All images and material © 2016 by Mike Clasen Photography • All Rights Reserved • Use By Permission Only
Captured August 2015 for a TMCC photography course project. A toppled broken tufa spheroid reveals the fascinating workings of its inner core, which were created thousands and thousands of years go under the waters of ancient Lake Lahontan. This ancient tufa formation, which resembles a speaker cone or an eyeball, is roughly ten feet in diameter. © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
So the name for this image was not totally taken from anything I saw in this scene, except for the sunset explosion over the Sierra Nevada, and the dream like tufa spires in the foreground. The name ‘Exploder’ is a heavy metal guitar solo by Akira Takasaki from the Japanese heavy metal band “Loudness” back in 1984-ish. Dream Fantasy is a song from the band Loudness which includes a drum solo, also from around 1984-ish (been a long time). Combine both names, and there you have it. This was captured at Mono back in October of 2012. This was the type of afternoon, where you can only hope for the weather conditions that were at Mono Lake on this day. I was shooting to the east where dark gray/blue luminous storm clouds were swallowing up the horizon, and light was dancing off the landscape and clouds. Calm reflections of the storm spanned across Mono Lake, it was a show to say the least, and I was unaware of what was starting to happen behind me. I was moving rather fast, tripod and camera attached, capturing the storm and sunset colors that were starting to unfold on the east side. I started to head for another spot and turned around to walk around some tufa spires, when BAM, there it was… I was like, holy shit! Nobody else was in the area I was at, so there were no photo bombs. At the time, I could not recall a sunset more glorious than this, and still, I am sure I have seen one, but this one blew me away. It had been so long, that I almost forgot about this trip, and I only processed a few pics initially after it, and it was pretty crappy processing for what I knew back then. So I revisited the images back in 2017, and I found this capture that I had bracketed during the initial shoot, and merged to HDR using Photomatix Pro back in 2012. So, I opened up the merged HDR image in PS and started working on it, and this is what I came up with. I would probably process this differently now, and may still do that... © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
A sunrise lights up a desiccated lake ‘somewhere’ in Nevada. This was not a capture I planned on working out. I only took three bracketed sequences of this shot (literally setup and captured them in a couple minutes), as I figured it would be a wash due to shooting directly into the sun. For one bracketed sequence; I blocked the sun with my fingers to get rid of the sun flares in foreground. Blending the exposures worked out ok.. If the little cloud would not have been there to diffuse the sun somewhat as it was rising, this would not have worked out with the sun star, as it would have been too bright and overpowering. This is one of the very few times I have woken up early up to shoot a sunrise, and this was the last time... Captured April 2015... © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
