Cementotem

"The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."  from Song of Myself -W. Whitman

Something For Galen

Not that he needs anyhting, but he was a great inspiration to me as both a climber and artist.  When I saw these pudgy rocks and their colourful lichens, a connection was made immediately.  I know there's a compositional rule or two being broken with this, but all my other framing efforts lacked the same sense of whimsy.

In The Last Of The Sun

Blackfoot-Pawnee-Cheyenne-Crow!

Ap-a-che!

Ar-ap-a-ho!

...sheesh!  If anyone reading this can remeber the post-punk, new wave song that chant is from, you're too old to be reading (or writing) blogs with fonts this small.  Anyway, whenever I venture to roam a bit in this Fort Collins Natural Area, that silly song pops in my head and won't leave.  Any guesses?  Here's a hint:  I'm adamant that in natue is the key to our survival.  Might even contain the fountain of youth.  Drink deep and howl into the night with the Kings of the Wild Frontier!

City Park Fauxtumn

Obviously, I'm really starting to have some fun with these digital painting tools.  If this dang wind ever stops, there are a few places I think I can find new subjects to apply this technique.  Hopefully, a few leaves will be spared, but there are whole branches (literally) blowing through the neighborhoods.

Elias

As often as possible I'll take the long way or the dirt road or the "hey, what's over there" route and that's how I found this cemetery.  There are less than a dozen markers, two of which are modern.  Mostly they are broken or very well weathered, like this one, which looks both.  I wonder what is more interesting, the life Elias led or what happened to his gravestone.
It's Friday and October... take the long way home.

A Forest Fall

If you ever get the chance to camp in the center of an Apsen grove, do it.  Even in the height of summer it's a rewarding experience.  If you have trouble finding a good place, remember, "X" marks the spot.

Cubic Frost

I told you the nights got really cold!  After the light of dawn had faded into another disconcerting overcast morning, I hung my head (which helps me find stuff) and saw the frost was still around.  Since I wanted to laydown anyway,  I got down to about an three inches off the leaves to shoot this at 1:1.  The DoF was tricky, I wanted all the frost in focus and none of the ground.  After throwing a medium sized tempertantrum (awake and working for three hours w/o the benefit of coffee) I decided on a 7mm exposure stack 1mm apart, all at f/45.  The Nikon R1C1 and a well made focusing rail really made doing this a lot easier.  Had to keep finding new subjects, though, because I couldn't stop breathing on them and melting the frost. (Duh!)

Polaris on a Cold Night

An EN-EL4a with three quarters of a charge will shoot 34 four minute exposures when the thermometer reads 36F, in case you are curious.  That's around 2 1/4 hours.  Which is enough for an interesting Polaris, but I'm gonna have to get some handwarmers for the Milky Way trails later this winter.

Paradise Divide

The headwaters of the Slate River as they cascade down the surrounding slopes to writhe through a valley of their own.

When this image was made, I had been squatting for over three hours on the hillside waiting for that cloud to cooperate with my composition.  When it finally began to behave, most of the colour was gone.  Bastard clouds!  I haven't done much black and white since Agfa Scala followed the dodo, but every once in a while, I see something that really wants to be black and white, like this very pretty place.

Momentary Loss

I admit it... I'm an artsy-passionate photographer.  When that ridiculous title carries the presumption that my craft or knowledge is somehow less than that of a guy running a business involving a camera, I get a little indignant.  So, tonight's assignment was "go to an ugly place and come back with one interesting photo straight out of the camera".  The secondary goal was the alchemy of turning anger into creativity (beat that Mr. Workingclasshero).  I believe art is the highest form of education.
Image notes:  in camera JPEG conversion of a single RAW file, only post work was dust removal on the JPEG.  Single 6 second exposure.  There wasn't any fog last night and I didn't miss a dust spot, it's a cat-faced spider cleaning her web.

