Yesterday’s Precon was at Red Rock National Park and it was one of the best we had in Las Vegas. While landscape photography can always be a challenge, especially when it comes to getting up at 4am, the benefits of beating the heat made it worthwhile for everyone. Now Red Rock is a really cool place with great formations in all directions which are perfect for color and black and white photography. If you’ve never been there then you should go sometime because it really is worth the drive.
The way the day unfolded we didn’t have the most dramatic of skies. We did have a good diffusion layer to the east which helped add some soft light on the formation and the valley terrain. Now because of the lack of clouds a lot of what I shot was detail shots. Tight close ups on the rock faces. It wasn’t until after the sun popped over the diffusion layer that I was really going wide and working the foreground. It basically came to chasing the light and minimizing the amount of blue sky which wasn’t really that pretty.
The whole time I was out there I Was shooting with the D5 and the 70-200 VRII. For two main reasons, the D5 has an amazing file size and really great quality that goes with it. If I wanted to bring out the details in the shadows I could have. The 70-200VRII was great at focusing in on those details. When it came to finishing the images there was two ways to go, color or black and white. Black white is probably what I’ll use for the majority of the images since we had really great texture amongst the terrain and the light. Now a lot of these lessons I talk about in my class this Thursday but for those that weren’t at Red Rock or at PSW this week, then you can go here on my blog and download a PDF copy of my class. It’s full of great content.