The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

Autumn comes to Denali National Park between the last week of August and the first week of September. During this time, the entire tundra floor (almost the whole landscape) turns shades of yellow and red. This is my favorite time to be in the Alaska interior (except for high-altitude mountaineering where conditions are better in the spring), with changing weather and the mosquitoes gone.

Denali National Park spreads over six million acres, with only one access road inside. At mile 87, where this road skirts Wonder Lake, you can get closer to Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in North America, than from any other place accessible by road. Although 27 miles away, the Mountain will seem close, within touching distance.

Reaching that particular spot at the right time is not as easy as it seems. It it were, everyone would be doing it, as this is one of the most spectacular locations in the world for landscape photography. You’ll have to put some effort: Denali is a popular location with very restricted access. Beyond the park entrance (except for the Kantishna enclave), there are no commercial facilities in the park, such as food, gas, or lodging.

As of 2009, reservations for the next year (including bus and campgrounds) just opened on Dec 1st at http://www.reservedenali.com. If you plan to travel to Denali in 2010, after reading this article, you will understand why you should start planning now.

Although the road is 90 mile long, only the first 14 miles are paved and normally open to private vehicles. Special permits are issued for the unpaved section, but don’t count on getting one. You’d need extensive credentials, and/or win a lottery. Even Galen Rowell didn’t qualify. This means that you’ll have to take a bus. You will need a reservation. There are only a fixed number of buses everyday, regardless of the demand. If you didn’t purchase your ticket well in advance (2/3 of tickets are sold that way) you’ll have to get on a 2-day waiting list for the remaining 1/3 of tickets. The journey by bus from the Park entrance to Wonder Lake takes 6 bumpy hours one-way, clearly not leaving time (nor good timing) for quality photography on a day trip. If you’ve come that far to Denali National Park, just going on day trips does not make sense.

To stay overnight in the park near Wonder Lake, you have three options. The first one is to camp at the Wonder Lake campground (mile 85). You will need a reservation. There are only 28 campsites there, and in general, they are booked many months in advance. The second is to stay in Kantishna, a private enclave at the end of the road (mile 90) featuring a number of resort lodges and cabins. The problem is that staying there will easily cost more than your airfare to Anchorage. With both options, a mountain bike would be useful for moving along the park road. Unlike motorized vehicles, bikes are not restricted.

If, like me, you didn’t plan half-a-year in advance, there is still a third option, which is to get a backcountry permit. Such a permit lets you camp anywhere within a certain area, provided you are at least a mile and out of sight from the road. Those permits are issued on a first-come, first-served at the Park visitor center. Only a few parties are admitted at any given time in each area. Naturally, there is a high demand for the most scenic areas, such as the one around Wonder Lake. The trick is to first get a permit for a less popular area. Once you have a permit for one area, you can get on the waiting list for other areas, moving from unpopular areas to popular areas.

During my trip, I carried my full photography kit, since I in addition to large format landscapes, I was hoping to photograph wildlife. It would have been a lot of work to go backpacking with that kit, and all the gear and supplies necessary to survive in the park. I’ll share with you my strategy: I travelled with two backpacks, one for photography, one for camping. Each evening, I would cook dinner near the road, in order not to have any bear-attracting food at my camp. Then I left the bear-resistant canister there, together with the photography pack before hiking into the wilderness just with my sleeping gear to find a spot for camping. The idea of leaving $15,000 of gear overnight on the tundra might appear hair-rising, but as there aren’t many people around, the worse you have to worry about is rain or snow. I tucked the pack, a Lowepro Super-Trekker, under its all-weather cover, and used my GPS to mark its location.

Staying nearby, I was able to catch the best light for this scene, which is late afternoon. Mount McKinley is so tall that it creates its own weather, often hiding behind clouds for days. I was lucky that during one of the three evenings when I was within sight of the Mountain, the clouds cleared for a few hours before sunset, as a half-moon was rising. As you can see in the second image, they moved back soon after sunset, and I didn’t see the Mountain again during my stay.

All images of Denali National Park

Each year, the U.S. Department of State produces calendars which are given out as gifts by U.S. embassies around the world. I am honored that all the 13 images from their 2010 National Parks calendar are from me.

I have posted new images of Acadia National Park. As always, new images are mixed with old images. Use the button “List most recent images” on the home page to see which images are new.

It had been a decade since my previous visit of Acadia in Oct 1997. Although that 1997 visit was short, lasting three days, I felt satisfied by it, and since then Acadia had ranked high in my list of favorites, for the variety of scenery it packs in such a small area. This, and the distance (furthest from the San Francisco Bay area), explain why Acadia was the only National Park in the continental US that I hadn’t visited at least twice.

