This monochrome version of an iPhone photo was chosen for Flickr’s Explore page July 25, 2024. The bright white clouds behind the arch draws the eye to the arch. Against a clear, bland sky, a photo of this arch would be much less interesting, maybe even boring.
I called this natural rock feature “The Head”, because it looks like a head on a neck looking across the broad valley into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, maybe thinking it would be cooler to be in those mountains, under a blanket of snow, rather than stuck down here forever.
For our sunset shoot on March 18, 2024, my son and I hike up a steep hillside near a feature known as The Eye of Alabama Hills. (I only have iPhone images from exploring around the Eye, which might be included in another post later).
It was a cloudy evening, which is both good and bad for photography. Good in having an interesting sky, bad for getting the best golden hour light on landscape features.
My home was in the path of the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024. Spring weather here is often unsettled and this year is no different. I watched the weather forecast day by day as the date for the eclipse approached. The forecast consistently predicted cloudy, rainy weather for April 8, although with some variation. There was considerable uncertainty about whether the eclipse would be visible or not and I feared my son, who planned to fly in to photograph the eclipse, would have wasted his time and money flying into Dallas for this event.
April 8th arrived and it was heavily overcast. The cloud cover was widespread, so there was no viable option for quickly getting to any other location with any expectation of having any better weather. So we set up our tripods and cameras in my backyard and hoped for the best. As the time for the eclipse to begin approached, we could not even tell exactly where the sun was in the sky. The cloud cover was moving and we occasionally got breaks that allowed us to spot the sun and at least aim our cameras.
As the eclipse began, there were intermittent brief periods of breaks in the clouds and we shot whenever possible.
I was not able to capture the beginning due to the cloud cover, but got shots whenever the clouds thinned sufficiently to see the sun and find the sun in the camera’s LCD screen. I used Live View touch focus on my D850 with a Nikon 400mm lens and a 1.4 Nikon Extender.
My solar filter took all of the color out of the sun, so I converted a number of my images to black and white. I think the thin cloud cover added interest to these images. Otherwise, there would be only a bright object and a dark sky. I captured a couple of sun spots with one easily visible in the image above.
The total eclipse was much more awesome than I had expected. Viewing this event through my eclipse glasses was so enthralling, that I did not do the best job of photographing the event. I needed to adjust camera settings more quickly, but in the excitement of the moment, I was not thinking clearly or quickly. As a consequence, I did not capture the most amazing part of this eclipse very well. I was really surprised to see those little pink flares of the solar prominence.
As totality continued, a flare of light began to emerge at one point around the circumference, that I’m informed is sunlight passing through valleys on the moon’s surface.
By the time the eclipse ended, the sky was nearly completely clear over a large area around the sun and moon. Yet, I still think, in spite of the tension, uncertainty and missing portions of the eclipse due to the cloud cover, the clouds still added interest to these images, when they were thin enough to allow viewing of the eclipse.
This experience makes we want to witness another such eclipse, but to do so in my lifetime, I will have to travel out of the country. Something to ponder.
As I’ve said many times, early morning landscape photography is the best for a number of reason, but especially for being alone on location. Most casual tourists and visitors to a popular location, seldom get out and about in the early morning hours, so we seldom have to worry about people popping into our shots.
Shooting from the rounded rocks in front of the arch, made using a tripod very difficult for getting down low, so I ended up shooting hand held, using a higher ISO to get my shutter speed high enough to counter my hand shake.
I shot many images at this location today and could include more, but these are representative of the morning’s scene. Having those magnificent, early morning clouds was a bonus for shooting today.
This arch is so named because it is supposed to look like a boot. Maybe the base looks a little like a boot, but I’m not quite seeing this strongly enough to have it so named.
I can partly see the naming of this arch, but I’m thinking another name like “Lobster” or “Crayfish” might be more suitable, especially when other view points are considered.
Upon arriving at the Mobius Arch, we began to work around it checking out various photographic compositions. I suspect every possible view point of this arch has been photographed many times in all sorts of weather conditions, so the prospect of achieving any unique photo here is remote at best.
Note: After migration of my blog site to another hosting provider, there are ongoing problems with the migration. I am finding (hopefully) temporary work arounds, so that I can resume posting, until a permanent fix for the website problems are found.
I began to realize early in this scouting outing that photographing the scenes here would be more challenging than I had anticipated. The scenery was spectacular, but the foreground tended to be so immense and dominant as to become a distraction for letting the eye get past it into the rest of the photo. And those mountains! The Sierra Nevada mountains were domineering as background, seemingly demanding to be included in every shot. As a result, I’m not overly pleased with many of my photos, even those that I choose to present here.
The images in this post have embedded links that will take the reader to that image in my WordPress Image Library. The photo captions are links that will take the reader to that photo on my Flickr page.
