Greg Miller Photography Blog

Rainbow & Squall - Acadia National Park

I had the honor and privilege to serve as an Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park this past October.   The National Park Service has residencies within the parks that have the facilities to house artists inside their parks.   Acadia uses former naval facilities on Schoodic Point as an environmental education center as well as for housing for the Artist in Residence program.  Schoodic Point is a beautiful rocky peninsula and is about a  1:15 drive from the main part of the park.  It many ways this served me well, because I had little desire to photograph the all the cliche scenes that every photographer who visits the park tries to shoot.  I always strive to capture scenes in a unique way, which to me means waiting for special light and/or weather conditions.  Having a thorough knowledge of a specific area and its weather patterns improves the odds of being at the right place at the right time.  I did see any point in capturing photos that have already been done over and over, so that left me free to exp0lore in the hopes of capturing photos that would be more unique.  Much of my time in Acadia saw cloudy, rainy days with flat, boring light.  That quality of light works well with intimate foliage shots, which I will be sharing in the future within this blog.

The photo I am sharing today was taken on one of the few sunny days that I experienced during my stay.  This day was especially calm and clear, with not a cloud in the sky most of the day.  But about an hour before sunset, a rogue and isolated storm appeared on the western horizon.  The storm system consisted of a single line of clouds that was perhaps 2 or 3 miles long.  It passed overhead in a terrible fury as I drove to the coastline where I hoped to catch a photo before the storm disappeared over the Atlantic ocean.   Rainbows only appear when looking directly away form the sun, so I was fortunate that the sun was setting behind me.  The low angle of the sun allowed the raonbow to really sizzle with color.  This rainbow is limited to band of squall area beneath the rain cloud on the left, as there was nothing but blue sky above the strip of clouds.

Come back to this blog often in the near future, as I will be posting more photos from Acadia.

This photo was taken the same morning as the previous photo, but looking the opposite direction and taken at 5:40 AM.    While the patterns are critical to this photo too, the photo is more about the dramatic light.  This is why serious photographers are out shooting at a time of day when everyone else is still in an REM phase or enjoying their first cup over the morning newspaper.   You just don’t get light like this at noon (or even 9:00 AM)!

The tallest mountain in the far back right is Slide Mountain – tallest peak in the Catskills.

I recently had the pleasure of leading a photography backpack into the Catskill Mountains for the Appalachian Mountain Club.  These are always interesting trips, because in addition to hauling food, shelter, and clothing up the mountain trails, we also strap tripods and cameras to our packs, making for very heavy loads.  The reward for this work is being in position at remote places for the yummy light that sometime happens around sunrise and sunset. I had timed the trip for a time of year that, weather permitting, the direction of the sun at both sunrise ans sunset would be optimal for adding dimensionality to the surrounding mountain ranges (given their geographic orientation).

This photo is one of my favorites from the trip.  When reviewing the set of “keepers” from the trip, this photo is not the one that leaps out at you – it does not have flashy colors or spectacular light.  But it can sometimes be more satisfying making a compelling photograph from otherwise rather pedestrian elements.  The light is nice but not amazing and the colors are also nice but certainly not jaw dropping.  What I think really makes this photograph is the repeating shapes and patterns.  The image includes several groups of round top peaks, and as well as several triangles and diagonal lines in the mountain ridges and cloud formations.  The trick was to frame it all to make the patterns complement each other.  My philosophy of photography being an art of subtraction (compared to most other 2D arts like painting and drawing that are arts of addition) leads me to always eliminate elements in the scene until the composition is distilled down to only those elements that are necessary to convey what I see to the end viewer of the photograph.

This photo was taken with a short telephoto lens, which helps compress the scene and brings the elements together.  I selected an aperture of f8 – because all of the scene was relatively far away, depth of field was not an issue; I chose f8 because that is the sharpest aperture for my lens and provided more than enough depth of field for the photo.   I used a 2 stop graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure differences between the sky and land.  Time of capture was 6:30 AM – about an hour after sunrise.  The direction and intensity of the sun were just right to reveal the undulations of the mountains with swaths of soft sunlight and shadows, as well as imparting an alternating series of dark and light from front to back .