In general, I try to return at different seasons, but this time I happened to be in Maine, working on the Maine Woods in September, so I was back again in Acadia during the fall season. The weather made this visit different. The interesting thing with landscape photography is that with changes in light, seasons, and weather, you are never seeing the same scene twice. Some would not have been pleased that it rained most of the time during their two-day visit, but I welcomed the change. The rain made the pebbles on a beach glisten. Leaves look more saturated with colors. The fog created mood in landscape images of Jordan Pond. I could hear tourists stepping out of their car on Cadillac Mountain expressing their disappointment over the limited visibility. I would have been disappointed myself if this had been my first visit. Although trying to keep the lens dry was a challenge, since I had already seen the expensive views, I was excited to photograph in different conditions, and try to make the most of what nature had handed me.

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This is the first in a new series of postings. Each will feature one specific photographic location (sometimes referred to as “photo hot spot”) in a different national park. I will describe the location, sometimes give tips, illustrate it with a few typical images, and, if warranted, provide links to all the images on www.terragalleria.com photographed at that location. If this is popular, I’ll try to make it a weekly series, so it would run through 2010, since there are 58 National Parks.

Outstanding locations are plenty in Yosemite National Park, but if I’d have to name a favorite, this would be El Capitan Meadows. El Capitan Meadows is located next to the park loop road in the Valley, just at the base of El Capitan (2.5 miles west from Yosemite Lodge) but if you are not craning your neck, you might miss it from the road.

I often came there to catch the early sun rays and cook breakfast in the morning before starting a day of climbing. From there, you can look directly at the face of El Capitan, which is the tallest cliff in America. If you come during the climbing season, there are always a couple of parties scaling the cliff that you can follow with binoculars, and photograph with a super-tele lens. In the evening, the cliff is punctuated like a starry sky by the headlamps of climbers setting a bivy. The meadows is where you start an El Capitan climb. Some meadows may be more central, but to me El Capitan meadows is the heart of Yosemite Valley.

Besides El Capitan, the Meadows are bordered by the distinctive-looking Cathedral Rocks and the Merced River. From the bridge at the end of the meadows, reflexions can be photographed in both directions. Graceful black oak trees grace the meadow. They appear both on the cover of Ray McSavaney’s Explorations and John Sexton’s Recollections. Because the meadow is surrounded by all those high cliffs, the light there is often special, even in the middle of the day at some times of the year. The sun doesn’t reach the meadow until around one hour after sunrise and until one hour before sunset. The trees go from fluorescent green in the spring to bright yellow in the fall. Ferns and wildflowers adorn the meadow. This is there that I took the first series of Yosemite images with which I was really pleased (several years and dozens of trips after my first visit to the Valley) after a snowstorm in the middle of winter.

More images taken from El Cap Meadows. All images of Yosemite National Park.

I’ve posted new underwater images of kelp taken a month ago during a day of diving in the Channel Islands They were all taken with a Sea & Sea 15mm lens on a Nikonos V using Fuji film.

This might sound awfully wide to those not familiar with underwater photography, so here are some explanations. Because the refraction index of water is 1.33, when used in the water, the lens is the equivalent of a 20mm lens (all lenses become 1.33 times longer). Then, in underwater photography, you need to get very close to your subject, because even a small amount of water between the lens and the subject would degrade images significantly, and in particular absorb the all the reds (resulting in blue hues).

While I am pleased with the images, considering for how long I hadn’t been diving and the equipment that I had, I will be most likely returning next year with a housed dslr and my strobe repaired, since I saw so much more than what I managed to photograph.

Phillip Colla feels that it is crazy to have only 36 exposures available. On the first dive, I was so tired (insufficient weights might have contributed) that I had to force myself to finish the roll. But after I got more comfortable in the water, that did became a limitation. However, what I missed most was the ability to shoot at high ISOs. This would have made it possible to try to photograph sea lions (do they move fast in the water !) and scenes in the shade.

Being a large format photographer, I tend to be a bit picky regarding image quality. When using 35mm cameras, since one needs to enlarge so much from the small image capture, everything has to be the best possible in order to yield a sharp print.

Of course, image quality is a minor aspect of photography, compared to all the other factors that go into making great photographs. However, to quote Norman Koren, “the technique you develop in testing cameras and lenses will spill over to your daily photography. Alfred Stieglitz tested film and developers extensively when he discovered photography as a student in Berlin. Ansel Adams performed extensive tests in the development of his zone system. Although nobody would claim that testing is responsible for their unique vision, it certainly contributed to the skill that transformed their vision into prints of transcendent beauty.”

