fnaqzna

Got up at 2AM this morning and drove to Death Valley for the sunrise.

GreyWolf

Beautiful... especially the last one with the rippled dune crest.

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The secret to great marksmanship is deciding what the target was AFTER you've shot.

fnaqzna

Thanks GreyWolf. One more...

blahblah454

Those are absolutely spectacular! I love your work fnaqzna

motdakasha

amazing composition and saturation.... i thought the bloom season was over? i was going to go a few weekends ago but my understanding was that the season was ending! also how's the heat right now?

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=^-^= motdakasha =^-^=
Just Google It.
BA Psychology & Photography
(I'm not going psychoanalyze you nor will I let you cry on my shoulder. Have a nice day.)

fnaqzna

Thank you.

Thank you. At 5AM, I was in a t-shirt. Probably gets pretty hot in the afternoon. I wouldn't wait much longer.

---------- Post added at 11:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:33 AM ----------

Here's a bit of creosote:

motdakasha

I wouldn't be able to drive out there until next next weekend. It'll probably be too late to see any of the wildflowers.

__________________
=^-^= motdakasha =^-^=
Just Google It.
BA Psychology & Photography
(I'm not going psychoanalyze you nor will I let you cry on my shoulder. Have a nice day.)

mixedmedia

good lord, man...stunning.

I especially love the 4th one in.

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fnaqzna

Jetée

Is there a particular setting you use to capture night-time photos and render them looking as clear as day, sandman/fnaqza, or is this a post-editing (read as: photoshop) feature? I have just come to notice your statements about how some of your images are exquisitely-detailed star/sun-scapes, but then you tell me you took it at 2am/2pm, so it kind of equates to "mind=blown" for me, in that you can filter out these luminescent eye-deal-absorbing colors with absolutely no light at all, (or too much, depending) but what comes affixed to your camera.

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fnaqzna

At night, there's no secret. It's just a long exposure using a tripod. These in this thread were taken in the morning at sunrise. It's a two hour drive to get to Death Valley, so we were up a 2AM, out the door, and on the way.

Most DSLRs (that I know of) won't do more than a thirty-second exposure without another timing device. With film, we just used a cable-trigger that could lock down in bulb and timed manually. I use a Nikon MC-36 trigger for the D300.

Oh... and I post-process everything. Usually adjust exposure, curves, levels, pop the color a bit, etc.

Jetée

Yeah, I noticed about 5 seconds after I submitted my post that you said you "drove" there around 2 a.m. to capture these photos at sunrise. Still, though, I do recall one or two other instances about how you mentioned the "converting nighttime shots to look as though they were caught with extraordinary brilliance"-type images, and in a way that is true, but at the time, I just assumed it was the sun that provided you with that.

Thanks for the explanation, fnaqzna; I don't know when it happened, but I have just fallen in love and seek out every form of true "context" & reason there is, just to understand it a bit better.

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Titan_Uranus

Stunning.