Let Them Go, They Will Return

Walking back the Jeep, I was struck by the beauty of this composition.  The colour was muted by the overcast sky, the air had warmed enough to make me sleepy and I just wanted to lay in the grass listening to the gentle rustle of Autumn.  (it's Monday, who doesn't want to go back to bed)

In The Shadow Of Earth

That may seem like an overdramatic title until you realise the dark blue band along the horizon is actually the Earth's shadow.  In this image you are looking west at the end of the civil twilight that preceeds dawn.  The heavily faceted quartz crystals in the granite errily reflect the alpenglow as though they are glowing from inside.  Veedauwoo itself is an overdramatic location that has on more than one occasion tried to kill me.  I still love it, though, and was glad to be there in the warm morning braced with the rocks for the last sunrise of summer.

Last Spin Of The Summer

Spin, spin, great circle!
Ninety-six minutes during the last night of summer as a full moon lights the changing aspens of Veedauwoo.  Smoke from a fire in the expanse of land northwest of this location hangs low and is illuminated by the negligible light pollution of Laramie, WY.

The Broken Bridge

Seems like every fall, I find a composition that allows me to place a sun star in the leaves of an aspen tree.  As if on queue, I clamboured across this bridge and turned around to play.  Sometimes you just get lucky.

Aspirations

Everything was going swell this morning until all the clouds lined up to block the sunrise.    I hung my head in despair and noticed these grasses admiring the reflection of clouds in the prefectly calm surface of the pond.

Ponds Below Elbert

Mount Elbert, 14,440' (right), is the highest peak in CO, and the highest in the Rocky Mountains of NA.  Might not look that way from this vantage, but once you start walking up the hill, you quickly realize the scale.  No filtration, no multiple exposure fancy compositing, just a single 2.5 second click before dawn.  The sun rising into thin clouds way way way out east, which was killing the colour in the sky, but bathing the ground in a soft warm pink light.  After snapping this, I scrambled down the hill through the stream and over to my second perch for the morning.  This light wasn't going to last!

The Cast Removed

This photograph is the same as the one in my earlier post.  But the great yellow glow was just too much, so I corrected this for the little bit of blue sky in the left of the frame.  Not much different, but certainly a more natural balance to the scene.  Artistically, I prefer the other photograph, which is what I was pursuing at the time.  Only in hindsight, did I consider that the yellow from the filter gives a fantastical and sinister quality to the photograph, and a more natural balance might be more alluring to the viewer and therefore, bring the photograph closer to the idea.  Incidentally, all preferences aside, this is the version I submitted to a recent contest, because when it comes down to scrutiny, you can't argue with natural colour.  Hope you enjoy both!

As They Whisper, So They Move

I started down this road while waiting for a couple of noisy folk on quads to leave the area.  In many ways I'm like the wildlife, people come and I go.  Downhill, to be accurate.  Not much was happening photographically, I was at an elevation of 8600 feet without a single cloud in the late afternoon sky.  The fall colour was about a week before the real peak would happen.  There are some beaver ponds in the area that I wanted to scout for the following morning's sunrise shoot.  You'll see those trickle through the blog in the next few days.  So, with all that sun, I had been playing with the blue/yellow varicolour filter, does interesting stuff to the light when all you have is big bright sun.  The colour in this photo is from stacking the filter with a polarizer.  Instant autumnal peak!  At the bottom of the hill was a drained pond and thick mud.  The road took a hard 165 degree turn to avoid the mud, but the photographer did not.  Instead I plodded through to see the area just behind the former dam and found another little pond.  Lots of dead trees sticking up through thick muddy water.  Time to turn around.  Walking back up the hill, I noticed the way these trees leaned and bent over the road.  The autumn glow gave the impression they are playful among themselves, but cautious with outsiders.

Head of the Slate

Two late season snow fields and several incipient drainages purge the steep hillsides of excess water and feed into the Slate River Valley, Colorado.

Happy Friday!

Bracteantha in UV

Wandered out late last night armed with a couple of handheld UV flashlights just to see what reacted.  Since we were dressed in mostly black clothes ( a hold over from art school) wearing hoodies & carrying camera gear and flashlights, I was certain we would be incarcerated as terrorists!  But our luck held out and we found this fantastic reaction in the CSU Annual Flower Trial Garden.  If this has piqued your interest, you can view a small gallery here.  There's also a link to the same gallery, now, in the "Portfolios" section.  Also, there will be yet another "bonus post" today.  So, if this funky flower joined you for breakfast, check back around 12n (MDT) and there'll be something new for lunch.  Cheers!

