I often go hiking with my camera at Inks Lake State Park and I enjoy the park, but I always feel like I have photographed everything out there and I won’t really be shooting anything new. But it is always nice to go out there and it was a late Sunday afternoon, so most of the weekend crowd would be thinning out so there was a chance I would see some wildlife. Soon after I began hiking, I saw a deer in the trail that ran into the trees. It stood there staring at me while I tried to shoot a few photos through the branches and then ran off. So, you can probably find a deer in the photo below if you try.

After hiking for a while I came to Spring Creek, where water would tumble over the rocks forming a little waterfall if it was flowing. You might think that Spring Creek is fed by a spring based on the name, but it is an occasional creek fed by rainfall and is named Spring Creek because that is the season in which it is usually flowing. This time of year it is more of a rocky creek bed and with the late afternoon sun casting its golden light on the rock, and I thought it needed to be photographed.

I really wanted to emphasize the undulating rocks and texture, so my strategy was to get down low and close to the rock with a wide lens and tilt the camera down toward the ground. This has the effect of exaggerating the foreground and pushing the background far into the distance, which is what I wanted to do with the rocks to make them really stand out. One problem with shooting so close to something is focus-depth; with the foreground in focus, the background would be out of focus. To deal with this issue, I created a set of focus stack images to merge later in Photoshop. My camera has a built-in focus shift feature which makes it quite easy to program it to take several photos, shifting focus with each frame. The vertical image below is a focus-stacked merge of 10 or 12 images.

I don’t instinctively like the vertical orientation for landscape scenes, but I force myself to take them anyway. I also flipped the camera 90 degree and took a landscape oriented photo of the same scene, also focus stacked. You do get more of the rocky landscape with the horizontal image, but it kind of fades off to dark nothingness on the right and doesn’t seem all that balanced. I would have shifted the camera right, but there was a tree there that I didn’t want in the frame. Anyway, I liked them both so I put them both here. What do you think?

As the sun neared the horizon, it began to set directly down the creek bed toward the lake and it was lightning up the rocky valley nicely, so I had to try to photograph directly into the sun to capture the scene. This is a scene that requires bracketing, or taking multiple photos of different exposure to blend later in software. So, I set my camera to take 5 exposures, each 2 stops apart, ranging from very under-exposed to capture the color in the sun and over-exposed to capture the detail in the landscape.

When I got back to my computer, I didn’t like the way the software was automatically merging the images as it wasn’t handling the ghosting of the sun from image to image well. I eventually just took two of the images, the darkest frame and one of the bright frames, and decided to manually merge them. To do this, I adjusted the two images to be the same exposure in Lightroom. This meant boosting one image by 2 ev and reducing the other by 2 ev. At this point the two images looked similar but one had a lot of clean detail in the sky and the other had a lot of clean detail in the landscape. I opened these as layers in Photoshop, masked out the sky in the bright frame, merged the images and brought them back to Lightroom to finish editing them. Below is the result.

Another thing I seem to automatically do is stop the aperture way down (f/18 in this case) to create a burst effect in the sun. In thinking about it, I don’t know if I really love this so much and maybe I should have captured a set without this effect. Stopping down the aperture also seems to make the flare bubbles worse and it reveals any dust you may have on your equipment. And it doesn’t really look all that natural as we don’t really see through a 9-bladed mechanical aperture when we see the world. Anyway, next time I’ll probably keep it down to f/8 or lower.

I’ve been out to Inks Lake State Park dozens of times over the years and whenever I go, I feel like I am just going to take the same photos I have already taken. But sometimes I managed to find some feature that I haven’t spent time photographing before and on this day it was this granite creek bed. I just happened on it with the late afternoon sun casting a golden glow across the rocks, revealing all of the textures with the side-lighting. I alway look forward to these pleasant surprises and this keeps me hiking the same local places throughout the year.

After this some thick clouds built on the horizon, making sunset a gray affair. But here is blue hour reflection across the lake taken with a 30 second exposure.

Thanks for reading.