Bisti May 2019 – Day 3 Sunrise

I was up at 4AM and noted that it was very cloudy, overcast and a little breezy.  I thought about not going out due to the heavily overcast sky, thinking there may not be good sunrise light, but I went, anyway.

My destination was the hilltop at the end of a canyon that I had scouted on the first day of my arrival.  There was good color in the eastern sky before sunrise, but I was a little too late in getting to my destination in time to get shots of the best color.  As I was hiking to my destination, I missed a turn into the side canyon that I had to take to get there.  Fortunately, I realized my mistake quickly and only lost a few minutes as I backtracked.  Still, those few minutes cost me a few possibly good shots, as the color was mostly gone by the time I got set up to shoot.

The heavy cloud cover eliminated the sunrise golden hour, too.  I had to make do with the light that I had to work with and the clouds did add some interest to the sky, at least; but the photos are a little dull without that golden hour light and the dispersed, uniform light with no shadows made the images a bit flat.

At least, I got just a little color in the overcast sky in a few of my shots.

I considered converting most of my images to monochrome, but without the shadows, these lack the depth that help make such images more appealing.

There were many interesting toadstool type hoodoos scattered all around the hillsides and wide vista.

The features in the foreground of the shot above are actually fairly large, but they are on a hillside across a ravine so I could not safely get closer.

I spotted this large petrified log in a ravine downhill to the west.  The slope was quite steep here and I would not risk trying to get closer to this one.  I have a number of shots of it, trying to show how impressively large it appears and the environment around it; but I think none of the shots do it justice.

I continued to work the area, shooting anything that I though might be interesting.

Looking back up the hill from above the large petrified log is this large hillside with many toadstool hoodoos on the top and a few scattered below:

These are the features that are most prominent, when first climbing up the hillside from the canyon access:

A close up of that rather large toadstool feature:

And another view of the large toadstool with the vista stretching out behind it:

Down the hillside behind the large toadstool, I got down low behind one emerging toadstool to get this view of the sky and the vast desert vista:

I was not satisfied with the sharpness in the first image in this post, so I made a series of images to focus stack:

{Note that a number of the previous images are created by focus stacking a number of images.  I finally have had enough of the problems with Photoshop focus stacking, so after some research, I’m trying Helicon software, which is designed specifically for this task.  So far, I’m really impressed with it.  Helicon produces more accurate results, much faster than Photoshop and has an easy to use retouching tool, that can fix things like artifacts produced by moving subjects (for example, the clouds in these images)}.

I do not recall seeing Bisti photographs such as those in this post.  I know others have hiked around this area, since I could see evidence of footprints which had been essentially removed by recent rains;  but such areas of Bisti are less popular with the typical visitors and do not have the striking rock shapes as the more popular areas.  Yet these photographs, when compared to those from the more popular areas, illustrate the geological variety and vastness of this striking desert wilderness.

This post is getting too long, so I will continue it in a follow up.

Thanks for following, remember that your critiques and comments are always welcome and that clicking on most of the photos will take you to the photograph on Flickr,

Ken