In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Sep 30, 2013 | Digital Darkroom
Star Trails and junipers east of Sonora Pass. Lightroom’s retouching tools keep getting more sophisticated; Lightroom 5’s Advanced Healing Brush was very helpful in removing jet trails from this image.
Adobe just released Lightroom 5.2, with a small but significant new feature: the ability to add feathering to the Spot Removal Tool’s brush. This adds further sophistication to Lightroom’s retouching abilities, continuing the theme introduced by the “Advanced Healing Brush” in Lightroom 5.0.
You usually want fairly hard-edged brushes with retouching tools, otherwise you’ll get unwanted blurring along the borders of your retouching areas. But small amounts of feathering can help make transitions smoother and the retouching less obvious. Try setting the Feathering in the Spot Removal Tool to 40 as a starting point, then modify it if necessary. And in keeping with Lightroom’s complete flexibility, you can adjust the feathering after the fact: you can place a spot or add a brush stroke, then adjust the feathering of that area to see the effect of different feathering amounts.
As I said, this is a small improvement, but a helpful one, and something worth paying attention to if you’re a Lightroom user. Naturally 5.2 is a free upgrade if you own Lightroom 5.
And while we’re on the subject, I’ve found the Advanced Healing Brush to be extremely helpful. This is a new capability added to the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom 5.0, allowing you to brush over an area you want to retouch instead of using a series of discrete spots. It’s made my retouching in Lightroom more efficient, and allowed me to use Photoshop less and stay in Lightroom more. I’m curious about whether others have also found this new feature helpful—let me know how you like it.
— Michael Frye
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by Michael Frye | Sep 25, 2013 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Giant sequoias in fog, Mariposa Grove, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
I thought this was an interesting story in the L.A. Times about efforts to save Yosemite’s giant sequoia trees and old-growth sugar pines during the Rim Fire. Sounds like it was quite dramatic (though perhaps the writer played up the drama a bit).
Today the fire is almost out. They’re still listing it as only 84% contained, but that’s because they’re letting it burn slowly into remote and rocky areas east of Cherry Lake and north of Hetch Hetchy. Elsewhere the fire is smoldering here and there within the containment lines, but rain and snow last Saturday doused a lot of that activity, and smoke from the fire has diminished greatly. All the main roads inside and outside the park are now open.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 24, 2013 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Reflections in North Lake on Sunday morning after a dusting of snow, Inyo NF, CA, USA
Last weekend my wife Claudia and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Millpond Music Festival in Bishop, over on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. We had a wonderful time, as usual; this is either the 14th or 15th consecutive year we’ve attended this event, so clearly we love it.
On the drive over we could see some color changes starting to appear in the highest aspen groves, like where Warren Canyon meets Lee Vining Canyon along Highway 120 east of Tioga Pass, and on the higher reaches of the Parker Bench, above the northern end of the June Lake Loop just southeast of Parker Lake.
Saturday evening it sprinkled in Bishop, and further north several inches of snow fell on Tioga Pass and Sonora Pass, temporarily closing both routes. I knew that the nearby upper reaches of Bishop Creek Canyon would likely have a dusting of snow in the morning, and I’d heard that the colors were already changing up there, so I rose early Sunday and drove up to North Lake before sunrise.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 17, 2013 | Announcements
Half Dome, Sentinel Rock, and Bridalveil Fall after a snowstorm, Yosemite NP, February 9th, 2009
Clearing Winter Storm is my favorite Ansel Adams photograph. To me it captures the majesty and grandeur of Yosemite Valley like no other image.
(I wish I could show the photograph here, but I’d violate copyright laws in doing so. You can click this link to see Clearing Winter Storm. The image shown here is one of mine that was made on February 9th, 2009.)
The funny thing is, no one knows when this famous image was made. Ansel had a notoriously bad memory for dates, and various years have been given by him and others for this photograph, ranging from 1935 to 1944. In his book Examples, Ansel wrote that the image “came about on an early December day,” but again, his memory was not particularly reliable about such things.
A couple of years ago, Don Olson contacted me about dating this photograph. Don is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Texas State University, and he and his colleagues have used the position of the moon to find the precise date and time that Ansel captured two images: Moon and Half Dome, and Autumn Moon, the High Sierra From Glacier Point.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 12, 2013 | Reviews
The Visual Toolbox: 50 Lessons for Stronger Photographs
by David duChemin
Craft & Vision; 201 page PDF ebook
Craft & Vision has just released their second “Big Book.” This one is called The Visual Toolbox, by C&V founder and publisher David duChemin.
I’ve said before that I think David is an excellent writer and photography educator. But this time he’s outdone himself; The Visual Toolbox is one of the best photography-instruction books I’ve ever read.
