I went out just before sunrise to photograph along the Rio Grande in Thirty Mile Campground, getting wet by the early morning dew covered vegetation that I had to walk through to get to the river’s edge. It was a cool, but not really cold morning and it warmed up quickly, after the sun came up.
I found a spot with boulders along the river bank that looked favorable, so I began shooting prior to sunrise, making a few tentative exposures with longish shutter speeds in the still dim light.
Wanting an even longer exposure, I added a darker neutral density filter to my setup, getting a 30 second shutter speed to smooth the river current. The neutral density filter also increases the color saturation. I probably had a circular polarizer mounted, too; but I really do not recall for sure, since it has been a couple of months since I made these images.
Since I was in a valley, there was no golden hour light, as the sun had been up for a while before direct sun rays impinged upon the scene.
I think the image below may be the best one that I got during this morning’s shoot; although, I do like the earlier 30s shot, which has a more serene appearance, as compared to the more dynamic later photographs.
I favor the composition above, because it has more colorful vegetation, with wildflowers, along the river banks, prominent boulders, dynamic flow in the river current and those wonderful, early morning clouds in the sky and the river cutting diagonally across the image leading to the cloudy sky.
Having decided that there was not much variety to shoot at this location, I decided to move on to my next destination today, rather than trying to stay over another night here.
On my drive out of this area, I stopped along the river to shoot a few scenes, even though it was getting well into the morning with harsher light to deal with.
There were many ducks, adult and young ones, in the river. So I had to try to capture a few of those. Maybe I should have put on my 80-400mm lens to shoot the ducks, but I like to travel with the 24-70mm mounted on my camera, since it gives me more flexibility for wide to medium telephoto range landscape images.
My destination today is Teal Campground north of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
More later,
Ken
Beautiful photos! They take me to a better place. It looks so peaceful. I have read about neutral density filters but have never used one, but then again, I don’t get many places to do landscape photography. And for that matter, it has been ages since I have used my polarizing filter.
Hi, Fay. I have numerous polarizers and filters of several sorts with special mounting devices. However, I normally use only one or two filters, most of the time. I’ve mostly stopped using a CP with a wide angle lens, since it makes the sky look too dark blue, especially at the corners. I’ve ruined a few photos by using a CP with a wide angle. Mostly, I use graduated ND filters to balance the exposure between bright and dark areas and sometimes a 7 to 10 stop filter for long exposures. It all gets to be a chore keeping up with all of the filters, mounts and adapters, which is why I usually carry only a few into the field. Thanks for reading.
Ken