Bouldering and Experimenting

This weekend had a great mix of photography for me.  Although the volume was lower than I had hoped due to terrible weather on Saturday and the need to replace old plexiglass windows in my house on Sunday (yes, plexiglass), I still had a great time shooting what I was able to and approving the final proof on my 2008 Crux Photo Calendar.

 After work on Friday, I quickly ran up to Little Cottonwood Canyon to meet up with Elizabeth Hardwick to do some bouldering and take some photos.  Sometimes getting climbing photos when you only have an hour can be stressful because you don’t want to just boss the climber around, but at the same time you are on a time schedule.  I think working with Elizabeth was really easy since she was flexible and really easy going.   When I’m shooting photos of climbers, I try to keep things really relaxed.  If I don’t get a great shot, it really is okay.  I’d rather the experience be fun for both the climber as well as myself.  In fact, I spent more than half the time just climbing myself. 

After getting some nice fall climbing shots, I decided to see if I could get a few more fall stream photos.  After a lot of searching, I found the perfect spot….but a bit to late.  The light was to low to have the depth of field nice and large without doing a bulb exposure.  Looking back, I probably should have experimented with the bulb exposure and do a 2 minute exposure rather than drop my f-stop so low.  Either way, I love the image, but I won’t be able to use it for more than sharing on my blog because a lot of the image is out of focus.  I also found focusing to be extremely difficult with the low light.  I am hoping to go back up soon to get another shot at this image, but I think with the cold snap and heavy snow this weekend that the rest of the leaves on that tree will be gone.  But I love how clear the water is and how you can see the boulders on the riverbed below the water.

So like I said, the weather turned terrible and the house was in desperate need of repair before the weather got too cold.  Sunday night, in a combination of letting the dog get some exercise, we headed back into City Creek Canyon to see if there were any other worthy shots.   Nothing really inspired me so I decided to try some experimentation.  In my back yard I have some Aspen trees that are in front of a fence covered with Virginia Creeper.  The Virginia creeper gets deep red, and the Aspens normally turn yellow.  This year was pretty bad for them, so they pretty much went right to brown.  But I was thinking that I could take an image with the yellow in the foreground and the deep red behind, completely blur it out of focus, and see what happens.  So in the very very low light I had left, I tried this in City Creek Canyon.  The last image was similar, but it was yellow leaves back-lit by the moon.

~ by cruxphoto on October 22, 2007.