In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Oct 31, 2018 | Advanced Techniques, Photography Tips
Swirling dogwood blossoms, Yosemite. I used a slow shutter speed (1/2 second) to deliberately blur the motion of these dogwood blossoms, but usually I’m trying to make my photos as sharp as possible.
It’s always disappointing to find out that one of your photos isn’t sharp – especially if it’s an image you like (and you weren’t trying to deliberately blur the image). Yet we all make mistakes. Even professionals like me sometimes take unintentionally blurry photos (as you’ll see below!). But after you’ve swallowed your disappointment, it’s important to figure out why the image is soft so that you don’t make the same mistake again.
There are basically five causes of blurry photos: camera movement, subject movement, missed focus, insufficient depth of field, and lens softness.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 28, 2018 | Uncategorized
Autumn Colors: Sunlit reflections of Aspens above Grant Lake, Inyo NF, CA, USA
I’m working on a longer post, but in the meantime here are some more autumn colors, this time from the eastern Sierra about ten days ago. This image was actually Claudia’s idea. It’s difficult to photograph directly toward sunlit reflections like this, but she liked the color palette of yellow, orange, green, red, and blue, so I decided to try it, and somehow it worked.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 23, 2018 | Light and Weather
Sunbeams and aspens, Dallas Divide, Colorado. Claudia and I were headed to a more distant aspen grove, hoping to find snow on the trees, but saw some great sunbeams breaking through the clouds and decided to stop at Dallas Divide. We ended up staying for half an hour, with sunbeams moving across the landscape the whole time. For this image I bracketed five shots, two stops apart, and blended them with Lightroom’s HDR Merge.
In my last post I mentioned how much I love the transition from autumn to winter, with splashes of yellow amidst beautiful white aspen trunks, snow etching the trees, and the feeling of the long, cold winter settling in. Here are a few more attempts to capture that mood from the mountains of Colorado.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 21, 2018 | Light and Weather
Hillside with aspens and conifers, Uncompahgre NF, CO, USA
We were in Colorado for two-and-a-half weeks, and during that time we watched the upper-elevation aspens lose most of their leaves. The lower-elevation aspens followed, going from green, to yellow and orange, and then, in some cases, bare. Rain and snow set in, and we saw the snow level drop from 11,000 feet down to 10,000 feet, then 9,000 feet, and even briefly down to 8,000 feet. It felt like winter was approaching rapidly.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 18, 2018 | Light and Weather
Interesting weather: Autumn hillside in the fog, Uncompahgre NF, CO, USA
As I mentioned in my last post, we got some interesting weather while we were in Colorado – rain, mist, and even some snow. We stayed in the area longer than we originally planned to try to photograph some of this weather, hanging out with our friend Charlotte Gibb during some of that time, and enduring rain in hopes of photographing aspens in the fog or snow.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 14, 2018 | Composition, Travels and Stories
Aspen kaleidoscope, Uncompahgre NF, CO, USA
Claudia and I made our annual pilgrimage to Colorado to see the aspens, with a short detour into some Utah canyons. We’ve actually been traveling for three weeks, and just got home. During our trip we got up before sunrise almost every morning, and stayed out until after sunset nearly every evening. I kept thinking that I should post some photos, but there always seemed to be some interesting weather, and photos to be made, and barely enough time to eat, sleep, and then get up at 5:30 and do it all over again.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 16, 2018 | Vision and Creativity
Storm clouds over Mono Lake, CA, USA. 50mm, 20 seconds at f/8, ISO 100, ten-stop ND filter.
Claudia and I spent many days in Lee Vining over the last month-and-a-half. We’ve done three night photography workshops there, and the iPhone workshop Robert Eckhardt taught for us at Bodie.
Before one of our night workshops Charlotte Gibb and I headed to a favorite Mono Lake viewpoint, hoping for a photogenic sunset. When we first arrived we found some dramatic storm clouds and virga over the lake (virga is rain that doesn’t reach the ground). Later the sun broke through, soft of, off in the distance, and we even saw a faint rainbow. I photographed it all, but my favorite images were the early ones of those dramatic clouds. That wasn’t what I was expecting or hoping for, but it’s what I got, and I really liked the mood that sky created.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 3, 2018 | Travels and Stories, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Paintbrush and peak, sunrise, Inyo NF, California. Since the closest flowers were only a foot from the camera, I used focus-stacking to get everything in focus, blending five frames with Helicon Focus. (Exposures were 1.5 seconds at f/16, ISO 100, focal length was 23mm.)
Last winter was a strange one in the Yosemite area, with most of the precipitation coming in March, followed by a big, warm rainstorm in early April that created flooding in Yosemite Valley. That rainstorm melted much of the snowpack below 9,000 feet, so spring came early in those low- and mid-elevation areas. We found some nice flower displays at those elevations, but nothing exceptional.
Above 9,000 feet, however, the snowpack remained intact, even after the early-April flood. And that lingering snow led to an exceptional bloom in the highest elevations. Back in July, before the fires, Claudia and I photographed the flowers as much as we could, and we also led our Range of Light workshop group to a couple of our favorite flower spots.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 28, 2018 | Smartphone Photography, Travels and Stories, Workshops
Standard Stamp Mill, Bodie SHP, CA, USA
Two weeks ago our good friend Robert Eckhardt conducted another iPhone photography workshop for us. This time we were based in Lee Vining, and the workshop included two trips to Bodie, with special access to the interiors. It was so much fun.
I hadn’t photographed Bodie interiors in two years. Bodie endured two earthquakes in December of 2016, causing structural damage to some of the buildings, and knocking over bottles, shelves, and other objects. So no photography workshops were allowed into the interiors in 2017 while the park assessed the damage.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
Coneflowers in a forest burned by the Rim Fire, near Crane Flat, Yosemite
The Ferguson Fire, which has been burning on the western edge of Yosemite since July 13th, is now 100% contained. The other major fires in California, like the Mendocino Complex and Carr fires, are still burning, but nearing containment. Skies around the state have become much less smoky over the last week or two.
Tragically, two firefighters died battling the Ferguson Fire, but no homes were lost. We were lucky around here compared to the people in Redding, where the Carr Fire destroyed over 1,000 homes, and eight people lost their lives.
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