Roadtrip Images

Many people come to Zion National Park in the Fall to see the Cottonwoods along the Virgin river in full color. In the winter they have another draw for photographers.

As I mentioned in last weeks post, we originally came to Zion looking for the bare cottonwood trees of winter. We did find them but we received a wonderful snowstorm while we were there that caused a change in direction. Once the snowstorm cleared and the sun came back out, we resumed our search. The bare cottonwood trees have these silver tips on their branches that have a wonderful glow when the sun hits them just right. Couple this with a rich sandstone canyon wall background and you have a really nice color contrast. This really highlights the tree and makes it just come alive.

I really wanted to get a single tree that I could isolate against the dark background. It also needed to be oriented so that the branches would be backlit by the sun. Although there are tons of cottonwood trees in the main canyon, finding this combination was harder than expected. We spent several days in search of just the right tree. Many good candidates of isolated trees just didn’t have a good background or the sun was in the wrong position or both. Finally, towards the end of our stay, we found one.

Shooting a backlit subject can be tricky. Photos of people who are backlit typically require a fill flash to get enough light on their face. In the case of a backlit tree, you’re usually pointing the camera up a bit so there is risk of getting sun flare in the lens. You can see an example of lens flare in this post here. I spent quite a bit of time moving my tripod around to eliminate any flare while still keeping the tree in strong back light. In the image above, the sun is just out of frame in the upper right. Another negative effect to having the sun so close is it reduces the contrast in that part of the image. Often this has to be corrected in post processing.

From a composition perspective, I wanted to keep the tree branches isolated against the canyon walls. Standing below the tree looking up allowed me to do this. If there were other trees or brush behind this tree the back light effect wouldn’t be nearly as strong. Given all the elements I was trying to juggle it took awhile to get everything lined up. Once I had everything set, I took a series of photographs until the sun went behind the canyon wall.

We found several other potential trees over the course of several days but this one proved to have the best combination of features.

Post processing was relatively easy for this photograph. Most of the hard work was done in the field getting the composition set up. As I mentioned above, the sun was just off the upper right corner of the image so I had a lighting imbalance to deal with. I evened this out in Photoshop plus I enhanced the contrast in this portion of the image since the sun had washed it out a bit. Bringing up the highlights intensified the glow on the branches. I added some dehaze which deepened the color of the canyon walls behind the tree. All of these adjustments were done in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) filter. After the light balancing was done I went into the Nik Color Efex Pro module to add dynamic and tonal contrast to open up the image a little more. The tonal contrast really enhances the color contrast between the silver branches and the dark background. Next step was sharpening with the Nik Sharpener Pro module. I use the output sharpening function and keep it dialed down to only 35% or so. Much more than this and I believe it gets a little “crunchy”. The last step for this photograph is some vignetting to darken up the edges a little. This helps guide the eye to the center of the image where the branches are.

Going back to Zion in the winter proved to be a wonderful experience. Yes it got a little cold with the winter storm and we generally avoid the snow while travelling in the motorhome. From a photography perspective it was superb. The rapidly changing weather as the storm came in and then cleared out brought some amazing conditions to shoot in. Clearing winter storms in the mountains can be epic.

It also helps to have some pre-visualized concepts in mind as we did with this cottonwood tree. I had seen this effect before and I knew that Zion would be an awesome place to experience it in. We were fortunate to capture this image and being there during a winter storm was such a gift.

As always, you can see higher resolution images on our Facebook page. Please give us a like while you’re there.

Nikon D810 with Nikkor 24-70mm at 48mm. f/11 at 1/20 of a second. ISO 40.