Death Valley - Badwater

Annette and I participated in a Photography Workshop in Death Valley this past week.  In fact, we just got home today after taking the red-eye flight back east.

The workshop was good.  They pushed you to expand your vision.  In fact, part of their tag line is to, "Seek your vision."

Each day we were out before daybreak so that we could be in location by the time the sweet, warm, morning light hit the subject.

Each mid-day was spent putting the images on the computer and processing them.  I learned a lot about processing B&W images.  None in this blog, but you will see them in future blogs.

Each evening we were in location before sunset and we stayed until long after dark.  We were trying for the sunset colors and the stars in the sky.

Our first evening, we went to Badwater, the lowest point on the continent.  Badwater is the site of an immense salt fat.  It stretched to the horizon in the North and the South and was bounded by mountains on the East and the West.

We must have walked more than a mile out onto the flats.  It sure seemed like a long way when we had to trudge back to the cars in the dark! We went that far because we just had to get to the point where the patterns in the salt had not been disturbed by human footprints.

Here are a couple of pictures from that shoot.  Let me know what you think of them.

I wanted to show how the salt stretched out into the distant mountains.

The salt and the sky stretched forever!

The sunset sky was so full of color and texture!

I light painted the foreground to give the image an Otherworldly feeling.

The salt was not what Annette and I expected.  I expected that the salt would be soft and would crumble easily.  That was not the case!

When I knelt down on the salt to get a lower perspective, the salt was very hard on my knees.  It did not crumble easily!  You could pick up a chunk of the salt and actually have to put some effort into  breaking it!

Annette loves low perspectives and she has the injuries to prove it.  She has scratches on her knees and shins.  Salt in an open wound is no fun!

One of our fellow students thought ahead.  He brought knee pads with him.  I also saw another photo workshop group there and every one of the students had knee pads.  Oh well, if there is a next time, I will know to bring the pads!

Lowlight Photos at Renfrew Park

Annette and I were very lucky this week.  Almost the whole week was about photography!

Tuesday night was the Projected Image Competition at the Harrisburg Camera Club

Wednesday night we met with our wedding couple and showed them a virtual copy of their wedding album.  Other than a few tweaks, which Annette has already taken care of, the album was good to go.

Thursday night we went with the Antietam Photographic Society to Renfrew Park in Waysnesboro for some low light photography.

Saturday we went with the Harrisburg Camera Club to Paxtang Cemetery.  See the previous post.

What a week!

This post concerns the Low Light Photos at Renfrew Park, which is a museum and park that is based on an old farmstead.  It is very nice.

One of the Society's members instructed the group on how to take low light photos.  Here are some of the results...

The first two pictures were at the beginning of the shoot.  You can tell because there is still light in the sky!

There are two techniques on display here.  The first technique gives a warmer result.  See how warm/yellow the little building is. This was accomplished with a large battery powered flashlight. While the shutter is open, the building was "painted" with light from the flashlight.  The light was just moved back and forth over the front of the building.

 The second technique gives a whiter light because the flash for a camera is designed to give off white light.  So as you correctly figured out, while the shutter was again held open, the bush and the building were "flashed" with a flash strobe several times.

Which of these two do you like best?

 Annette found this next picture.  It is interesting because there are a couple of light sources.  There was a night light behind the smaller building that was lighting the face of the larger barn.  To add to the light, I opened the shutter and wandered around the picture using a camera flash to light the tree, the smaller building and the dark side of the barn.  The tree came out a little hotter than I would have liked.  You can tell that the shutter open time was fairly long because the clouds are kinda smeared.

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The last picture tells a little bit of a story.  This is an empty house at night, waiting patiently with the lights on for the owners to come home.  

I lit this picture with a flashlight.  Trees are real light suckers.  It takes a lot of light to get the tree to be anything other than a black silhouette.