Stick It On A Pin

Checking out the macro capabilities on the P7000. Handheld 1/125 @ f/7.1, ISO 100.  Lit using an SU-800 on camera and SB-600, blew out the background in post for effect, I was only going for "proof-of-concept" kind of results, anyway.  You are looking at two velvet ants (display pinned) and something as yet unidentified (because we're busy, not that it's new or rare).  Looks cool, thought I'd share.

Symmetry on the Prairie

Everything seemed to line up on the prairie this morning.    Maybe it's a face telling us an ancient story?  I love the sun here in CO, makes it difficult to find a decent exposure, but sure feels great!
Here's to a warm spot in the sun this weekend!

Rabbitbrush and Horsetooth

An early morning view along the Cathy Fromme Prairie Natural Area in Fort Collins, Colorado.

False Promises

Sorry about the late post... um... my dog forgot to set the alarm clock?

Trying to find a composition before dawn, I shivered in the weeds with the rodents.  This scene was lit entirely by light pollution.  Thirty seconds of sodium vapour, the best light of the morning, if not for the breeze.

Riverbend, Plate 4

Ideas, like leaves, scattered to the floor

Lay clumped in effluvial eddies.

Swirling away, in a breath of air

Will they walk or do they drown?

Nikon P7000 Field Test - UPDATE!

UPDATE:  November 2011  I noticed this page has received a bit of attention lately, and thought I'd let you all know how I'm getting on with this camera.  Well, it went to Nikon Service in April for repair of the lens blades, then it was replaced after developing the same lens blade problem, then replaced again, and then replaced once more all for the same lens blade problem.  When the camera worked it worked well.  Unfortunately, the five different SNs I used exhibited the same physical defect.  I could rant for a month about my frustration with this camera.  But our affair has ended and not at all too soon.  I'm taking recommendations for a new compact camera.  Supposedly the P7100 fixed a lot of the shortcomings of the AWFUL P7000.  Someone else will have to review that one, I'd rather go back to disc film!


Now back to the original post.
When the Nikon P7000 arrived a couple of days ago, I charged the battery and headed out for an eight mile hike.  Out of the box and into the field.  I didn't read any of the manual, didn't learn the buttons, tied a piece of webbing to the strap attachments and started using it.  This isn't a super technical review, just my reactions to being handed a new camera and trying to make interesting images while out enjoying the big bright Colorado sunshine.

Click through for samples and some running commentary.

Closer

Sometimes you have to tell yourself the story.  It's alright, though, I'm certain you can hear it.  All sound begins with silence.
Have a pleasant weekend.

October Morning

Mountains make their own weather.  I woke under clear skies and cursed through the dawn for some drama.  Didn't happen until I finished dressing and packing up for a long hike.  Ok, better late than later.  Instead of hiking, I dodged bursts of rain and wind and chased little hits of sunshine around the aspen groves.  I carry an umbrella as a standard part of my camera gear, it's the best for keeping both rain and sun off your lens.

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!