Bonus Thursday Post = FLY AGARIC!

Might have been the most prolific mushroom of the season.  Every where I went these were in full screaming beaming sprout!

The Clearing To Come

Little drops on the needles of the pines catch hits of sunshine.  After seventeen hours the rain finally relented.  Slightly comforted by the sighting of colour, we shiver into the night.  Everything in the forest yearns for dawn.

Gothic Mountain Scene, Plate 1

The view down Washington Gulch as a late summer storm brews.  I tried to balance the view between the two dominant subjects, the commanding mountain and the explosion of yellow flowers.

Turkey Creek Rainbow Streak

I've been chasing this phenomenon with a camera for decades.  Never really happens in very photogenic places, or so goes my luck.  Pretty, though.  Had the camera pressed to the windshield for several clicks until I found a good spot to pull over.  Just several minutes up the canyon, the foreground got a lot better, but my angle to the sun changed, so, no more prismatic effect.

Marmot in an Old Truck

Above the town of Crested Butte sits the remnants of Painter Boy MIne. Surrounding the old sluice is a weird collection of old junk seemingly posed on the hillside as a grave marker.  It provides the local human population a with targets of various squishiness.  For this I used an SB-900 racked to 200mm, the next day someone else was using something a lot more explosive!

Ten Seconds at Camp

...and so it began, another week in the mountains, another seventeen hours of rain.  Gotta get that campfire  hot!  It's gonna be a few day before the wood dries out.
Gone Camping.
Happy Friday!

Hydranomoly

This spunky fireplug sits about seven feet from a paved foot train in a local Natural Area.  An example of the planning committie's forethought and preparedness, or a leftover from the previous zoning?

Any Moon Tonight

A Paddletail Darner (as in "darning needle", yes that's why) fancies a lamp globe.  These guys, like many of the insects you see at night, navigate using the moon.  Instinct says, "Go toward the light!", but it doesn't tell you what to do if you get there.
Dangle for all you're worth, little man!

Contest Entries

                Cold Burn, 2009                                               Dream Lake in a Fog, 2009

Evening Events

Ever find one of those places that you don't want to leave?  I set up my tent and sat here for nearly a week.  Most of the recent photos are from very close to this exact spot.  In the afternoons, I'd head into the mountain (literally), but mostly... I stayed close to this spot.

Wilting Goldeneye

Torrential rains followed by an excruciatingly cold alpine summer night and these Showy Goldeneye have had enough for one season.

Daisy's Dew

Subalpine Daisy

Shiver in the mourning dew.

Eager for the sun.

Flying Through The Firestorm

Close to the same view as the previous startrails.  Differences here are 24mmf2.8 (prime, which is awesome for point light sources, btw) which is pointed a little more south.  My standard 4 minute exposure stack of 9 images, at ASA 200.  Captured an airplane, I like it though.   {wait...ASA?...hmm}  Stray clouds and the heavy dew really started to show in the individual exposures, hence the staccato effect and blotchy areas in the sky.  Enjoy!

The Mauve That Makes The Clouds

Continuing with colour and layers.  Shot this nervously under a very black band of the storm.  Felt like it was lifting and beginning to break up, so I kept telling myself that there wasn't any danger.  But 10,000' makes it's own weather, so you never know.

Trees Against the Night

Light pollution painted the clouds and I painted the trees.  An arm of the Milky Way cuts the frame.  A pleasant night in the mountains.

When Colours Collide

It was tremendously difficult not titling this one after an old song but, then I couldn't get it out of my head and immediately started hating the song again.  But let's face it, the image isn't about the song, I'm celebrating the phenonemon of colour opposites.  Over here on the Front Range, blue and orange is easy, in the center of the state it's green and purple.  Either combo is magic!

