Arrow to the Sun
Feb, 2020Views
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Awards
Contest Finalist in Image Of The Month Photo Contest Vol 54
Peer Award
Absolute Masterpiece
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Magnificent Capture
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Behind The Lens
Location
This was taken in Death Valley National Park, in California.Time
The sky was shot at sunset, 5:45 PM last December on a 2 week trip through the Southwest. The foreground was taken about 30 minutes before that - see more about the processing below. That morning we had photographed sunrise near Lone Pine, CA, and we were originally planning to stay in that area, but after looking at the weather maps it looked like Death Valley might have an awesome sunset, with high clouds over the valley and a clear horizon. So we drove back to Death Valley, having already passed through, and when the sun managed to get under the clouds, it created one of the best sunsets I've ever seen.Lighting
No manual lighting here, but I did a blend of two images, in order to capture the best sky with the best light on the foreground.Equipment
Taken with a Sony a7III + Sony 12-24 f/4 lens, on a Sirui ET-2204 tripod.Inspiration
I'd really been hoping on this trip to take a decent photo of the famous mud cracks in Death Valley. Although the valley is filled with these cracks, I found it surprisingly difficult to find ones that I liked! Some were too flat, I wanted them to have some concavity, some just had an ugly arrangement, others were perfect but had distracting bushes behind them. Finally after maybe 45 minutes of walking around, setting up at multiple spots, I found this one, and I loved how the nearest tile made a cool "arrowhead" shape pointing towards the sun.Editing
This image uses a technique that some people refer to as "time blending". The sky and the foreground were shot about 30 minutes apart, and those images blended together in Photoshop. I hadn't originally planned on this, but I took multiple photos and later decided that the best glow on the mud tiles came when the sun was just above the mountains and the clouds softly diffused the light, while the best sky was after the sun was below the horizon, illuminating the clouds from below. Originally I had planned the focus stack this image as well, but at f/20 I was actually surprised at the sharpness of the image, with great depth of field and not bad diffraction.In my camera bag
I try to keep a light and versatile kit that allows me to respond to changing conditions quickly. On this trip, I carried a Sony a7III with a 12-24 f/4 lens and a 24-105 f/4 lens, as well as a Sony a6600 with the 70-350mm (APS-C). All these lenses are decent quality for zooms, the 12-24 especially, and this means that I can cover the 12-525mm (effective) range with minimal lens swapping, while the whole kit weighs only about 3 kg, which is great for hiking.Feedback
I think one of the most valuable skills in landscape photography, which I am only beginning to understand, is reading the weather and adjusting your plans. This particular location was a couple hundred miles away from where we had planned to shoot, but we decided to drive here because of the possibility of a great sunset. Of course, doing this means you also need to do a lot of research, and know the region well enough to have multiple possible locations to photograph.
