Cactus Sunrise
Feb, 2020Views
428
Likes
Awards
2020 Choice Award
Peer Award
Absolute Masterpiece
Top Choice
Superb Composition
Magnificent Capture
Outstanding Creativity
Superior Skill
Genius
All Star
Emotions
Impressed
Happy
Top Ranks
Top 10 rankTop 10 rank week 1
Top 20 rankTop 20 rank week 1
Top 10 rank
Categories
Platinum
NickBelial
February 23, 2021
The lighting here is spot on. Your work is inspiring. So many absolutely beautiful images.
Heidi360
March 02, 2021
Love this, I loved taken pics of cactus's in AZ when I lived there over 15+ yrs ago
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Discover more photos See all
Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in Arizona. I'd rather not share the exact location, because there are many places in Arizona that you could take a photo like this!Time
This was shot at sunrise.Lighting
I love the way that cholla cacti catch the light and look like they're glowing, so I really wanted to get a good photo of backlit cholla on this trip.Equipment
Shot on a Sony a7III with a Sony 12-24mm f/4 lens. No tripod! This was a focus-stack that needed to be hand-held, since a tripod couldn't be set up here.Inspiration
I've seen a few photos of layered cholla that have a great sense of depth and arrangement throughout the photo. So I was really concerned with the spacing of the different cacti and how they lead the viewer's eye toward the sun. My hope was for the image to convey the feeling of the warm sun hitting you as it comes above the horizon.Editing
The nearest cholla needles are close to the lens' minimum focal distance, about 11" from the camera, so this image needed focus stacking to capture everything sharp. But, the nearest cholla cactus is just one arm of a much larger plant underneath, so it was impossible to set up a tripod here! I had to do the focus stacking by hand, holding the camera out over the cactus, and turning the focus ring while trying to keep my hand as steady as possible. In the end, I had to blend two images (both taken at f/22) manually in Photoshop, and the small movements of my hand made the blending "impossible" because of the parallax, so I had to actually decompose the near-focus shot into multiple "pieces" of cholla that could be moved around slightly and masked individually to get them to line up with the far-focus shot.In my camera bag
On this trip I always carried my Sony a7III with two lenses, the 12-24 f/4 and 24-105 f/4, as well as a Sony a6600 (crop sensor) with the new 70-350 lens. This made it easy to cover the focal lengths from 12 mm to 525mm-equivalent, while keeping the weight of my backpack pretty low.Feedback
Tiny differences of position, even just one inch, can affect a composition like this a lot, because the nearest cactus can obscure other cacti in the background. Since it was handheld, it was hard to make sure that I got it right and hard to see on the camera's rear display, so I took the image a few different times and used the best one in the end.
