The Digital Photo Guy

Death Valley, The Photos Keep On Coming

I had originally planned to cover a different topic today but, in looking over my Death Valley National Park (DVNP) photos, I realized there were more that could be re-purposed for a blog. I’ll move on next time but, for this post, I’ll continue with photos from DVNP.

Batteries are near and dear to many RVers and Scotty’s Castle is a marvel of battery technology. The owner, designer and civil engineer, Albert Johnson, was as ingenious as he was eccentric. As backup for the diesel generators that eventually replaced the Pelton water turbines, Johnson installed two banks of 100 Edison nickel-alkaline batteries. Each battery produced 1.2 volts for a combined total of 120V per bank.

This is the top bank of batteries and there’s another bank below. It’s quite an impressive installation with none of the negatives associated with today’s lead-acid batteries. Knowing I couldn’t use a tripod or flash during the tour, I carried only my Canon EOS-M mirrorless camera with a fixed 22mm lens, a medium wide lens on the EOS-M. That meant I could back into a corner and capture most of one battery bank in a single frame.

In order to get most of the batteries in focus, I set my aperture to f/11 (small opening.) That gave me a hyperfocal distance (focus point) of about 7.5 ft where everything from half that distance (~3.75 ft) to infinity was in acceptable focus. Of course, “acceptable” is in the eye of the viewer so some may not like the blurriness of the near and far battery caps but, when you’re being hurried along by a tour guide you have to go with “by guess & by golly.” The trade-off at f/11 is that my shutter speed (time light is allowed into the camera) was 2 seconds. I’m sure some of the blur is due to camera shake as I tried to handhold such a long exposure while braced against a rail. The photo was converted to B&W in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom by simply clicking the B&W tab in the Develop Module.

The point here is that you don’t always need the whole scene to make a good photo. This photo has legs because the open cap in the foreground contrasts with the neat, tidy rows of closed battery caps. If I were to exhibit this photo, I’d title it something like, “I Gotta Be Me!”

Sometimes, a scene seems silly and whimsical. I saw the scene below as we emerged from the power plant tour and thought it might make a good photo to go along with DVNP history as a setting for sci-fi movies.

Notice how the original was quite different from the final. The only substantive change was to crop the final to just the relevant parts. The Crop Tool is one of the most useful tools in any photo editor. At the same time, keep in mind that cropping throws away pixels and reduces the overall quality of the final image. This is OK for small web images that you use on social media but won’t print worth beans.

Panoramas are popular types of landscape photos because they capture the grandeur of wide-open space like DVNP. Most any photo editor today has a built-in pano stitcher but that’s the back-end of the process. If the starting images aren’t carefully aligned and processed, the final result will suffer. Remember, “garbage in, garbage out.”

The group drove to Aguereberry Point one day. I took a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-105/4L IS lens and a tripod. The temperature was about 55F at the top and most of the group wanted to jump out, snap a photo and get the heck out of Dodge. I, on the other hand, wanted to wait for the right light so we compromised and left as soon as everyone got their snapshots.

The pano above was stitched together in Adobe Photoshop CS4 from seven separate images. To make the images, I first leveled my tripod using the built-in bubble level. After mounting the camera and deciding how much I wanted to include, I adjusted the pitch downward to capture the valley floor near Badwater. Usually, a very expensive camera and/or lens are used to correct pitch but today’s software is pretty sophisticated so it’s easy to correct slight pitch. Be sure to overlap each frame by 20%-40% depending on how much pitch you have.

When making pano images, be sure to adjust exposure using shutter speed and not aperture. Changing aperture will change depth of field and cause odd focus shifts between frames. Back home, I selected the most interesting frame and adjusted that first. Then, I synchronized all the frames to the first image. This ensured that all the frames had similar light, white balance and sharpness. Otherwise, it would be obvious that multiple frames were stitched together.

On the way to Aguereberry Point, we stopped at Eureka Mine an abandoned mine claim worked by Pete Aguereberry. Here, I made two photos to illustrate a common issue in tourist areas, too many tourists! The first two photos show people in both. The third photo shows the scene with the people removed by simply layering one photo on top of the other and erasing the area with people. The photo below shows through and everything lines up perfectly. I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 but its little brother, Adobe Photoshop Elements, can do the same thing with a bit more effort.

So, that brings us to the end of another article about photography in Death Valley National Park. Of course, these tips can be applied to any situation, not just DVNP. As always, if you have questions, comments or requests, post them here. Thanks for reading.