It really is a toolbox, covering almost every aspect of photography, including exposure, depth of field, composition, balance, light, how to slow down and really see, and much more. But what sets this book apart is David’s ability to offer fresh perspectives and ideas on familiar photography topics, and get you to think about these subjects in new ways.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 5, 2013 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Poppies, lupine, and oaks blooming in an area burned by the 1990 A-Rock Fire, near El Portal, CA (photograph from April 2009)
Yesterday the Rim Fire reached an estimated 237,341 acres in size. That makes it the 4th-largest fire in California since they started keeping records in 1932. It has long since passed the record for the largest fire in the recorded history of the Sierra Nevada. Firefighters continued to make good progress, with containment at 80% as of last night. Even full containment doesn’t mean that the fire is out; it will continue to smolder until the first significant autumn rain or snowfall. But it will mean that firefighters don’t expect the fire to jump their containment lines and spread further.
Since the fire seems to be winding down, it might be a good time to look at some of the long-range consequences of the fire, and put it into perspective in relation to fire management, and the history of fire in this region. I’m not an expert on these matters, but several people who are experts present their views about the causes and consequences of the fire in this New York Times piece. The article includes a striking graph showing the effects of fire suppression during the last 150 years, and links to several other relevant articles. This piece from Wired describes the range of possible outcomes for the burned forest areas, and another article from SFGate covers the reasons why the fire suddenly exploded and burned 90,000 acres in two days.
As I said, I’m not an expert on fire management, but I have seen many fires during my years in and around Yosemite. I have vivid memories of the A-Rock and Steamboat fires of 1990, which closed most of the park for three weeks, and devastated the community of Foresta near the park’s western boundary. My wife Claudia and I lived in Yosemite Valley then, and she was nine months pregnant when the fires started. When she went into labor we had to get special permission to drive through the fire zone to the hospital in Sonora.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 3, 2013 | Yosemite Photo Conditions
Star trails over the Rim Fire, 8/24/13, Yosemite National Park
On Saturday, August 24th, Claudia and I hiked cross-country to a spot near the Tioga Road with a view of the Rim Fire. I’d picked out this spot, and the route to it, using topographic maps and Google Earth, but you never know until you try it how difficult the route will be, or whether you’ll really be able to find an unobscured view. Fortunately, the hike turned out to be easy, especially compared to our epic bushwhack from two nights earlier. And the view was impressive. The edge of the fire was about six miles away, but the smoke plume was so vast that I couldn’t fit it all in with a 17mm lens.
As the sun went down, I made a series of images of the smoke and fire, some of which are included below. When the sky got dark enough, I set my interval timer to make a series of exposures, each one-minute long, that I could then merge into a star trail sequence. I made about 80 exposures altogether, so the total time for the sequence was about 80 minutes. I then merged the images in Photoshop by setting all but the bottom layer to the Lighten blending mode. You can see the final, merged sequence above. (Here’s link to a post that explains a bit more about this image-stacking technique for star trails.)
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by Michael Frye | Aug 29, 2013 | Announcements, Yosemite Photo Conditions
Pastel-colored smoke from the Rim Fire at sunset, 8/26/13, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
I’ve been spending every spare moment photographing the Rim Fire, but I’ve finally had a chance to process some images. I made this photograph Monday evening, as smoke spilled over from the Tuolumne watershed into the Merced watershed near Yosemite Creek, creating a layered view of pastel-colored trees.
The Rim Fire has become the largest fire in the recorded history of the Sierra Nevada, though undoubtedly much larger fires regularly swept through these mountains before Europeans arrived here. At 192,737 acres, the Rim Fire is also the sixth largest in California history, and seems almost certain to pass the Witch Fire (197,990 acres) for fifth place.
The fire’s growth has slowed considerably. Estimated containment for the Rim Fire is 30%, which represents a lot of progress for firefighters within the last few days.
Highway 120 west of Yosemite remains closed indefinitely. Within the park, Highway 120 is temporarily closed from the park’s western boundary to Yosemite Creek. This means that you can’t drive from Yosemite Valley over Tioga Pass to Lee Vining and Mono Lake (or vice versa). You can reach Tuolumne Meadows, Tenaya Lake, etc., by taking another route to Lee Vining, and driving into the park over Tioga Pass, but you’ll have to turn around at Yosemite Creek and leave the park via the same route.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 27, 2013 | Announcements
Well this photo made me smile. And after you’ve finished laughing you can head over to Craft & Vision, where you can get all their ebooks for half price today and tomorrow, including my Light & Land, and Exposure for Outdoor Photography. It’s Craft & Vision’s fourth anniversary sale. There’s no discount code – everything is marked at the reduced price.
— Michael Frye
by Michael Frye | Aug 25, 2013 | Announcements
I’ve been a bit preoccupied with photographing the Rim Fire, but I want to express my appreciation for the great response to my print sale through The Ansel Adams Gallery. Thank you all so much! It’s gratifying to see that so many people like the images we selected. If you bought one of the prints, I hope you enjoy it for many years to come.
The sale ends at 6:00 p.m. Pacific time today, so there’s still time to take advantage of the discounts. I’ve included all the information about the images and the sale below.
Thanks again!
— Michael Frye
Half Dome, Sunbeams, and the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California
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