Amethyst

Before the COVID-19 lockdown prematurely ended our photography club’s meeting season last month, I presented an instructional session on the subject of focus stacking to the club, followed by a hands on practice session of the technique at our next and final meeting. Focus stacking is a method of increasing the “depth of field” in an image by making a series of exposures with a small change of focus between each, and then combining them in software. I stacked 32 exposures in Photoshop to create this image of an amethyst specimen. The close-up magnification, full frame sensor size, and medium aperture of f/8 are all factors that combined to produce a very shallow depth of sharp focus in each exposure. Without focus stacking I would not have been able to produce this image with the entire specimen sharp.
Pentax K-1, Kiron 105mm f/2.8 macro, f/8, ISO 200

Movement in Blue

Another busy spring, summer and fall, another long gap in my posts to this website and I have not been doing a lot of photography either. But with winter having set in, I have a bit more time now and the new season of our photography club has been providing fresh motivation to get back into it. I shot this image for the latest club assignment on the topic of “movement”. For an abstract image such as this I don’t like to limit the viewer’s imagination by saying too much about it. But I will note that the movement in this case is in the camera rather than the subject, and it involved zooming the lens during the 1 second exposure at dusk.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR, 1.0 sec @ f/10, ISO 100

Conducting the Symphony of Lights

Auroral activity has been weak this past winter as the sunspot cycle established solar minimum, but the early hours of April 1st brought the best display I have seen all season and it was no April fools. An unusually warm March had melted all the snow off the lake ice (as well as most of the land) but it still was solid and thick enough to safely walk on it. I had been wishing for northern lights the preceding week when the surface had many glassy areas that would have produced wonderful reflections; unfortunately those had decayed mostly to frosted glass by this time. Still, the light show was exhilarating. I illustrated my emotion whilst breaking up the empty space of the foreground by posing myself in the scene, guided by the teachings of Paul Zizka at our recent workshop.
Pentax K-1, Bower 14mm f/2.8 ED AS IF UMC, 13 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 2500

Aurora Colour War 2019

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 60mm, 1/640 s @ f/10, ISO 400

Eyes of a Young Warrior

Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax DA* 60-250mm f/4 ED [IF] SDM @ 98mm, 1/500 s @ f/10, ISO 400


The Aurora Colour War has become a perennial favourite event to photograph at the annual Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous in Whitehorse. Fashioned after India’s Holi Festival of Colours, it involves participants throwing coloured corn starch from packets into the air and at one another. The action is chaotic and it is difficult to have the camera pointed at the right spot at the right time to catch the best of it in tightly framed shots, so I generally shoot relatively wide and attempt to capture great crowd scenes. I wish I had been zoomed in on the child staring into the camera, but I had to crop heavily to achieve the composition you see here.

Beam Me Up

The Whitehorse Photography Club brought in Paul Zizka last weekend for our annual workshop that we present for the local photographic community. The theme was astrophotography and this image came out of a field session at Lake Laberge. Paul set up a bright light at ground level atop a rocky outcrop above the shore, with the purpose of backlighting a human subject to be photographed from the frozen lake below. When he positioned himself as the subject he noticed that the beam was projecting around him enough that it outlined his form in the sky. So we all took turns photographing our own shadow in the heavens, whilst simultaneously serving as the rim-lit model for those shooting the intended perspective from the lake. I was intrigued and inspired by this unusual abstraction and I took some extra time to work the scene, adjusting my composition, body position and pose until I achieved this shot. It is my favourite image from the workshop.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 15-30mm f/2.8 @ 15mm, 25 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 1600

Eclipse Unveiled

It is very unlikely that this is the best photo you have seen of the super blood moon of January 20th. However, the circumstances under which I captured it make it notable enough that I decided it is worthy of presentation. You see, the evening of January 20th was overcast here. The cloud was thin enough that prior to total eclipse the moon did shine through, but it was a hazy, featureless blob. The photos I took at that stage were far too lacking in definition to be usable. When totality was reached, the blood moon was completely invisible to the eye, but I continued to follow its path with my camera. Using ridiculously extreme exposure settings, I discovered I was able to pull it out of the murk. Red light scatters less than the shorter wavelengths included in white light, and my images showed surprisingly good definition. The image I present here, photographed just after the eclipse exited totality, was a 40 second exposure at f/6.3 and ISO 6400! Comparing this to exposures used for this subject by other photographers who were under clear skies, I estimate that the cloud cover had the effect of a 6-stop neutral density filter. Of course, this long of an exposure with a 500mm focal length would be heavily blurred by the rotation of the earth without a tracking system. I do not own a tracking mount, but my Pentax camera has a feature called “Astrotracer” that attempts to mimic an equatorial mount by moving the sensor during exposure. It does not always work perfectly, especially when exposure times are pushed towards the high end of its capability, which is limited by the available range of sensor movement. But I must have had it calibrated especially well on this occasion because it performed admirably right at the exposure time limit that it could offer in this situation. The ability of a modern advanced digital camera like my K-1 to show me things that I cannot see with my naked eye is a major inspiration for night photography, and it is very satisfying to have achieved this image in seemingly impossible conditions. I should note that this rendering of the image involved some fairly heavy post processing adjustments in Lightroom, particularly with the dehaze and black point controls.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 500mm, 40 sec @ f/6.3, ISO 6400

