Welcome to the Maru Landscapes Blog. Here, I will share with you my latest images, techniques, and thoughts on landscape photography. From the best places to go, to the best equipment and techniques to use, you will find it here. I hope you enjoy the blog and come to visit often. Feel free to contact me at maruphoto@shaw.ca if you have any questions at all about the content of this blog. Jeremy Jackson
Story: Part of the skill of landscape photography is finding the best landscape at the most interesting or unusual times of year. Most landscape photographers spend perhaps 99% of their time searching for the right place and about 1% shooting. For many years now I have been thinking about going to Northern Arizona to shoot a bizarre and remote area of desert called White Pocket. This year the conditions were perfect and so I decided to make the 3-day, 2500 km drive from my home in Chilliwack.
I arrived at White Pocket just after a huge storm that deposited unprecedented rain in the bone dry Arizona desert. The conditions were as good as they could be. In the next few posts, I will share some of my images from this area and the techniques I used to make them. Please enjoy!
Technical Details: This is a composite of 3 images. Two focus-stacked images were made for the foreground and mid-ground rocks and one image was made for the sky. The images of the rocks were made at 1.3 seconds, f8, and ISO 100. The image of the sky was made at f5, 1/60 of a second and ISO 100. All 3 images were combined manually in Photoshop. No significant changes were made to the original images except for an overall increase in contrast and some light dodging and burning. Overall, saturation in the rocks was reduced! The rocks in this area are unbelievably colorful and, it turns out, much too saturated to look natural.
For all images I used a Nikon D800E and 14-24, f2.8 lens set at 14mm. Such a wide angle of view exaggerates the foreground and diminishes the visual significance of the background. I would say the front lens element was about 1 foot from the rock in the foreground and 100 feet from the yellow rocks in the distance.
Please be assured that, as bizarre as this image looks, the image is true to life. This is, as far as I know, the most unearthly place on the planet. It takes years of looking, years of preparation, and being in a place at exactly the right time to see such things.
The Storm