Mountain Sping IV – Trinidad CA

Posted By John Chabalko on December 9th, 2007

I’m pretty sure this is the picture i nearly soaked one of my lenses taking. I had retreated back to my bag to grab a wider lens and slipped as i was climbing back to my camera. I curled my hand around to protect the lens and took about half of my weight on the backs of two of my fingers – on a rock right next to a 2 foot pool of water. It’s my favorite lens – i couldn’t let it meet that sort of demise, and besides my fingers are all healed up now..

I’ve found that it’s really tricky to make long exposures of anything that’s not firmly rooted or mechanically attached to some other sort of stationary object. These ferns are a perfect example. It was still back there, dead still. But every once in a while the smallest of breezes would blow through just for a second (there was probably some minor pressure shift under the trees induced by the sun coming out from behind some clouds for a second). I made a handful of exposures between 64 and 128 seconds just to make sure there was no movement. This was the sharpest frame of all of them.