golden hour

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A Spiderweb, some bokeh, and a point of view

Monday, August 9th, 2010
Spiderweb in the Golden Hour

Spiderweb in the Golden Hour

Yesterday I posted the spiderweb in the image to the right to Flickr. This particular photo is, perhaps, my favorite (self-made) spiderweb shot to date. I said that at the time, now I’ll give a bit of an explanation.

Typically I tend to *not* like spiderweb photos: they’re all the same.  Particularly the ones that I take – I see something & try to bring out that detail.  But I never quite… catch the beauty of what I see.

A week or so before going on this vacation, however, I re-read the first couple of chapters from Photography and the Art of Seeing. The author (Freeman Patterson) devotes one of the first chapters to “thinking sideways,” and specifically uses the example of a spiderweb:

Webs are so beautiful in their own right that they had kept me from examining them carefully, and especially from photographing them in a personal way…

…When you think sideways you will find new ways to see your subject matter, and you will stumble upon discoveries and happy accidents.  Abandon your normal premises , and go on a search for new ones.

This was in my mind when I first saw the spiderweb. But it was just a web at mid-day.  Nothing special, kinda dingy.  Later that afternoon, the light began to yellow, and the dinginess turned golden.  At this point I noticed it again, pulled out my camera, and started to circle the web. Looking up, down, climbing on a chair, squatting under it.  On a monopod, off the monopod, against the light, with the light…

… at some point, I found that there was an entire side that brought out the gold in the light.  It wasn’t the typical angle I’d normally look for, but I found the view more pleasing.  I kept working up & down, within the same basic area of light (and quickly, the light fades fast), playing with different depths of field.  I was finding the background to be better than the web.

The end result is what you see; the focus on this one wasn’t the spiderweb itself.  Rather, it was creating an abstract in the background, and then using the spiderweb to break up that pattern.

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Getting up early

Friday, July 17th, 2009
Fishing at Dawn

Fishing at Sunrise

When you talk to photographers, myself included, you hear people talking about “the golden hour” like some mystical time of day.

Well, in Alaska it can be mighty elusive at times. Rather, in the summer.  In the winter it is most of the day.  In the spring and fall, it’s mighty strong, and lasts longer than most areas in the south.

Generally when you hear about it, you hear about it in the sense of “right before sundown.”  There are a few reasons for that, but mostly because people are awake then.  At dawn?  Even those who are awake are bleary-eyed.

But the rewards are great, if you can pull it off.  The pic to the right is an example (click it for a larger view!).  Those yellows only exist in the morning, and usually in the higher altitudes.  By evening, they’re much more golden, and brighter.

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Brilliant colors

Monday, May 18th, 2009
Anchorage in the evening, last Friday. 9:20pm. Still quite a ways from sunset.

Anchorage in the evening, last Friday. 9:20pm. Still quite a ways from sunset.

The picture to the right is typical of Anchorage, this time of year.  Or rather, the light is fairly typical.  We’re not so far north that we get sunlight 24×7 (plus it’s too early yet), but we do have direct sunlight until nearly 11pm (officially, we already get over 20 hrs of sun per day).  But due to the angle, we end up with relatively weak sunlight for large parts of that.

To a photographer, that gives us a few advantages.  The golden hour, for example: it lasts well over an hour.  None of the hurrying to take a shot in 15 minutes, like we see so often when we make it to Hawaii. The tradeoff on the golden hour: the light often isn’t as brilliant and saturated, like you see in places further south.  So yesterday was an exception.

While on the topic of benefits of northern light, one of the things I’ve noticed: in more temperate areas, there is a definate period of time where the sun is directly overhead and light is either too harsh or just unflattering.  You still get that here, but even in the middle of summer the sun isn’t directly overhead.  No, it’s always at an angle, which means there’s very little time where  you can’t do landscape photography.  Or even outdoor portraits with natural light – the sun is that low most of the summer.

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