Ok, so I haven’t posted anything in a long time. I really meant to. In fact, I planned on trying to post something every week. But I’m also a fantastic procrastinator. I’ll try to get better. Not at the procrastinating. The other thing.

Anyway, I managed to make one of those epic photo mistakes at my recent Zion workshop. You know the epic mistake. It only happens when the light’s fantastic and things are happening fast and you only really have a short time to get that once in a lifetime shot. This wasn’t actually once in a lifetime, but it was still pretty darn nice.

Let me set the scene:
Sunrise at the Towers of the Virgin in Zion National Park. It’s overcast and the clouds are hanging over the cliffs and peaks in front of us. It looks to be a dull, dull, sunrise. Or an epic one. Those are the only choices I’m allowing on this morning. Well, it looked like it was going to be the former, and in fact, one of the workshop groups that was there packed up and left right before the sun was to actually rise.

But then it happened. The clouds started turning pink, then deep red. And a deep red glow began showing on the cliffs (the other workshop group was scrambling back by this time).

This ended up being about the best sunrise I’ve seen from this particular spot (granted, I don’t live near Zion so I can’t get there a whole lot, but when I am there, I usually I get clear, boring skies).

So where’s the epic mistake you ask? Well, the night before we were photographing the rather dull late afternoon light on the Watchman. So I took some shots with HDR in mind. You probably see where this is going. To make things easier and quicker to capture the HDR shots I needed, I put my camera into the auto-bracketing mode. Now do you see where this is going? Well, I forgot to turn off auto bracketing, so when the amazing sunrise hit and I started shooting, I was unintentionally bracketing.
Fortunately it wasn’t too much of an epic fail. I still got good shots, and the over exposed shots are mostly salvageable. And when the light was at its best was when the camera was mostly at the right setting. So it all worked out. But it did remind me of the time in Monument Valley when I shot a sunset landscape (on a tripod, no less) at ISO 1600 with my D200. Talk about noisy. And the reason I did that was because the previous day we were in the slots I set the camera to 1600 so I could take hand-held slot shots to show workshop clients what kind of possibilities lay ahead of them in the slot. Then I forgot to change the ISO back. The worst part is that I can see the ISO setting right in the viewfinder so I had no excuse.

And no, I haven’t even bothered looking at the HDR shots I made of the Watchman. The light was dull and so too will be the results. I may use them just to practice using NIK’s HDR Efex Pro software, but I don’t think you’ll see those shots any time soon.

Sigh.