Sunset Ruin

Please help me with this one. I think it is a truly striking and

beautiful scene (at least when one is actually there). It is so

hard to shoot with the sweeping cave ceiling on the Left and the

buttress of rock on the right blocking the colorful canyon beyond.

This was f22 at ~20 seconds while handholding 2 Graduated ND filters

(+2 and +3). Thanks! cc

Great shot for a hand held pic.

Lovely composition.

7/7, "Great Shot"! As far as it looks to me, you did everything just right, way to go!

Great place at right timing. You did good job here but I did see the problems from the buttress and the cave. No idea so far to improve it.

Beautiful landscape, great colors, nice composition, what do you whant improve??? ;-)

Handholding ND filters for 20 seconds? Wow.

 

It's a beautiful shot that I have seen other versions of - this is a tricky lighting situation. Another way to try this is by using a circular polarizer on the whole scene and using fill flash on the foreground. It looks like the rock formation on the right is some distance away but if you have a flash unit that allows you to "tunnel" the head (ala Galen Rowell) you could aim it off to the right, set it at -1.7 for fill as a starter, and bracket the fill one-half to a full stop above and below. If you wanted to tone the flash down some you could put a 81A filter in front of it or an amber colored gel.

Hey cc,

 

Falise above made some suggestions that sound interesting, I don't know if I follow it 100%. Where did you hold the NDs? On the left? I like the image as is, not sure you could improve it much. The cave roof being dark empasizes the sunset, it should be dark. Now if you could have moved that hill on the right...j/k.

 

One of the most perplexing things I've tried to capture, is the magic you see and feel at an ancient site. If you get a second, take a look at the Metsada picture in my folder (crappy scan of a print), my gf and I sat at this spot drinking wine, having a smoke, over looking Jordan and part of the Dead Sea, looking at the ruins of Metsada. The history, view, wine, incredible feeling, we went there 6 times trying diferent light. Ninety photos and I never caught what I felt there. Ok, I'm rambling, what I am saying is that you have captured the magic that you sensed at this place, the hardest part of monument photography-congratulations, excellent.

 

cheers-md

Just to clarify: The camera was on a tripod--but I had to manually hold the filters in front of the lens. The +2 filter was held over the entire top 2/3 of image (down to the edge of the Kiva). The +3 filter was held diagonally, roughly following the sweep of the sky and bright canyon from upper right to lower left. cc

I think that without using a flash, there, the results are truly good. On an overall colour note, I agree that a polariser and a 81a warmer (or the Moose combo of the two) might have made it overall warmer.

 

The composition of the arch and the buttres is really well done.

Beautiful composition. Excellent sky but I would like more details on the shadow area. Did you bracket?

Maybe I should clarify a couple of things. The following procedure assumes a few things:

 

1. You have a camera with a matrix meter capable of TTL flash metering (I use an F100 and a D100).

 

2. You have a flash that allows you to manually set the flash width, relative exposure, and direction (I currently use an SB-80DX, but I hear the SB-800DX is awesome).

 

"Tunnelling" a flash head means setting the dispersion width smaller than the lens you are shooting through. Let's say I am shooting with a 24mm lens and I want to fill flash only a third of what I see through it (like the picture above). If I have the right flash head I can manually set the width of the flash beam. The recent Nikon flashes allow this. I can set the flash to 85mm while the lens see 24mm, thus narrowing the flash beam to a specific point in the frame. In the case of the picture above, I would set the head at 85mm and aim it off to the right to fill the foreground rock formation. The other benefit of tunneling the head is an increased flash distance.

 

The second part of this is to set the exposure difference between the foreground and background, or between the rock formation on the right and the background sky. Nikon swears its matrix balanced fill flash does this automatically but I get better results by setting the exposure manually, using an f-stop reference. In the case above I would set the flash head -1.7 to -1.3 stops below the background. What the meter in the camera does is adjust the flash output to get a foreground fill flash exposure that is 1.7 to 1.3 stops below the background. The result is just enough flash on the rocks to reveal some of the shadow detail without changing the exposure of the background sky.

 

If you are using a D100 you have to experiment - a digital sensor and film react differently to flash and the D100 isn't quite as capable as the F100 in this area. If you are using an F100, the above procedure will nail the exposure every time - even on Velvia.

 

Bob

Bob: That's a pretty cool workflow. I don't use flash much, though. Here, I am posting a different (perhaps better) exposure from the same shoot. In this new image, I was able to allow more of the Right buttress to come out because the light in the canyon had receded. In the original shot, I didn't bracket anything. I use a Pentax 67II which has a sweet TTL, matrix meter. I have yet to encounter a situation in which I prefered spot metering to the Pentax meter. So, even when using stacked, graduated ND filters (2 of them), I can then use the matrix meter through-the-lens and get a great exposure. cc