In search of good light

[mausamhazarika]

Midnight Tango on Flickr.

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Shark Fin Cove Overlook on Flickr.

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Wounded Earth on Flickr.

Trees adorn the edge of the Cinder Cone crater at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. The hike to this spot is very steep heart-stopping half mile from the base of the Cinder Cone but the views from the top are quite spectacular.

[mausamhazarika]

Hiking Rewards

Back in the spring of 2014, my wife and I took a trip to Mount Shasta in Northern California and spent a weekend exploring the area. The highlight of our trip was a hike to Heart Lake. The hike is relatively short (under 2 miles one way if I remember correctly), somewhat challenging in places depending on the kind of shape you're in but the wonderful views from the top make it all worth it. We climbed up the rocky cliff overlooking the lake to get a better view and I took a few of shots of the lake by itself but my favorite one is this particular one with my wife in the foreground taking in the views.

[mausamhazarika]

“Mudstruck”

The picture was taken on April 11th, 2012 and here’s the story I had written about it back then.

Yesterday while driving on 237 East bound en route to home, I noticed the nice cloud formations in the sky and thought to myself 'this looks promising, should I go shoot somewhere?' The recent rains have blessed the hills on the east bay and they looked lush green and with the later afternoon sunlight  playing hide and seek behind the clouds, they looked even more beautiful! Sometimes on days like these I wish I had a camera attached to the windshield of my car to capture such fleeting moments of beauty.  Once I got home, I decided to head over to the nearby Don Edwards Wild Life Refuge area. Because of their proximity to my home,this and Alviso are my typical go-to places when I have the itch to shoot but don't want to go too far  I parked my car at the parking lot and headed inside along the Bay View trail. 10 minutes into the trail, I bump into my buddy who is also an avid photographer and together we decided to walk past the boardwalk and along the trail. On hind sight his presence was Godsend for me and I'll get to that in a bit. After walking for a while, we settled on this area just off the trail on the northern side. This area appears to have dried up recently probably through forced drainage and has some beautiful crack patterns showing. There are also a whole lot of small puddles here which would make for some good compositions but appear to be quite hard to get to. Problem is that the recent rains and the fact that this area was probably until very recent times totally under water makes this ground very soft almost like a bog and needless to say feels a bit dangerous. With the sky blowing up with some great colors, I decided to push the envelope a bit and kept edging farther and father out along these cracked patterns in a bid to get closer to one nice looking circular puddle. Cut to Step 3 ...looks good, moving on.., step 4...a bit wobbly but ok holding my weight fine..step 5 and whoooooshhh! Down I went in a hurry knee deep into the mud! I tried pulling myself out but it was too thick and the harder I tried, the more my other leg sunk! The fact that I was holding on to the tripod with camera attached, carrying my camera bag and those extra 20 lbs of excess body fat probably didn't help matters!  Thank God for sending my buddy to help me today - he grabbed my camera and that helped me free my hands and drag myself out of that mess!  Of course the casualties of this misadventure were my hiking boots and jeans which had so much of this yucky black mud that I had half a mind to discard them right then! Although a little flustered and embarrassed by it all, I decided to hang around and at least get some shots to make my trip worth it. The above is one of those after-the-incident shots.

After walking home from the car barefoot and spending a good 20 mins in the shower cleaning the grime off me, I couldn't help wondering what might have happened if the mud was softer, had I been buried deeper and what if there was nobody around! I guess it's for worst-case scenarios like this that it's nice to have a buddy to go shooting with. We serious photography enthusiasts do tend to get carried away by the motivation to go the extra yard (literally in my case :-) ) to get that great shot and sometimes fail to notice potential danger. So here's to photo buddies!! Enjoy your hobby and be safe everyone!