Chewing on a Toothpick

It has been several months since I last posted anything to this site, having been preoccupied all summer with home projects and not doing a lot of photography. But I set aside a day last month to take part in a photography club trip to Atlin, BC, which turned out to be quite photographically productive and stimulating. We were actually not too far out from Whitehorse when we came upon this grizzly foraging beside the Alaska Highway, with the grasses still frosty after a cold night. I got a number of good shots of this magnificent beast, but chose this one for the somewhat comical, transient expression on the bear's face as it gnawed on the remains of a twig.
Pentax K-1, Sigma 150-500mm f/5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM @ 340mm, 1/125 sec @ f/8, ISO 1000

Waiting For Spring

This spring arrived late and it continues to be a slow thaw. As we draw to the end of April, there is still plenty of snow on the ground around here. But the strength of the April sun cannot be denied, and it had melted bare an open, south facing hillside before winter reasserted herself with another fresh dump of snow and freezing temperatures. Still the sun began to melt and recrystallize the new snow, which blanketed small plant life that had started to revive. This image captures a tiny piece of its intricate, icy artwork. Depth of field is very shallow in close-up photography. To achieve satisfactory focus on both the ice and the weeds beneath it, I used Photoshop to focus stack 3 shots that I had taken with different focus points.
Pentax K-1, SMC Pentax D FA 50mm F2.8 Macro, f/11, ISO 200

Heaven Revealed

I haven’t done much northern lights photography this winter. In part that is because it has been quite a nasty winter with a lot of cloud, snow and deep cold. But even when the sky has been clear, I have not seen any impressive displays comparable to ones that had been common in recent years. It seems we are well into the down side of the sunspot cycle. SpaceWeather.com reports that sunspots were present almost continuously from 2011 through 2015, then 9% of the days in 2016 were spotless, 28% in 2017 and 57% in 2018 to date. Anyway, I was anxious to get out with my camera one recent night when the aurora forecast was promising, the sky was clear and the temperature was moderate. I watched from my home through the evening while the sky to the north occasionally got quite bright, but the lights were diffuse or formed weak bands that were not very interesting. Finally they erupted into the nice curtains I had been waiting for. My gear was at the ready, but in the few minutes it took me to get dressed for the cold and get out the door ... they were gone. Well, now that I was out there, I decided to carry on to a better vantage point and hope for an encore. The lights did return for a bit, but weakly and once again they were diffuse, like a luminous haze with no apparent structure. However, sometimes the digital camera can reveal things in the murk that are invisible to the naked eye. Yeah! I set my ISO to 6400, the highest I have ever tried for aurora photography, exposed for 10 seconds, and was rewarded with this pleasant surprise. I would not have been able to make this image using my older Pentax K-5 with an APS-C sensor, which for night skies is pushing the limit of acceptable image quality by ISO 1600; that would have necessitated a 40 second exposure, which likely would have blurred away most of the structure in the aurora. This is why I bought the full frame K-1.
Pentax K-1, Bower 14mm f/2.8 ED AS IF UMC, 10 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 6400

Face in the Snow

Snow sculptures are always a part of the annual Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous festival, held in Whitehorse at the end of February. This face was a small element of a large sculpture at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre. It was carved into the shaded north side of the snow block, which meant that on this sunny afternoon it was primarily lit by the brilliant white fresh snow that covered the ground, while the blue sky provided only secondary illumination. Contrast was very low, but I like the modeling effect that this unusual lighting produced. The blue of the sky light proved overpowering and I could not colour balance it without making the light areas a very warm yellow, which did not suit the subject. So I converted the image to black and white, later adding a touch of purple toning to impart an appropriately cool look.
Pentax K-1, Pentax HD D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 ED DC WR @ 80mm, f/7.1