Day 04 – Morning Fire and Evening Patterns

We tend to photograph at locations opposite from the norm. Where people go for sunrise, we visit at sunset. For us, it makes for more interesting light.

One of the iconic features of Bryce Canyon is a great hoodoo. It gets lit by the natural fill bouncing off the cliffs. I love this and try to give it a slightly different look every time I am here.

Breakfasts in Bryce Canyon are just not like Oscar’s in Springdale (Zion) or Jailhouse Cafe in Moab (Arches and Canyonlands), so we didn’t dawdle over our meal. Still, there is good conversation, discussions about photography, and laughs, as always.

Our participants learned more about post-processing. As Ansel Adams said, “The negative is the score, the print is the performance.” And as we tell our groups, cameras are computers, just ones and zeros. What we see is the result of very sophisticated software, or more realistically, what comes out of the camera is partly the camera engineers’ idea of what color should look like. Nikon and Canon, Hasselblad and Leica, and all the others render color differently.

As any artist, we are interpreting our scenes, not recording them.

After our critique session, we headed back out for our late-afternoon/evening shoot. The light was beautiful, and several people, including me, were drawn to what we dubbed “The Parthenon.” Being a bit higher, it held the light while its surroundings slipped into shadow.

Those of you who follow our blog know that we love night skies. The moon phases don’t always allow for good ones, as the moon can be too bright. We were lucky; the moon was rising later and affording us moonless views.

On our way out to our location, this tree begged to be photographed. I liked the way it delicately stood on tippy-toes against the fading sky.

We moved along the rim to another spot, and after making a few more images, we found our positions as the stars came out. In my case, the position was rather awkward, to say the least. This tree was perfect for what I wanted; however, there were other trees around, so I had to put the camera almost on the ground and twist it so that it made what was for me a pleasing composition.

There were recalcitrant branch ends that kept wanting to escape from the image boundaries. It was challenging and involved a number of tests before I got what I wanted.

Next: Final Morning and Critique

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