[mausamhazarika]

Mossy Goodness

Pony Tail Falls, Oregon

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Cloud watching in Kiwanda

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Yosemite falls in its full glory

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Receding Tide

One of the hidden gems of Northern California, the Trinidad State Beach near Eureka is one of the most beautiful beaches from my photographic perspective for its unique set of sea stacks. This is a sunset shot from July 2013  when the weather Gods were gracious enough to provide a nice sunset with beautiful colors on my first ever visit to the beach

[mausamhazarika]

Star Dust

Low light pollution and clear skies in Maui made for some wonderful opportunities for night photography during my Sept 2014 trip. Getting up at 3 in the morning to see sunrise at Haleakala was bit of a tough proposition for both me and my wife as neither of us do well with sleep depravation. So we decided to check out sunset instead. I haven't seen a sunrise from Haleakala to make a comparison but I thoroughly enjoyed the scenic drive up to the top of Haleakala as we were greeted by low hanging clouds, lush greenery and a light drizzle on our way. We saw a beautiful sunset from the top Haleakala and my wife braved the near freezing cold in the car to allow me to spend a couple of hours after sunset for some night photography. I had wrapped up shooting some star trails over the city lights when I got down to the parking lot and saw this scene. The only other car in the parking lot had just roared into life and was about to leave. The reddish light on the mound and on the watch tower are from the rear red lights of this car. I took the opportunity quickly shoot the Milky Way while the foreground was lit red by the car lights.

[mausamhazarika]

Moody Ocean

One of those days when information online deceives you. weather.com had said clear skies for Santa Cruz coast for the evening and I drove down hoping to do some astro photography but when I got to Davenport just north of Santa Cruz, the skies had turned gray and it was all gloom and doom. Instead of shooting stars, I went for some wave action shots and decided to process them in black and white for a bit of drama.

[mausamhazarika]

The city and the treasure chest

After waking up at 4.30 on a Saturday morning and driving nearly an hour over to the Marin headlands north of San Francisco, I found that the first couple of parking lots were already full. So I parked at the third one and walked down on Conzelman road to get to the Kirby cove entrance which is near the second parking lot. From there it was another mile or so of steep downhill trail to get to the cove. If you think I am crazy to do all this on a Saturday morning, guess what? There were at least 40 other photographers already at the cove, all ready to shoot and there was hardly a vantage point left. I eventually found a spot for myself close to the eastern end of the cove and tried some compositions. I was hoping for some fog or some clouds or a slightly higher tide but none of that happened. This and the fact that I was late to the party was a bit frustrating and I kind of lost my focus for a bit. The colors in the sky started glowing in hues of orange right in front of my eyes and not realizing what was going on, I started packing up. Then suddenly the sun came up beautifully from behind the city skyline. As soon as this happened,I could hear the orchestrated shutter clicks of the tens of cameras at the beach and I, like an idiot was caught napping wearing my backpack with no camera in hand!! I quickly put my bag down, took out my camera and took a few shots on the tripod. Unfortunately I had changed from the wide angle lens to the telephoto lens when I packed up previously which didn't allow me to capture the scene as well as I'd have liked. There were a few lessons learnt yesterday which I'll be sure to remind myself the next time I head over to this spot. This particular shot was taken just before sunrise with a 24-70 lens on a Canon 5d Mark III body. It is a 2 shot exposure blend - one exposed and focused for the bridge and the other for the foreground

[mausamhazarika]

A riot of colors at dawn

I took this shot at Lake Tahoe during a trip in December last year with my wife and in-laws. It was a sight-seeing trip for my in-laws who had never been to Tahoe before and also a getaway trip for me and my wife. We arrived in the afternoon, checked out Sand Harbor State Park in the evening and spent the next day at the historic Virginia City and Reno in Nevada . It was a tiring day and before going to bed that night, I debated with myself whether or not to set an alarm for a sunrise shoot on the next morning. I went ahead and set it anyway. The alarm went off at 5.30 am. It was still dark and the Yahoo weather app said the temperature outside was 25 degrees Fahrenheit, all great reasons to turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. Perhaps realizing the shooting opportunities are fewer these days, I coaxed myself out of bed, bundled up in layers and after spending 5 minutes blasting the heater in the car at full power and scraping off the frost from the windshield, I was off to Emerald Bay. After a 30 min drive, I arrived at the turnout overlooking the bay, set up camera and waited. After 30 minutes of enduring the 25 degree temperatures, I got to witness this spectacular sunrise. As far as brilliant sunrises go, this definitely has to be in the top 3 I've ever witnessed in life. It made the small sacrifice of two less hours of sleep totally worth it.