Chasing Rock Formations and Mountain Views at Sunset.
- Sylvain Petit
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Watch on YouTube:
A flat blue-sky forecast almost kept me home this weekend. Instead, it turned into one of my most productive hikes of the summer !
The hike / the journey
The trail up is steep and quite exposed, but it rewards you with 360-degree views over the surrounding iconic peaks. Plus, the other side of the ridge is covered in dramatic rock formations overlooking a ravine — that's what I really came to scout.
With the biggest rock formation still catching light, I grabbed a quick shot, then sat down for a snack while I planned the rest of the evening: drop into the ravine for a better angle on the rock formation and see whether blue hour could work by taming the harsh contrast between the shaded ravine and the very bright sky.
I pinned the spot in my scouting app - Get Pinscape - for a possible sunrise return, then pushed on toward a ridge that would catch the last light.
Photographing a blue sky day
A lot of photographers, myself included, assume a cloudless blue sky is a wasted day. It isn't — it's a scouting day, and sometimes more. A few ways to work around a boring sky: keep as little of it in the frame as possible with a wide angle and an overwhelming foreground; or shoot at a longer focal length to compress the scene and crop the sky out; or skip the sky altogether and look for a different subject: a shaded ravine or deep forest, patterns on the ground, reflections in water... The possibilities are there!
On the ridge, with grass catching nice light in the foreground, I shot lower to the ground than I usually do and wide open, throwing the closest grass stems out of focus so they'd fill the frame as soft shapes rather than distracting detail. I also leaned on a circular polarizer to deepen the sky and cut through haze.
The blue hour shot
Back at the rock formation as the light dropped, after a couple of adjustments, I set up a vertical composition with the mountain on one side and the formation rising toward the sky. In near-total darkness, I closed down to f/8 to maximize depth of field which resulted in a 50s exposure. To be safe, I also chose to exposure bracket but ended up not needing the extra exposures.
In the end, a day that started with low motivation due to flat blue sky turned into one of the more productive shoots of the summer, proof that the forecast telling you to stay home is sometimes wrong !
Comments