Camas And A Sunrise At Sagehen Meadows (2 clickable photos and camera settings)

Yesterday morning's camas wildflower sunrise photoshoot was a success! Here are two "keeper" photos that I'm pretty happy with. It was an early 3 am start to my day, and it was very wet and cold out there but totally worth it.

I had been out to the meadow a few times this year. The camas got a little later of a start than it usually does, and it's not the biggest year for them. However, they are finally blooming now and there was enough of them to get some nice photos. I also shot some video of my little adventure out there, please look for the link to that below.

click images to view large

These photos were both shot on a Canon 5DS R with a 24-105mm lens. The photo above had the lens set at 96 mm. I chose not to shoot the scene with a wide angle lens so I could create a more filled in look to the camas. There weren't as many camas as usual so if I were to use a wide angle lens, they would have looked more sparse in the foreground. The aperture was f16 so I could have a fairly decent depth of field but even with that setting, the background is still slightly soft focus. Two graduated neutral density filters were used on the front of the lens in order to darken the sky a bit and balance out the exposure. A headlamp was also used to lighten up the foreground a bit, that technique can be seen in the video. The exposure time was 25 seconds long and that all led to needing an ISO of 400.

I also used two graduated neutral density filters for the photo above but it was light enough out by that point to where I did not need to use the headlamp to lighten the foreground. Since it was lighter out, I was able to use an ISO of 50. I was also able to use a smaller aperture of f20 in order to get a better depth of field, which led to a shutter speed of 3.2 seconds. Of course, a tripod is a must for these longer exposure times, I also used a shutter release cable and mirror lockup in order to not shake the camera when taking the photo.

Both images were shot in RAW format and edited in Adobe Photoshop's Camera RAW feature. The shadow and highlight detail was brought out more and the color balance was worked on. I also did a little bit of "dodging and burning" of the camas in order to bring out a bit more contrast and detail.

Here's the link to the @dtube video where I explain the techniques used to capture these images: VIDEO

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I'm curious to know which of the two sunrise photos do you like best and why?

Thank you for looking, watching, and reading!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography



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