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Alabama Hills Sunrise

The Alabama Hills are a range of hills nestled between the town of Lone Pine and Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in America’s Lower 48 States. The rocks in the Alabama Hills have weathered into various rounded shapes, and over 100 arches have been identified. 

As a follow-up to our fun Death Valley workshop last month, I'll be leading a night photography workshop in the Eastern Sierra with +Lori Hibbett and +Bill Wight in June.  We'll practice night landscape photography, light panting, astrophotography including star trails and Milky Way photography.  We'll even spend a night in the "ghost town" of Bodie State Historic Park!

A description of the trip with a link to an album of sample images of Eastern Sierra night photography is posted here: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/eastern-sierra-night-photo-workshops-2013/
The enrollment and payment button through +PayPal is in the right column on my blog's front page: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/

I've been exploring the Eastern Sierra for 30+ years, living here for the past 3.  I love to show photographers around my home region!  If you don't join us this time, we'll show you some of the images we capture, and my guide book to landscape photography locations including the Eastern Sierra will appear later this year in the series presented here: www.PhotoTripUSA.com 

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34 thoughts on “Alabama Hills Sunrise”

  1. Guess what,if I could read or write code,I'd self proclaim genius and create a government tax of one billionth of one % just because I could and knew how.  You teach all you can. Great job! Be careful!

  2. +George Lowrimore I actually lightened the shadows and darkened the highlights quite a bit, but I would generally agree with you and point out that trying to overcome the camera's recording to make it better match what we see of a scene onsite is one of the key battles landscape photographers fight.  
    Here's how Galen Rowell described it:
    "I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing. "  – Galen Rowell 
    Pursuing reality may or may not be the ultimate objective:
    "One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it."  – Galen Rowell
    In fact, if photographers want to exercise some judgement and actually play a tangible role in the outcome (thereby elevating themselves above the status of the output of a simple Web cam or copy machine), some intervention may be required:
    "If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."  – Galen Rowell 
    Choosing to allow some portions of an image to appear as silhouette, using the low dynamic range of the camera as an advantage, is one way to accomplish that creative role.
    "I began to realize that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed."  – Galen Rowell

    I can't actually see what you're seeing, the odds that we use the same display technologies and that our monitors are calibrated similarly are close to zero, but I get what you're saying.  The photos I share are no't actually intended or optimized for online use at all, they're being formatted to use in a book, so there are going to be a lot of non-optimal results.  Google+ for example has to resize my photos for display, and the algorithm they use often darkens photos.  It's just something I have to accept.  My typical day often involves a social network, but I can't afford to have my workflow or life revolve around them (I don't have the luxury of being able to make custom, optimized copies of my work).  Sorry it's not looking better for you.

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