Photographing the Stone Wings at Bisti Badlands is a captivating endeavor for any photographer. This is the second memorable shot that I took of the Stone Wings. These unique rock formations, often referred to as hoodoos, resemble giant stone wings stretching out from the ground. To capture their majestic beauty, the golden hours of sunrise and sunset are ideal, as the soft light accentuates the textures and the dramatic shadows enhance their otherworldly appearance. On a previous recon hike to this location, I had determined that a morning golden hour shot could offer the desirable light for this shooting point. A wide-angle lens was needed to capture the full expanse of these formations, and a tripod will needed to fix the composition and allow me to take multiple exposures that were used to build this high dynamic range (HDR) image. For this composite HDR image, I took six photos starting with a 1/80 second and ending at 1/15th of a second. A review of the histogram shows how much dynamic range was present during this overcasted morning.
This composition was settled upon after experimenting with different perspectives—such as shooting from the ravine bed or climbing around the slopes of the adjacent hills—can result in striking compositions like this one. Which is why the remote and rugged terrain of the Bisti Badlands adds to the adventure, making each photographic visit a memorable experience. This shot was taken after sunrise had crested above the horizon. I had just walked back to this location after traversing the hilltops in the area to photograph this nice cloudy sunrise sky that I am showing below. I came back to my desired shooting point because I knew this lower clouds would offer some break over the Stone Wings shortly, because I had been watching how fast they were moving fast. And as my photo shows, that break in the lower clouds did occur and allow the some of that rise sun rays to tone those clouds. These clouds also aided in diffusing the sunlight to give nice filtering of the sunlight on the Stone Wings and record a Brightness Value of 6.77 while retaining a zero Exposure Bias. I shot these images that I blended together in manual mode in pattern metering mode. If you look at the extracted color theme and color wheel it indicates that the image is dominated by closely grouped saturated analogous colors in the Yellow-Orange spectrum.
