An eclipse, a storm over Mt. Sopris with a double-rainbow, and… bears?!
We began our August 2017 “Almost” to “Wow!” workshop at Anderson Ranch viewing the 72%-totality solar eclipse from a student’s deck overlooking the continental divide. (Thank you, Becky.) As if that weren’t dramatic enough, while we were looking up at the darkening sky, a trio of bears (a mama & two “babies”) passed under the deck immediately below our feet. (It happened so fast they casually passed by within feet of us, while we stared slack-jawed!)
At the height of the eclipse I measured the exposure for the landscape with my DSLR. A standard “sunny day” (ISO 100) exposure is normally 1/250th sec @ f/8. At totality the exposure was 1/15th sec @ f/8. That’s 3.5 stops darker than normal – in the middle of the day! Crazy cool. So cool, in fact, that we were all reaching for sweatshirts and sweaters. In the pictures below, you can see that among the most interesting effects of the eclipse were the crescent-moon-shaped shadows cast by trees and spaghetti colanders.
Other highlights of the workshop included storm chasing – and catching! My thanks to Tom (and my friends Jim Ryan & Chase Harrison) for guiding us to the perfect vantage point to see a thunderstorm over Mt. Sopris – with lightning… and two rainbows. Really. Landscape photography doesn’t get any better than that. (Or maybe it does, thanks to Jay & Mercedes inviting the class to their place afterwards for refreshments and conversation. We had such a good time.)
Gino by Jim Ryan
In fact, my thanks to each of you, my new friends, for participating full-out in this workshop, and for your collaboration and generous contributions. I’m so grateful to have had such a great group! Spending the week together was a pleasure: working in Photoshop & Lightroom, sharing photographs, all of us learning and teaching, working and playing… reaching for, and attaining, that next level of seeing…
This is what a great workshop looks like – and these are just the snapshots. (Captions indicate who shot each picture; thanks for sharing! Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to advance the slideshow):