Back in the early 1990s, I was doing quite a bit of lens testing in order to understand which lenses were sharper, and how the choice of focal lengths and f-stops affected image quality. One photographed targets (that had to be carefully labeled to identify the parameters at a later stage), had the film processed, and then squinted with a microscope, struggling to determine which groups of bars were “resolved”. This approach can yield very reliable measurements, including resolution in lpm (the best example of them today is found on William Castleman’s EOS lens reviews) but it was tedious, and I eventually lost interest.

This changed in 2004, when Norman Koren released his first version of Imatest, a software to automate digital image quality measurement. You still need to set up the target shots carefully, but now you just input sets of digital images into the software, and then read measurements. Compared to other solutions, Imatest distinguishes itself by the simplicity of the test targets it uses, consisting of two uniform regions separated by a straight border. Those targets are easy and inexpensive to make.

In late 2005, Canon released the 24-105/4, which was anything I wished for in an all-purpose lens. The only question mark was image quality. To find out for myself, in early 2006, I tested this lens against my 24-70/2.8 and other EOS lenses on a Canon 1Ds mark II. I have previously written a comparative review of the 24-105/4 and 24-70/2.8 lenses. This post summarizes my findings with respect to sharpness.

I won’t detail my experimental procedure here (this may be the subject of a future post) but let me say that tests were done very, very carefully and the results were repeatable. Imatest can provide a lot of information, including, in the current version, 3D graphs and a MTF graph similar to the ones published by Canon in EF Lens Work. This test was conducted with an older version of Imatest. For the sake of simplicity, I am using here a single number to represent image quality. This number is the MTF 50 calculated by Imatest, integrating several measurements over the image area. The larger the number, the higher the resolution/contrast.

Lenses tested:
24-70: Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM
24-105: three copies of Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM
12-24: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG IF HSM
17-40: Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM
70-300: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
70-200: Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM
24TSE: Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L
45TSE: Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8
50: Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM
85: Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM
90TSE: Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8
100: Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM

@24	24-70	24-105  	17-40	12-24		24TSE
2.8	26.2	na/na/na        na      na		na			      		    
4	29.8	28.2/34.8/35.0	28.3	na     		27  
5.6	31.6	33.6/38.4/35.8	33.3	23.6 		29.8
8	31.7	35.7/37.4/34.6	36.1	29   		31.1
11	30.2	33.2/33.4/32.3	34.6	29   		30.3
16	27.2	29.0/29.1/28.9	30.3	26.7 		26.9

@35	24-70	24-105		17-40
2.8	28.2    na/na/na        na
4	32.3	32.6/36.0/34.0	21.8
5.6	33.7	37.4/38.6/37.5	23.2
8	33.4	36.8/37.1/36.6	29.7
11	31.6	34.3/34.6/34.1	34.3
16	28	29.6/30.0/30.3	30

@50	24-70	24-105				50	45TSE
1.4	na      na				13.7    na
2	na	na				21.4    na
2.8	24	na				32.87	33
4	29.2	24.4/32.7/32.5			40.11	35.6
5.6	31.5	35.8/33.9/37.1			40.7	35.4
8	32	37.2/33.3/35.1			39.7	34.6
11	31.2	35.3/34.2/34.5			36.2	33.2
16	28.3	19.7/31.2/31.4			31.9	30

@70	24-70	24-105		70-300	70-200	85	90TSE
2	na      na		na      na	25.2	na
2.8	20.3	na		na	29.9	28.8	29
4	23.66	25.2/25.1/26.5	27.9	32.2	32.6	34.2
5.6	26.98	32.3/37.6/35.5	32.8	31.7	36	38.2
8	28.77	28.8/36.9/34.6	37.1	31.2	37.2	38.6
11	28.4	34.0/35.4/33.6	35.3	29.8	35.1	36
16	26.52	30.3/31.0/30.1	31.2	28	30.8	31.4

@105		24-105		70-300	70-200	100-400	100
2.8		na		na	32.6	na      29.8	
4		20.1/23.1/26.0	na	34.2	na      34.1	
5.6		26.0/33.3/34.9	34.3	34.1	28	34.6	
8		23.5/35.8/35.3	37.2	33	30.6	36	
11		18.8/34.4/33.3	36.4	31.2	31	35.4	
16		29.4/30.7/30.1	32.2	28.7	28.6	30.5
	

A wealth of information can be found in the table above, but here are a few general observations. Some will be well-known to some readers, but are worth repeating for others.