The mountains in the scene, from left to right, are:  Indian Head, Thomas Cole, Black Dome, Blackhead, and Round Top.

My intention is to make regular posts (like the one below about Sterling Lake Snowstorm) that describe the story behind how I captured specific images.  The stories might include the planning behind the image, or the arduous and epic trek to get to the location, or the technical or artistic thoughts that were involved in making the image.  Hopefully the readers of this blog will find that interesting and informative.  If there is a a specific image that you would like me to write about, please send me a note to let me know.  Thanks!

Sterling Lake Snowstorm

Many of my photographs are “planned” images.  That is, I have seen a location previously, and have planned to re-visit it when I think  the optimal conditions will exist for photographing the scene.  Elements that factor into this include time of day, season, and weather conditions.  Weather being fickle, this means that many times I show up and the conditions just don’t work out as planned.

Other photographs are “found” images.  That means I just get lucky and stumble upon a scene when the conditions just happen to be good for photographing the scene.  Ansel Adams claimed that most of his photographs were “found” images.  At first glance, this seems to me to be an odd way to go about making photographs – basically relying on serendipity to be in the right place at the right time for the right subject.  But giving it more thought, it actually makes a lot of sense.  One of the philosophies of photography that I follow is “look for the light, then find your subject matter”.   While I usually visit a location with a specific subject in mind, once I am on site I usually disregard the subject matter and focus on what the light is doing.  This also supports the philosophy of “A boring subject in great light usually yields a much more compelling photograph than a great subject in boring light”.  So I usually plan a photography trip with a specific subject in mind.  I go to the site based on expectations that the right conditions will occur.  But once I am on site, it frequently happens that I find a different subject because the light is happening in a way that makes a less attractive subject a better image than the photograph that I had anticipated making.

This image of Sterling Lake is a “found” image. On a previous hike in this area I had found a pine tree that a beaver had felled.  The tooth sharpened stump was just above a large boulder that sloped steeply down to the edge of Sterling Lake.  The pine tree had fallen down on to the ice covered lake.  It is unusual for a beaver to take down a  pine tree unless it is close to its dam or lodge.  Beavers generally prefer deciduous trees like birch and willow for food in winter.  I thought that returning during or just after a snowstorm would make for an interesting photo of the gnawed stump, and snow covered boulder and pine tree.

So it happened that we had a light snowstorm happening on a weekend day where I could hike in to the downed tree.  Unfortunately the temperature was hovering right around 32 degrees and the snow was not accumulating on the boulder and tree.  I took a few obligatory shots (which I knew would not be usable; but I hate leaving empty handed), and decided to hike back around the lake to see if I could find anything else interesting to photograph.

This image appeared at the end of a small cove.  I was really drawn to the clean composition of the 2 sections of open water and rocks, with the background obscured by the falling light snow.  Lens choice was easy because evergreen tree branches intruded from both sides of the cove.  Using a wider angle lens would have meant cluttering the image with the distracting tree branches.  Using a longer lens would have meant losing some of the interesting detail of the ice patterns around the open water.   I was standing on the edge of the lake and had no option to back up because of trees lining the shore where I stood.  And the ice was not thick enough to support my weight.  My biggest compositional decision was moving left and right along the shore to get the best angle at the designs of the ice and open water  in relationship to the complementary ridge-lines of the mountains in the distance.   I’m not one to adhere strictly to the “rule of thirds” but in this case I felt that putting the prominent line separating the far shore and mountains about 2/3 s up from the bottom of the frame yielded the best balance for the photo.

It is always enjoyable for me to try to find isolated subjects from within the entire landscape.  It is a bit like playing “Where’s Waldo” but you don’t know in advance what Waldo looks like.  Photography is very much an art of subtraction (different from other artists who generally start with a blank canvas and create their art by adding information).  Photographers start with the entire scene around them and subtract information in order to distill the scene down to a composition that contains only the information that tells the story that they want to tell.  In this case, the image is fairly abstract, being more about tones and shapes than ice, rocks,  and mountains.