Sierra Nevada mountain range

The beautiful Sierra Nevada mountain range as seen from 30000 ft above the ground. I was on the plane and was lucky to capture this shot. The sun had almost set (as you can see from the orange hue on the left and the bright orange hues on the mountain peaks). The curved top is a result of the earth being curved not the camera sensor being curved! Why do I like this shot? Well, besides the beautiful scene we can see here, it was an extremely challenging shot. Light around this time is very low (probably around 3 lux) and so I had to shoot at at least a shutter speed of 1/6th. But when you are on a plane traveling at 500 mph, that shutter speed results in significant motion blur. So, I tried a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second. At ISO of 100, I could capture nothing. The scene was very dark! I bumped up the ISO to 5000 and was able to capture an image but it was extremely noisy. My lens was already at f/1.8, so it had no more room to let in more light. So, I tried the stacking technique. Remember that noise is random and if you stack multiple photos and average them, you can get a much less noisier photo. So, I took 16 shots and stacked them. From a theoretical perspective, that results in an ISO of 5000/16=312 and a shutter speed of 16/250. So, my stacked photo is 4 stops brighter (16 is 2 to the power of 4) than the single shot.

You can see the difference between the stacked photo and the actual photo in the image on the right. The stacked photo is much cleaner with much more visible details than the shot photo. Since I was forced to take the photo at a f/1.8, the depth of field for focus is not great, however. But that is noticeable if you zoom in 400%!

Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
Lake Mead National Recreation Area

My word! The stretch of land at Lake Mead National Recreation Area has some of the most colorful rocks I have ever seen. The drive through this region is simply otherworldly and if you are lucky enough to get there on a partly cloudy day, you will see some of the most saturated colors you have ever seen. I was lucky enough to get to the park at exactly the ideal condition and I saw some of the most amazing color combinations I have ever seen. The stunning show of colors throughout this park and later at the Valley of Fire State Park were mind blowing! Fantastic show of color created by the constituent elements of the rocks. Rocks here are made of different minerals and since these minerals absorb different wavelengths of light (different colors), we see all these beautiful colors!

In the very bottom photo of this 3-photo sequence, you can see beautiful clouds, complemented by some bizarre weather patterns. On the right side of the image, and on the very far, at the center, it appears that clouds are reaching the ground. However, it is not the cloud that is reaching the ground, it is rain falling down over there. I just stopped by this scene, took out my camera, and took a panorama handheld. I did not have high hopes of the photos stitching properly but was surprised immensely by the results. You can see my shadow at the bottom  of the photo.

Valley of Fire
Valley of Fire
Valley of Fire

I visited the Valley of Fire for two consecutive days. On the first day, the sky was clear with no clouds. I generally don’t like that type of sky for landscape photography because photos do not end up nice. However, at the White Domes trail (top left photo), I saw this stunning rock beaming with hues of orange and red. It was golden hour and sun was about 45 minutes away from setting. Reflections of sun rays from rocks that surrounded the valley created a secondary illumination source that caused the sand at the bottom of the photo to look magenta. It was such an amazing show!

On the second day, weather got cloudy and it started to rain at some points of the park. At some other parts, however, it was partly cloudy and sun was shining but not as intensely as a normal sunny days. And my word, that was my paradise. I took out my camera and started to photograph some of the craziest shots I have taken in my entire life. Some of them, we just saw above in the Lake Mead section and the rest are here in these two big panoramas that I took throughout the park. Colors were so saturated that I had to de-saturate some color channels to make the photos believable!! It were not only the rocks that were so colorful, the sky was also crazy beautiful! Clouds were so puffy with hues of yellow, orange, gray, and some blue sky in between that if one just looks at the sky instead of the rocks, I would not blame them. Also, the same story here for the clouds that appear to reach the ground; it is rain that appears as a cloudy spot in the photo! Fantastic, fantastic sceneries that I wish I could see again!

Sunset at Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada. The combination of different colors with the sun rays gave away for a wonderful photo. Unfortunately, the sky is featureless and while I could have done a sky replacement in Photoshop, I try to avoid that to the extent possible. It may prevent the photo from being elevated to the level that could wow everyone, but I already have a lot of photos that have clouds and sunsets by themselves. If I do photoshop on every photo, I cannot trust my own photos! This is a good reminder to me that not always every condition should be perfect. In fact, we can enjoy a beautiful sky with colorful foregrounds. The only thing I would have done differently about this photo would have been to lay down on the ground and then take the photo. That would have helped me get less sky and more foreground. We learn from mistakes anyways! Make sure to check the Nevada part of the website in the Landscape Photography section for some amazing photos that I took the next day that had some of the strangest combinations of clouds, sun rays, rain, and saturated colors at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire State Park!