• There is a significant performance variation between copies of the same lens. In general, Japanese lenses are not individually tested (unlike some German lenses, but they cost three times more). If you want to be sure to get a “good” copy of a lens, buy a few, test them, and keep the best.
  Amazon has free shipping both ways, and an easy 1 month return period, but beware that this does not apply to third-party sellers, which have their own policies. Rather than buying from a third party seller on Amazon, I prefer B&H. They have a 14-day return period and free shipping for some items only, however I have confirmed with their customer service that there will not be a problem to return lenses ordered for testing. Other vendors may charge restocking fees.
• All lenses are sharpest at middle apertures (sharpness is limited by abberations at wide apertures and by diffraction at smaller apertures. In fact, by f16, all lenses perform almost the same, which is why I didn’t bother to make measurements at f22). If given the choice, use a middle aperture such as f8.
• Zoom lenses can be sharper than fixed focal lenses.
• Inexpensive lenses can be sharper than more expensive lenses.
• Zoom lenses are in general weakest at longest focal. If you have the choice between two overlapping zooms, use the one which is less zoomed out.

Key findings about the 24-105:

• 24-105 is sharper than 24-70 at all focal lengths and apertures. This comes as a surprise to some, as the 24-70 is the more “professional-looking” lens, with its 2.8 aperture, better construction and hood, and slightly higher price, but the conclusion is consistent with Chasseur d’Images tests.
• 24-105 delivers excellent sharpness wide-open at wide focal lengths, but needs to be stopped down 1 f-stop at longer focal lenghts

Findings about other lenses:

• The sharpest lens by far, the 50/1.4 is also the least expensive. Excellent lenses in this focal length are very easy to design and manufacture. There is a reason why those “normal” lenses were, in the past, bundled with SLR cameras bodies.
• Of my three tele-zoom lenses, the sharpest one is also the least expensive, the 70-300, which in particular is sharper than the much-praised 70-200/2.8.
• Of the three TSE lenses, the sharpest is the 90, followed by the 45, and then the 24. This is expected, due to the difficulty of designing a short lens with a large image circle.

I’ve posted new images of Portland, Bangor and Bar Harbor in Maine.

I’ll be the first to admit that I spent only a couple hours in each of those places. In general I do not spend extended time in cities, but rather travel through them en route to or from National Parks. For instance, I left Acadia National Park at dark on a Sunday, drove to Portland. On Monday morning, I got up at 5.30 and photographed until 8.00 before driving to JFK airport in NYC to catch a flight home in the afternoon.

In the past, I would just pass through cities without any attempt at photography. However, as of late, I have felt more compelled to create images there, and not only for the challenge of working fast in unknown and new places. Those places are part of the experience of many people who live there. As I went through them, they also became part of my experience. Even through a cursory glance, they didn’t look like the cities closer to home, and the difference intrigued me. So I tried to make connections with something that I saw only briefly, without pretending to understand well what I encountered nor making a faithful portrayal. I see that a bit like an equivalent of travel writing: even if travel writers are often not able to spend the time necessary to become intimately familiar with a place, by weaving words together, they would create something interesting out of disparate chance moments and fleeting encounters. My hope is to create a portrait of America, fragmented but nevertheless true to the diversity of the country.

I am often asked for lens recommendations (although I have already wrote a page of technical comments). For those wishing to make photographs similar to mine, and using a Canon full frame camera, I always suggest the Canon 25-105/4 L IS as an all-purpose lens. I consider this lens to be the best zoom ever made by Canon, when used with the appropriate software.

In 2006, after much testing (which will be the subject of a separate post), I replaced my 24-70/2.8, a highly regarded lens which had been my main all-purpose lens, with the 24-105/4. However, as a recent mishap has ruined my 24-105, I’ve been using again the 24-70/2.8 for a few weeks, which reminded me of how much I prefer the 24-105. I am again trying to find a good sample of the 24-105. I thought that would be a good time to share my observations, based on years of use of both lenses.

The 24-105 (left) is collapsed @24mm and extended @105mm. The 24-70 (right) is collapsed @70mm and extended @24mm.

