blend together, giving the illusion of silky, continuous water. I find that my favorite silky waterfalls shots are usually between 1/2 sec and 2 seconds long, and to capture the majesty and power of a big waterfall in full flood, perhaps 1/100 to 1/250 sec.
1/30 Sec f/11 ISO 16001/5 Sec f/16 ISO 1002 sec f/22, ISO 100
I make a point, after I have captured the image of a falls that I really like, to switch things up and shoot 2 or 3 shots with a much faster (or slower) shutter speed, to see what comes of it. Using RAW files, you can always adjust color temperature and exposure after the fact, but there is no magic button in Lightroom or Photoshop to separate out the individual droplets of water (or blur them together), so make sure you capture some variations in the field to give you more options. It all comes down to individual preference. Take the two images of Havasu Falls below, for instance. They have almost identical exposures and composition by keeping the F-Stop high(aperture small), and inversely adjusting the ISO and shutter speeds. I have sold large prints of both, because the buyers had very different (and personal) reactions to the two images. The higher shutter speed may feel more real to one viewer, but some folks really prefer the silkiness of the slower shutter speed.
Havasu Falls – 1/100 sec f/13 ISO 2000Havasu Falls – 1/3 sec f/16 ISO 100
Shoot on a cloudy or rainy day, if possible
This one may seem counter-intuitive. As you can see from the images so far, water coming over a falls gets churned up, and creates highlights that often are much brighter than the surrounding dark wet rocks or leaves – in rafting it’s called whitewater for a reason. If there is sun directly on the falls, the highlights will jump off the right side of your histogram, or if you compensate the exposure for the brightly lit white water highlights, you will lose details in the shadows.
If the day is sunny, or party sunny, then try to time your arrival at a waterfall for when the falls are in shade, with little or no direct sunlight on the highlights. Bounce light can help fill in the shadows the same way a bright overcast day will, and you will still have less contrast. If you are shooting in shutter priority, you may find that you need to use exposure compensation by 1/3rd to a full stop to expose for the shadows, or use Auto Exposure bracketing to insure the right exposure, especially under shifting lighting conditions (think partly cloudy with fast-moving clouds). My default bracketing is three images: 0 and ± 2/3rds of a stop, unless I think the contrast is so high that HDR is necessary.
HDR can be very difficult when shooting waterfalls. Moving objects give HDR software trouble, and when the water changes shape, and/or leaves on nearby trees or flowers move during long exposures, the results can be disappointing.
Use a Circular Polarizer Filter
Like many nature photographers, a circular polarizer is usually on the end of my lens.
I used a circular polarizer filter here to cut down glare on the wet rocks, and to reveal the rocks below the water.
A circular polarizer filter is incredibly useful in and around waterfalls: to take the glare off of wet rocks, dial-up reflections in a pool, or reverse that to reveal the rocks below. When shooting up at a falls from below, it can make blue skies bluer, or give cloudy skies more contrast. It has the pleasant side effect of dropping the amount of light that reaches your lens by a stop or two, making longer exposures, and/or smaller apertures, possible. Sometimes I add an ND filter to the mix if I need to ’slow down’ the water even more.
Using Water as a Composition Element
The usual rules of composition apply: ‘If you see something pretty, throw something in front of it.’
Water Carved Pools and Reflections – 5 Sec. f/16 ISO 100
Often the best way to show water movement is to have a solid foreground or mid-ground object (like boulder or log) that stays solid as the water flows around it. With a large falls, try zooming in enough to have water entering and leaving the frame, which can give a lovely sense of capturing a moment in time and space, for a creek that starts far upstream and continues beyond. Many waterfalls are not just one fall. Try shooting from below, and using a smaller cascade as a foreground for the main event. In the above photo on Upper Buttermilk Creek in Ithaca, NY, I noticed the lovely tree reflection in the puddle, and set up my tripod very close to it, using a very wide-angle lens (Canon 7D with an EF-S 10-22mm) to capture the stillness of the pool along with the curving sweep of the falls. A circular polarizer brought out the reflection.
Waterfalls can make excellent black and white images. There is something timeless about waterfalls photography that works well in a medium that was mastered at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. It is also a way to solve a problem: waterfalls are generally at their most dramatic in April or May, when Spring rains combine with snow melt to give waterfalls their biggest flow, but when buds are just starting to appear on trees, and flowers are not yet present to add that pop of color. As you can see, they work for winter waterfall shots as well. A future blog will touch on my favorite technique converting color digital images into black and white masterpieces.
Sometimes you get Rainbows
Lower Falls Rainbow in Yellowstone National Park – 108mm 1/125 sec f/18 ISO 400
Most people who visit Yellowstone National Park use apps to try to predict when geysers will erupt, but if the sun is out, rainbows at Lower Falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone are even more predictable! Rainbows in waterfalls are generally only formed when there is alot of mist and spray kicked up by a powerful falls, with the angle of light just so (mid morning in July, depending on which viewpoint you shoot from). While a few of the highlights in the water are a bit blown out, this sunny photo worked out because the cliff rocks are also brightly lit (and a lighter, yellow stone). Here the exception proves the rule. I used my trusty circular polarizer to maximize the color intensity in the rainbow.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading my first blog post! The plan is to drop one of these each week. Future blogs will be a mixture of instructional blogs like this one, details of my hiking adventures to some fantastic places, and the day-to-day realities of my photography business.
Please subscribe to the blog at the right, leave me feedback about what you thought of this post, visit my Photo Galleries atLightandPhoto.com, and consider joining one of my upcoming photo workshops, or booking a custom photo tour.
Want to put all of these techniques into practice?
Sign up for my upcoming Weekend Catskills Waterfalls Workshop May 4-6.
I am a fully licensed and insured tour guide in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Other locations can include Dead Horse Point, Fisher Towers, Castle Valley, rock art sites, cottonwood canyons, and many other hidden gems in the area. Utah’s Canyon Country has some of the best light for landscape photography in the world, and the area is also famous for its dark night skies!
