Crayolapaho

I shot this with a dead battery.  Lithium batteries are temperamental.  Next time you have a battery die in the cold, put it in your jacket or under your hat, and leave it there as long as you can.  If it's charge is not completely exhausted, you may be able to salvage enough juice to shoot a few more.
After all the toneless gray I've endured the last few days, I wasn't ready to drive home  so I ambled around in the fading light.  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled the battery from it's sauna and was able to make three more images.  YAY!
Then I went home and had some soup for supper.  Happy Friday to all!

Armageddon at Arapaho Bend

After four days of solid grey skies, a small tear in the cloud blanket ran along the Northern Front Range, just enough to shift my inertia.  Hastily, I grabbed the camera, already mounted to the tripod, and sprinted down to Arapaho Bend Natural Area.  When I parked the whole area was awash in sunshine.  Being a hedonist, I just stood there enjoying the warmth.  The tear was soon sewn shut, again, of course, but a little sun poked through itching to play and neither of us could resist those clouds!  I took a few seconds to level everything out and strated shooting for another large pano.   By the third set my bettery was dead, first time that's ever happened, to me.  Guess I should have grabbed the camera bag too!

The Bridge at Riverbend Ponds Natural Area

This image is viewable at close to it's native resolution for those of you with a veritable surplus of time for art viewing.  Click here for the redirect, the viewer has it's own controls for navigation.  Enjoy!

I like the idea of large panoramic photographs, though they seem a bit impractical.  This photo is roughly 80 megapixels and 500MB, on paper it would measure to 78 inches long at 18 inches high.  I captured 240 exposures, of which I used 168, then compiled and tonemapped those down to 24 (7-stop brackets) to create this 180 degree view.  That may seem like overkill but I used art school math and Kentucky windage to hedge my bets.  Processing all those photos and stitching them all together was quite the experience as well.  If you experienced the lights dimming or sudden black-outs in your neighborhood, it's probably my fault.  Anyway, I think it turned out very pretty and strange.  This wooziness I'm feeling is most likely the result of number cruntching with an artist's brain.  Time to get some fresh air, perhaps I'll go for a walk.  Maybe you'd like to do the same?

Standing On The

Sometimes you have to ignore the facts.  Maybe you are standing on a poorly made floating deck on a manmade lake that smells of dead carp next to a colourless suburban cul-de-sac under skies that won't rain across from trees that won't bloom enduring a winter that just won't end.  Or maybe you are beginning a voyage on a rickety little raft you made from the debris of mankind pushed out into the green water of nowhere as the clouds compile their disdain.

Madame, I'm Death

An example of the pitch tubes that have become the all-to-grim calling card of Dendroctonus ponderosae. Much of North America is affected by this infestation, and great swaths of forest are filled with dead trees.  But the forests were dying anyway, and the beetles are just as opportunistic as any greedy human industry or corporation.  At least, this is as natural an act as could have happened.  When I cautiously walk in the ravaged forest, I am grateful to have known it's company, to have shared it's life and death.  I hope to share it's rebirth and know it anew.

Wind, Stars & Sandthrax

On the last night of an eight day camp in central Utah, I got the camera out to celebrate the only cloud free and windless night of the trip.  I'm pretty tough on my gear, but 70 knot guts of sand are a bit outside my tolerance.  Photography was (at most) a tertiary purpose for the trip, so the wind wasn't a huge problem, just an inconvience.  As a precaution, I used the little hook on the bottom of my tripod to set a guy rope on a sand stake as an anchor and then stood very anxiously by with a large trash bag in case the wind storms that plagued us returned.  My nerves could only handle the hour and a half it took to collect these images.
Greater background illumination via half moon in the west, full tree illumination was arranged by a gigantic campfire.  The shapes of the cottonwoods silhouetted against the sky piqued my initial interest, but in the end the warm orange light against the blue sky was too much to resist.