LEGENDS OF THE FALL
I’m often asked what got me started in photography, and one answer I have is that I saw the work of my heroes Philip Hyde, Eliot Porter, and David Muench in books and magazines during and shortly after college. The work of these photographers, along with my lifelong interest in the Southwest were important influences on me.
An experience in college, however, had a profound effect on my feelings about light and landscape. In 1968 I convinced some of my fraternity brothers–Sloan, the Loon, and Tricky Dick to escape the Iowa cold during spring break and hike to the balmy bottom of the Grand Canyon. I had already done this hike with my cousin the year before, going into the canyon from Hualapai Hilltop to the Supai reservation and the Colorado River. In some ways the idea was sound. It probably would have been quite warm at the waterfalls of the Havasupai even at that time of year (February), and had things gone as planned, we would have been bathing in warm sun and enjoying the Shangri-La of blue-green 300 foot waterfalls.
My rudimentary knowledge of the Canyon led me to believe that the South Rim of the canyon and the Supai Reservation were physically close to each other, and that a road surely continued from Hermits Rest on just a few miles to the trail to Supai. Of course, this was monumentally wrong. Supai is about 100 river miles from the South Rim, and much farther by road. This became apparent when we arrived at the Grand Canyon and asked about the road to Supai. The rangers explained that the drive was long, not particularly suited to passenger vehicles, and hard to find. Four idiotic flatland college boys might never return. So, rather than travel half way to California to do our hike, we decided to plunge down into the abyss on the Bright Angel Trail, which left the Rim just down the street.
No permits were needed in those days, and we had no camping equipment, tents or sleeping bags, or food – – just our total ignorance about the wilderness of the West. Although I had some experience in backpacking, we were all Midwestern boys, living our lives where food, warmth, and shelter were never more than a few miles or minutes away.
Down we went anyway, hardly noticing the layer of snow that covered the upper reaches of the trail. It was a beautiful day and we were young and vacuous. We probably didn’t even realize that in winter, the days are short, and by the time we got down to Indian Gardens, the shadows were deepening and billowing clouds began to roll in.
As the storm approached, magnificent light began to play on the walls of canyon rising thousands of feet above us. I had never seen anything so beautiful, The sun worked as a giant spotlight, illuminating first this butte, then this mesa, then a stretch of fiery red rock. The clouds too, began to shout with color. They seemed to be living things, attacking the canyon as their colors mimicked those of the very rocks they swirled around. This show mesmerized all my friends, and it became something I would never forget. I had never seen light like this, and I had never seen light performing its magic in such a natural cathedral of beauty. I didn’t know it then, but this unexpected experience became one of the most salient of my life. For forty years, I have been in pursuit with a camera of just what I what I was feeling and seeing as a silly nineteen-year old.
The light just kept getting better as the day ended. I was ignorant of even this simple progression of the day. Darkness began to fall, and my thoughts turned from the majesty of what I had just seen to the cold night my friends and I were not prepared for. We quickly found a heated bathroom at Indian Gardens, and bedded down as best we could as darkness fell. Just a we dropped into exhausted sleep we were caught by a ranger, and kicked out into the cold. Our only choice was to hike out in the dark, and as we began a light rain fell. A few hours later, in a blinding blizzard, cursing the ranger, we slipped and slid up the cliffside. Somehow we made it safely to the top, where about eight inches of snow covered the rim. Our luck continued and we drove in the blizzard to Williams, found a motel, and woke up to almost two feet of snow.
We started home that day, but there was one more discovery for me on the way. Our homeward journey took us through Moab as the sun was setting there. I had been to Moab before, but this sunset was almost a repeat performance of the Grand Canyon show as the cliffs of Spanish Valley glowed like molten metal and the La Sals pierced the sky above pink clouds at their base. Here was a place to live with the same light as the Grand Canyon! I could see the few houses out around the golf course and dreamed of living in one, and watching this show every night.
Six years later, I moved to Spanish Valley from Iowa. Serious photography came shortly thereafter, as a way for my artistic temperament to express my love of the Colorado Plateau. I had almost forgotten this trip, but recently I dreamed about it, and though it stills seems like a dream in some ways, it was a real series of events that concretely started me on the path that I still am on.
One other important lesson I gained from this experience was that if I wanted to safely and correctly experience more of these magical events in the often stormy outdoors, I was going to have to learn about backpacking and camping. I immediately began a two year immersion into the backpacking techniques of Colin Fletcher and The Complete Walker.
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My shooting this fall has been outrageous fun. I worked myself into a couple of storms, one recently in Escalante, and another at Natural Bridges at the peak of the cottonwood leaf season. I’ve been doing much work with HDR photography. It’s all the rage with digital photographers, and a important tool. Books are being written about, and classes taught, but so far I’ve just been experimenting by myself. I did read an article early on about the HDR function in Photoshop CS3. The writer suggested shooting up to five different exposures to drop into the program with the idea of creating an image with a very wide range of light values (about ten stops) – – all correctly exposed.
I tried this with some images with little success, and downloaded Photomatix software last spring to achieve the same result. Although Photomatix seemed to work better, it still didn’t seem to live up to the potential I was hoping for. I went back to using graduated neutral density filters while still shooting a series of HDR images in hopes I would be able to make the software work better in the future.
After a lot experimenting, I think I’ve had somewhat of a breakthrough. Instead of trying to combine a large number of exposures with each at a one stop exposure increment, I’ve had much better luck with two or three exposures, with several stops between each. For example, in a canyon scene with deep shadows and sunlit walls, I shoot one shot at the indicated exposure with my histogram right of center (correctly exposing the highlights, and then shoot an 2-4 shot underexposure. When I combine just those two images, which after all have a range of at least six stops, that seems to be all I need and the result is much more natural looking. If the image had darker shadows, I might do a third exposure with the histogram clipped on the right, but with plenty of shadow detail even in the darkest crannies. Photomatix seems to be much more able to create a good looking image this way. To gain and amazing 9 stops of HDR, I simply pull out my 4-stop GND and ad it to the mix. I’ve gotten images with a EV of 5 in the shadows and 14 in the sun correctly exposed completely throughout this way. As I continue to experiment with this, I’ll report the results.
Last night I had the good fortune to be in the front row of an Eagles concert. As a big fan of harmony singing, I have loved the band since the 70’s – – long before they became essentially the American Beatles. It was a stunning show, with the vocals ( I could hear the monitor on-stage mix – WOW ) true perfection. Many of the songs come from their now year-old album The Long Road out of Eden. Don Henley’s poetry as lyrics and his undiminished soulfully magnificent voice are lost on most of the crowd, I’m afraid, but the new songs are just as good as the old classics. I know the Big Leibowski hates them, but what does he know.
