the right light at the right time - making your luck

Galen Rowel, one of my natural light photographic heros, said "if it’s good, shoot it. If it gets better, shoot it again." You can't really make natural light better, but you can learn to recognise when the conditions are likely to make it great, and plan to be in the right place at the right time.

One of the frustrating things for me about going into the mountains is not being able to be where I want to be at that magic hour when the light is almost always guaranteed to be some degree of wonderful, either because I need to get to camp before dark, or there are a number of places I want to photograph but they are kilometres apart. This time however I was lucky. We reached the first overnight huts on the Otter Trail in the late afternoon. I was quite taken by the soft mist over the jagged rocks in the bay below, and liked the warmish tone to the light. However, looking at the conditions, I guessed that there might be quite a spectacular sunset that evening; there was no fog bank to obscure the sun as it set, so it would be free to shine across the sea, and the clouds that had appeared over the hills and were moving out to sea would generate some colour. I had already decided on my viewpoint when I took the earlier shots, so I went down to play on the rocks while I waited for sunset. My hunch proved to be correct...

Looking west at sunset along the Tsitsikama coastline from the first overnight huts on the Otter Trail.

The same view, almost exactly one hour earlier.

Galen Rowell's work is breathtaking, and his writing is inspiring. If you're keen on nature and landscape photography, I can highly recommend any of his books: www.mountainlight.com.

Just a quick note on photographing sunsets: they are generally far more spectacular in real life than on a screen or a piece of paper, and if you photograph one, most of the time you'll just be disapointed with the result. The key is to look for a focal point in that sunset light, something that is illuminated by the light, rather than the light show itself.