Fireside Star Fall

Mistakenly left the camera tuned to ISO 1600 for this, so I ended up with the blue sky.  The storm cleared out and the long exposure ignored the clouds, except the few illuminated by the light pollution in the last few frames.  For something to be captured by the camera, it has to be visible for 25% of the exposure, my method for compiling these ignores all but the brightest values of the images.  Add equal parts mistake, luck and technique - Shiver uncontrollably to combine.  Trees in the foreground left are lit by campfire light.  Seven photos at 240 seconds, or about 28 minutes.  As mentioned before the humidity was tremendous, so not long after sundown a very heavy dew settled on every thing, including that great bulbous 14-24mm lens, thereby ending the shot.

A Clearing Storm in Purple and Yellow

After two hours of duck drowning rain, the temperature lost twenty points, the humidity stayed at 100%, late season Arnica began their wither, and the sun gave a futile last attempt.

Not a Ramada!

Here's my excuse.  My escape.  My little birdhouse, tucked against a tree.  Branches and clouds and stars and mud.  I cannot get any closer to sharing with you, my love of being outside than this image.  Of course, I do a lot of crazy things outside, but being in the mountains, moving slow, watching the sky spin, is what I really need.  Maybe I'll fit some tent time in this weekend, too.  It's a work trip if I have the camera with me, right?

Have a pleasant weekend in your own little birdhouse.

Star Bombers

Trails in the SW sky, the Milky Way (center frame) remains visible above the Hayden Point forest fire. Compiles from seventeen four minute exposures.  These are the same trees and stars from yesterday's image.  Enjoy.

Through the Trees

Three blue spruce stand against the night sky in the White River National Forest.  Several miles away a fire near Hayden Point glows on the horizon.  The Milky Way continues on, undeterred.  Single 30 second exposure, trails to come later.

Flat Tops Trails

Flat Tops Trails, originally uploaded by McF Studios.

Of course I made a time-lapse. This is 10,080 seconds compressed to one.

Flat Tops Trails

A clear night above 10,000 feet in the White River National Forest. Half a moon lit the foreground and provided some colour in the sky. I figured there was too much light to catch any trails, or maybe the star colours wouldn't translate as well. Guess it pays to shoot anyway. The warm glow on the trees on the left is from my campfire. This image was compiled from 42 four minute exposures, roughly three hours.

Steady Thursday & Free iPhone Wallpapers

I think Thursday is going to be my post day.  It's always a struggle to produce content for the blog that meets my standards for artistic endeavours.  Sometimes the pictures happen easily, but the stories have trouble finding words, other times it's the opposite.  But I usually have something to share on Thursdays.  Maybe it's circadian.  Todays offering is in honour of the Fourth of July celebrations this week in the States.  I've created a set of 18 iPhone wallpapers of fireworks.  You get them all for the low cost of one mouse click on this link.  They are sized for the iPhone 4 screen specs but will display on any of the iPhone or iPod Touch models.  To install them Mac OS omputer unzip the file, drag the folder to iPhoto, sync your iPhone/iPod Touch, then, from your iOS device select an image and set it to the wallpaper.  Installing these from a Windows computer begins by pressing CTRL-ALT-Delete, and proceed from there.
Enjoy the prefestival fireworks!

The Cosmic Windmill

Gotta use what you're given, I guess.  Light pollution from Greeley, CO joins a gelled Maglite for a little mood lighting.  The Milky Way enters, stage right.  In adverse conditions, you gotta think through problems and be creative with solutions.  This is a great result and will hopefully resonate with a lot of viewers.  However, what I wanted was more simple and plain.  A lot of dreams start as mere suggestions.  So I turned the camera to the East, to find some black sky and used a small flashlight to illuminate the windmill.  This very subtle frame has all the elements necessary to explain why I make images of the natural world.  It's the last photograph I made that night, and with all those possibilities swimming through the sky, it's a great place to stop and get some sleep.  Have a pleasant weekend!

Cauldron

The Little Dipper floats above the glow from Cheyenne, WY.  Light pollution is a fact of life, and because we're all afraid of the dark, it's never going to cease being a problem.  Sometimes, though nature presents itself in harmony with our shortcomings.  Here the Little Dipper teases at the cauldron of city lights, maybe one day it will reach down and scoop the pollution away.