	24-105/f4 IS	24-70/f2.8
focal lengths	Extra range of 70-105 very useful (for ex. portrait work), or if lens is coupled with 100-400.
max aperture		Extra f-stop of 2.8 useful for moving subjects and blurring backgrounds, brighter viewfinder
close focus	0.45 / 1.48ft, 0.23x magnification	0.38m / 1.3ft, 0.29x magnification
IS	Image stabilization provides 3 f-stops of stability, more than makes up for max aperture with static subjects, useful for getting more DOF or low light shooting
AF	USM.	USM. Faster and more accurate in low light thanks to f2.8 aperture (many AF cross-sensors are disabled at f4)
Size DxL	83.5 x 107 mm only slightly smaller when used without hood	83.2 x 123 mm doesn’t include hood, which adds significant bulk
Weight	23.6 oz (670g) significantly lighter	33.6 oz (950g)
Construction	Sealed. Plastic barrel.	Sealed. Metal barrel.
Lens hood	Shallow lens hood attached to extending barrel of lens, optimal only at 24mm. Easily knocked.	Uniquely deep lens hood attached to fixed body of lens, takes advantage of the fact that lens is extended @ 24mm and retracted @ 70mm. Optimal at both 24mm and 70mm. Very efficient and solid, but requires removal to rotate polariser.
Zoom creep	long focals, in particular pointed down (annoying for close-ups)	24-28 range when pointed straight up (rarely used that way)
Sharpness	Sharper at all focal lengths and apertures. Excellent wide open at short focal lengths
Vignetting	@24mm: strong (1.5) wide open, mild (0.75) by f8 @50mm: mild wide open, very slight by f8 @105mm: slight wide open, very slight by f8	@ all focals: slight (0.5 f-stops) wide open, none by f5.6
Distortion	strong barrel @24, slight pincushion @50, moderate pincushion @105	moderate barrel @24mm, none @50, slight pincushion @70
Flare	Lots of ghosting when bright light source in frame	Little ghosting
Price (11/2009)	$1200 @ BH $1260 @ amazon	$1300 @ BH $1300 @ amazon

Both lenses include features found in L lenses and often missing in lesser lenses such as constant aperture, weather sealing, internal focus, non-rotating filter ring.

For my style of photography, where I often seek a large depth of field, the extra f-stop of the 24-70 is much less interesting than the IS and extra range of the 24-105. In addition, the sharpness of the 24-105 is exceptional for an optic with such a wide range and (relatively) small size and weight. If a wider aperture is desired, it is probably more effective to switch to fixed-focal lenses, which will offer a maximal aperture of f1.4 or f2.

The main drawbacks of the 24-105 are the strong vignetting and distortion at 24mm. Canon would probably have been able to produce a lens exempt from those shortcomings, but this would have come as a cost in size and weight. The lens was released in 2005, when the switch to digital photography was well underway. In digital photography, those shortcomings can be automatically fixed in post-processing by several softwares, including DPP, Canon’s (free) raw digital conversion software, and DxO Optics Pro, which I use. On the other hand, no amount of post-processing can make up for lesser sharpness. This is one case where a newer technology has changed the way one needs to look at an old problem (optical performance).

My main gripe with this lens is that if a bright light source (such as the sun or a street lamp by night) is included in the frame, flare is prominent, under the form of ghost hexagons of the shape of the aperture blades. I cope by switching to my 17-40/4 (much less affected by that problem) in those situations. This applies only to a limited number of situations, so the compromise is worth it.

f/4.0 1/4s ISO 1600 24mm

f/4.0 1/10s ISO 1600 24mm

The combination of IS and high sharpness wide open at 24mm has provided me with new opportunities. In the Elephanta Caves near Mumbai, tripods are strictly prohibited. Yet I was able to produce sharp images by hand-holding at shutters speeds of 1/4-1/8 s, shooting at 24mm wide open. A similar situation occured at dusk inside the capsule of the London Eye.

I’ve posted two sets of new images: Katahdin Region, and North Maine Woods, the final installment of images of the Maine Woods (trip report).

Although there are a number of foliage images, those two series are more about the relationship of people with the land, both recreational (hunting) and commercial (logging).

In a place that is overwhelmingly (94%) privately owned, and therefore unrestricted by environmental concerns, the landscape has been deeply impacted by more than 30,000 miles of logging roads. More than 500,000 acres are logged each year, and the cut is accelerating – with stakes raising with each massive acquisition – although the economic benefits seem to be shrinking at the same time.

Is an alternative possible ?

If you are wondering why I received so many student letters, that’s because the younger generation had a chance to read about my National Parks project in the October 2009 issue of Explorer, National Geographic’s magazine for children. The article was illustrated with pictures from Yosemite.

If you’d like to read the article, here is a larger version in PDF.