#52weekproject: Night Photos over the John Day

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Justin Le

A continuation from my last post; here are the photos I took Saturday, May 16, 2015, after I set up camp, with a beer in hand. In the first photo, I used my headlamp to paint the hills a bit for a little more detail in the foreground, but in the second photo, I just went for the silhouetted look.

They tell you that camping is a great way to reset your internal clock, and aligning with the setting and rising of the sun. But unfortunately, when you go to the west coast, and lose 2 hours, and are into night photos, it makes it a little harder to get to bed when the sunsets. Oh well, I think the photos were worth the extra coffee the following morning!

#52weekproject: Week 30 – Jimmy’s 34th Birthday

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Justin Le

Week 30: Jimmy’s 34th Birthday

Taken Monday, December 22nd, 2014 just off of the barely traversed back country roads of Montana. I spent my Christmas out there visiting my brother, and just happened to take a picture of my bro with his dog, Zipper in front of this finely constructed home. We had taken some time to walk around and check out the inside of this… Can you even call it a house? It’s kind of a creepy thing, checking out an abandoned structure. It had 3 rooms, with a roof, walls and floorboards, all warped and coming apart at the seams. An old mattress lay in the middle of the room, revealing it’s rusty and decrepit springs for the world to see; while old torn clothes, various broken furnishings, and beer cans littered the rest of the room. It felt creepy in broad daylight, so I can only imagine how it would be in the dead of night, with the wind howling and whistling through all the nooks and crannies in the walls.

Anyway, we didn’t stay long enough to find that out in person. We had our own scary encounter later on. As we tried to head back to the cabin were we staying, we took an alternate backcountry route, which, come to find out, was fairly iced over. As night was falling, the temperature dropped, and we almost slid off the side of an iced over single lane road into an 50 foot ravine. Luckily after some white knuckling, we were able to do some controlled sliding back down the sloped road and turn around and head back to our cabin the same way we came. Maybe this year, I’ll get my brother some snow chains for his truck for his birthday.

Anyway, I’m trying to catch up on posting my photos, so hopefully, I’ll be sharing more soon!

#52WeekProject: Moonrise over Chicago Harbor

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Justin Le

Week 28: Moonrise over Chicago Harbor

Taken on Saturday, December 6, 2014. It had been a while since I had gone out to take a picture. The last time, it was of a boat in the harbor while I was trying to do some scouting for this photo. Unfortunately, the day I originally wanted to take this photo (Nov 6th), the weather was crazy and the winds and waves ended up tearing up a lot of the lakefront and even sunk a barge. So wisely, I waited until the next full moon to take the picture. (And hooray, I didn’t get swept out to sea!)

The top picture was taken at around 4:20pm, as the sun was setting. The bottom picture was taken at around 5:01pm just after the moon rose over the horizon. The downside of having moved to December, was the moonrise ended up being 40 minutes after the sunset, so because of the darker scene, I needed to boost the exposure when caused a lot of issues. (As you can see in the blurrier bottom picture.)

In order to emphasize the moon, I wanted to use the longest focal length I could, which meant a 300mm f/4.5 manual focus lens stacked with a 2x teleconverter and a 1.4x teleconverter. This makes it an effective focal length of 1000mm and the increased distance from the focal plane reduces the overall exposure by 3 stops, so an effective aperture of about f/13. Unfortunately, because of these limitations, and the decreased ambient light, my shutter needed to be open much longer (from 1/125s to 1/2s), and with the long focal length and heavy gear on my tripod, every little vibration resulted in major blurriness in the photo. Even after I switched out the lens to the 200 f/2.8 with and only the 2x teleconverter (EFL 400mm f/5.6) at 1/6s, and you can still see major blurriness in the photo.

So, while the idea was pretty solid, the execution was pretty terrible due to the conditions and limitations of my equipment. I’m definitely going to try this photo again, and will likely aim for next year’s supermoon (Sept 27th, 2015) when the moon will be about 14% bigger, and the moon rises at 6:32pm, 7 before the sunsets. I’ll bring a sturdier tripod, and keep my fingers crossed that the weather holds up so I can shoot at some reasonable settings, so it’ll look like that top picture with a giant ass moon (not my own) in the background!

Also, I made a timelapse, which you can see below…

#52WeekProject: Week 24a – Trillium Falls

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Justin Le

A Trilli, a trilli, a trilli… Trillium Falls

Taken Tuesday, September 30th, 2014.

After camping in Crater Lake with my friends, Hage and Jared, we headed to Eugene, OR, where I picked up my rental car, and had a bite to eat from a food cart at Ninkasi Brewery. I happened to leave Eugene later than intended, which found me driving on the beautiful Redwood Highway after dark. There’s a section of US 199 (between Cave Junction, where i filled up on gas, and Crescent City) that is just beautiful, and you can tell even driving after dark. With the road weaving through the groves of trees, you are just in awe of the towering trees around you, while trying not to go careening into them around curves at 45 mph.

Elk Prairie & Redwoods National Park

In any case, fast forward a couple days to Tuesday, September 30th, and I’m camping near Orick, CA at the Gold Bluffs Beach Campground. It’s in the Elk Prairie area of Redwoods National Park (where you’ll find elk just wandering around, and possibly blocking the dirt road leading you back to your campsite). While I spent a lot of my time trying to take time lapses on the beach, I did get a chance to hike a bit and take a few photos.

Nearby my campsite, there were hiking trails that allow you to hike through the tallest trees in the world, through green and lush landscapes (including an beautiful and aptly named area called Fern Canyon). Here is a photo from one of those hikes, a short 2 mile loop called Trillium Falls. Unfortunately, the water flow was a little low during this time of year, but it was really quite stunning watching the fall leaves fall then there was a strong enough gust of wind to blow through the trees.

I used an ND filter to make this a long exposure, and I would have loved to stack my polarized filter on as well to cut down on the glare off of the rocks and leaves (it really does make a difference), but at that moment, it was stuck screwed onto another filter and I spent a good 15 minutes trying to unstick it like it was working with a jar of spaghetti sauce. Anyway, this turned out pretty good without it, but you know, it could be better.

Polarizing Filter

Here’s another angle of the falls with a polarizing filter. Notice the reduced glare on the foliage. It definitely changes the dynamic of the image.

Oh… and here’s a 3 frame animated gif!

#52weekproject: Week 24: Moonset over the Pacific

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Justin Le

Taken on Tuesday, September 30, 2014, while camping at Gold Bluffs Beach Campground (near Orick, CA, in the Redwoods National Park).

This is one of the frames I took while attempting a timelapse of the milky way over the ocean. Using an iphone app called The Photographer’s Ephemeris, I was able to plan ahead and figure out where and when the moon would be setting. I took a walk down the beach from my campsite to where I had eaten breakfast on a log earlier that day. That spot was key since it gave me a place to hang out while I waited for my timelapse to run, and I thought would be foreground for a few pictures. The key to nice milky way shots is to have really dark and clear skies. Which means, being far away from any city lights or any light pollution, no moon, and low humidity. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the weather was pretty warm, and humid, so the Milky Way was not super bright, but it was definitely there. (Ideally, it’s best when the weather is colder and the atmosphere can’t hold much moisture, but then you have to deal with battery issues, and trying to stay warm, but I digress.)

I’m pretty happy with this photo, but would have liked to have spent more time there, since I only had a few hours to work with. (I was only up until around 2am since the following morning I needed to pack up and leave my campsite before 8am so I could drive 9 hours to Fresno to meet up with my brother and sister.)

Also, here’s a photo of me setting up this photo:

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