Polaris Encircled

Got it this time.  What you see is the result of 116 minutes broken into 4 minute exposures.  The colours you see in the photo are not typically visible to the naked eye.  Thankfully, however, the camera can see them perfectly!  The warmer the star is the cooler it's colour, so the hotter stars are blue and the cooler stars are red… science is crazy fun sometimes.  Interested in the timelapse?  Well here you go, 6960 seconds compressed to 1!

Faux Nebula

That gaseous nebula in the lower right is actually light pollution from Greely, CO spewing forth into the night  An arm of the Milky Way fights for attention in the background.

Star Week at McF Studios!

A few nights last week, I endured the mosquitos and sleep deprivation that accompany night photography to make a few star photographs.  These were all taken out on the Pawnee national Grasslands in NE Colorado.  You can't really get away from the light pollution of nearby cities, but that's because there's nothing out there to block it.  No trees, no mountains and no buildings.  I love it!  Our rainy season is ending, so everything is green and lush and buzzing with life.  But those photos are going to wait their turn… for now it's the magic of the heavens and it's expanse of possibilities.  This is the first week I've actually scheduled posts, so check back every day for a new photograph.  This first image was a kind of failure.  But it's too cool not to share!  I love the morse code texture that the star trails have, and if you look at the bottom left of center you can see a nearby fence, great scale.  The prairie was absolutely alive that night, insects buzzing in my ear and the biggest loudest chorus of frogs I've ever heard out there.  maybe that's my I like this so much, the memory of sound is connected by the stuttering in the trails.  Anyway, I fixed my settings that caused this and will have a proper trail up later for you purists.  One more thing, that's Jupiter in the lower right and Polaris in the upper left, with a couple of airplanes throughout for good measure.

Happy Shooting!

A Tale of Two Tails

My first dog liked to chase her tail.  She'd spin in very determined circles, focused on her quarry.  An unstoppable vortex that would attempt to gobble up any counter attempt.  She learned, too, that hitting a wall or other object could giver her an advantageous bit of reach wherein she could finally attain her elusive quarry.  She became quite adept at catching her tail.  Trouble was she knew exactly what to do when she caught it… chew the hell out of it.  I'm sure it made sense to her… chase tail, catch tail, chew tail.  At that time in my life, I was too young to understand dog breeds, or behavioral anomalies and neurosis in canines.  If you asked me why my white dog had a black head and a pink tail, I would have told you she chases her tail and the black is a kind of camouflage.  Her tail is pink because she's good at catching it and she chews it until it bleeds.  Long before she developed this behavior, I named her "Tippy".  She's still a fond memory.  I'm very fortunate to have had a dog which provided me the opportunity to make empirical assessments at an early stage in my artistic life.  Sometimes the creative process is just a series of urges.  It can be similar to watching a dog chase it's tail.  The evening the photo above was taken, I set out on an uncharted course along Northern CO's grasslands.  Setting off without a physical or ideological destination at the beginning of an art making excursion is a valid endeavor, but can lead to the sort of behavior for which artists notorious.  Somewhere in the flat land, I got the idea that there was so much rain the rivers were taking back the roads.  And true the rain was making a very concerted effort to keep me bogged int he mud, so I ventured back to the dull paved lanes and eventually headed west toward home.  Taking the long way and effectively making a bigger loop around my tail, I came upon this scene as I rounded the bend, skidded to a halt, and began to close the loop with a series of u-turns and head-spins.  But to make the final catch on my quarry required abandoning commonsense and ignoring physical and legal threats to my person.  Thankfully, an F350 brought a moment of clarity and sanity to the evening, and I walked out of the middle of the road.  Did, I find something meaningful and succeed in making it an artful moment?  Thankfully, that's something for the audience to discuss.  I can only commit that I did, in fact, catch my tail that particular evening, and I am currently chewing the hell out of it for an, as yet, undisclosed reason.

(several other images from this evening can be seen in my Flickr Photostream, enjoy)