Smith Rock

-Christian Nestell Bovee.

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One of the problems of living in beautiful southern California is the absolute lack of clouds in the sky. Other than the marine layer that happens during the summer, the sky is often blue with a good supply of smog. I have found this to be true even after a rain or in the morning. This also means that one of my favorite filters, the LEE 10-stop ND, almost never see any use when we are touring locations near Socal.

So, I relish my opportunities when I am at a location where there are clouds and their motion is creating some drama in the sky. This shot was taken at the smith rock state park near Bend, Oregon. The morning we visited, I noticed that the sky still had some cloud cover in the morning and the wind was whipping the clouds around creating some amazing motion in the sky. So finally I had a chance to get the 10 stop ND out and capture all the fun stuff happening in the sky.

This shot was taken using a 10 stop ND to capture the motion in the sky and a 1 stop ND grad to balance the light in the sky and the rocks. I metered the scene on the clouds and calculated the 11 stops that I had to compensate manually. Focusing was also set manually on the rock cliffs. Color correction done in photoshop included setting the white balance of the image to compensate for the blue tinge that often comes with Lee Big Stopper.

• Hugh Leonard.

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The stunning smith rock state park, the day we visited the park we had a stunning sunrise with beautiful light and wonderful clouds. The only problem was that it was directly opposite this scene. But after the brilliant display of light behind us was over the whole park was basked in a pink glow for about 5 minutes. Summer is usually not a great time to take sunrise shots here as the rocks remain in the shadows.

I hope to return here again and hopefully the clouds will be in front of the rocks :)

• John Ruskin.

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When we decided to drive back from our trip to Washington, we knew that we needed a stopover in between to take a break and since we had couple of days thanks to inclement weather in the Southern Cascades, we decided to stop over at Bend, Oregon. I wanted to get to two of the iconic locations near Bend, Smith Rock state park and Sparks Lake.

We reached Smith Rock around 5am in the morning, well before the first climbers arrived and scopped out some of the hiking trails around to find some photo spots. This one is the most classic view of the rock formations and I took this shot just before the sunrise. The sliver of light was giving a nice glow to the storm clouds that were trapped by the mammoth rock formations. After this shot we pretty much sprinted with all our gear to get to the other locations we scopped out earlier while the light was still good. All in all, we had an amazing time in this park.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

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Enough with the woodland photographs, today lets talk about my bread and butter landscape location—the High deserts of the west coast. And today's shot comes from the Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. This is one location that we have visited on every trip to the beautiful beaver state. The rock formation is just absolutely stunning, and along with that, Smith Rock is a prime spot for spectacular sunset or sunrise shots.

The first time we visited the park was in 2013, and I had just updated my gear from a crop sensor D7000 to full-frame D800 along with a brand new 24-70 f2.8, and I was hoping for the image quality to take a jump. The expected increase in image quality did not happen. I had to discard a lot of the images because the 36 megapixels of the D800 demanded better technique than the 16 MP D7000. The 24-70 f2.8 was heavy, and the depth of field was shallower. This made sharp frames a challenge. So all in all, not a great first outing.

But I was ready when we returned the second time. I had time to get familiar with my camera gear, and my technique had improved quite a lot. I got way more keepers on this trip, but there we still a lot of photographs that I had to discard. Then I attended some post-processing & workflow classes and understood the importance of having a good workflow and sound post-processing. Now that I have some time on my hands, I revisited some of my old shots. By far, this has been the best skillset I have added as a photographer. Today's image was a stitched panorama of about five images taken in portrait orientation. The first time I post-processed the picture, it looked way too saturated and artificial that I decided not to post it anywhere. But I liked the composition too much and decided to re-process the image. I am much happier with the result. It is way closer to the actual sunrise we encountered that beautiful summer morning. I hope you all enjoy it as well.

• Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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Beautiful Smith Rock State Park located at Bend, Oregon. This picture is a panorama stitch combining about 4 shots in portrait mode stitched together as a landscape shot. This is such a stunning location personally I don’t feel like I have done justice to the beauty of this place. I would love to visit here again when the sunlight hits the rocks directly, hopefully sometime other than summer.

Thanks for visiting have a nice day..