Northern Wisconsin

I’ve been away for a while but my plan has worked, at least once.  My plan was to have Pam start adding a few postings to the blog so it wouldn’t be so bad if I took a long time between postings.  She started this blog several years ago and has at least temporarily given up on her beading and other hobbies and has picked up a camera.  I convinced her to contribute some of her own images to this blog.  You can see some of her favorite shots on an earlier post.  I am the one she says inspires her, I don’t know about that, I just want her to enjoy her new found hobby.  While I was up in WI I went over the camera with her explaining what the different settings do.  Even though I have a digital camera myself I had to actually read the instructions for some of the settings so I understood what they do.

More Jemez Mountains

A couple weeks after our trip to the East Fork of the Jemez River Byron and I decided to return to a different part of the mountains.  He wanted a different stream to fish and I wanted a different area to photograph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Battleship Rock

(This is a continuation of the Jemez Mountains posting, May 24, 2013)

Battleship Rock is actually on the way back to Albuquerque.  The Jemez River flows along one side of the outcropping.  It is probably 5 – 6 miles further downstream from our hike earlier in the day.

 

 

Jemez Mountains

More specifically, the East Fork of the Jemez River.  For those of you that live almost anywhere other than the Southwest you have a different vision of rivers than we do.  I remember when we went over the Rio Grande the first time.  We went over the whole river and kept driving thinking that what we just went over was a tributary of the Rio Grande, nope, it WAS the Rio Grande, quite a disappointment.  This year New Mexico is in its third year of drought.  I believe we have received approximately 9” of precipitation over the last two years.  Our average precipitation to start with is only 9” a year so you can imagine what the rivers or former rivers are looking like.

Ojito Wilderness

Lately I have been looking around on the web and through books for other places to hike around in New Mexico. One of my coworkers mentioned the Bisti Badlands. I have seen images from the Bisti through other blogs and thought this may be a possibility. Upon further searching I found it is probably 3 hours from home, which is not bad, just not something I wanted to do this weekend.

Tent Rocks

This past January I decided I wanted to visit Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. It’s less than an hour from Albuquerque, on the way to Santa Fe. The cone-shaped tent rock formations are the products of volcanic eruptions which left pumice, ash and tuft deposits over 1,000’ thick. Mixtures of the materials along with erosion caused by wind and water has resulted in these formations.

The name Kasha-Katuwe means ‘white cliffs’ in the Keresan language, from one of the local pueblos.

There are two trails that go in and along the canyons that make up Tent Rocks. The Canyon trail actually goes into and eventually ends up on the top of the formation with overlooks all around. The climb is over 600’ to the top with the trail slightly over a mile in length.

Another stop you should make, the Veteran’s Memorial, is another 3 miles to the west by way of the same gravel road taken to Tent Rocks. It has a wheel-chair accessible 1 mile long path which provides many views of the Peralta Canyon and Jemez Mountain peaks. Picnic table and toilets are available.

I had a wonderful time on that Saturday. I got there relatively early, 1030, and while on the way up to the top ran into a half dozen other hikers. The way down was busy with hikers, coming upon 30 - 40 on the return trip. As you can see by one of my photos it gets kind of tight in a few spots so your hike may be slowed down by one-way traffic. It was very nice in January, snow in spots where the sun didn’t shine but the temperatures were very comfortable for hiking. I am not certain I would want to do this hike in the summer unless it is early in the day with lots of water and sunscreen.



Veteran's Memorial panorama



For more information go to http://www.blm.gov/nm/st/en/prog/recreation/rio_puerco/kasha_katuwe_tent_rocks.html

Thank you for stopping by,

Mark

On Comet, on Cupi....

Wrong Comet, sorry.

I work with a bunch of photographers and people that really enjoy being outside.  Living in NM makes it easy to be outside, especially in the colder part of the year.  I'm not a real go getter to be outside from late June through September.  I don't really get along with mid to upper 90's so I don't go out of my way to hike around in that weather.  Anyhow, a couple of the guys I work with got out to see Comet pan-STARRS earlier this week.  The photos were great so I went out the following night.  Earlier this year I had scouted out a parking lot on the east side of town at the foothills of the Sandia mountians that has a great view of the whole Rio Grande valley.  It was a great spot for viewing the comet.

I set up around sunset and learning from the guys that were out the previous night I knew to wait until it got dark.  After a while I felt like a tour guide with all the people stopping by asking "Where's the comet?"  I think they were expecting something a bit smaller than the one that went over Russia a few weeks ago.  I was afraid that the clouds would move in taking away any chance of seeing it.  You can see from the photo that there are clouds all around and at times we had to wait for the clouds to move out of the way.  The comet is in the upper quarter of the image just to the left of center.  You should be able to see it by double clicking on the image, expanding it.

Once we could see it, with binoculars, I had to point out which landmark to line up on to assist at least a half dozen people in finding it.  My binoculars were busy all night, but not with me.  That was okay, I had my camera to play with.  I made a number of different exposures experimenting with settings until I found a combination I liked, a huge advantage of digital over film.  I have several images but wanted to share this one because I like the coloring of the sky post sunset. Living at this altitude along with low humidiy make for great seeing conditions.  The farthest city lights are between 12 and 15 miles away and the mountain making up the lower right horizon is just over 60 miles away.

Enjoy.

Thank you for stopping by,

Mark

My favorite 12 (part 2)

As promised here's the remaining 6 images of my favorite 12 for 2012.

I have promised myself to get out more to use my camera to shoot more and different images.  So far I have been on a couple longer hikes in support of that promise.  This one is from a late Novemebr hike along the Rio Cebolla.  It was below freezing when we started warming up to the 50's by lunch.  Because it has been fairly warm this fall there was spotty ice along the stream banks.  I had to really crop the image so the ice becomes a small potion of the image.  There is a lot of unresolvable detail in the ice that detracts from the original image.  A tripod really helps with placing and keeping the camera still for this image.

This was taken in Vancouver BC in the area of English Bay looking west.  This is a fairly classic composition with the horizon placed at a 1/3 position horizontally and the couple at one of the 1/3 positions vertically.  The image is somewhat underexposed enhancing the feeling of the sunset.

I like the following two image because of the selective lighting on the leaves.



The last two images were taken on two different hikes.  The lake image was taken in the Pecos Wilderness this past fall.  The sunset-peak image was taken around the Gilman tunnels in the Jemez Mountains.

I hope you enjoyed my 12 favorite images of 2012.

Thank you for stopping by,
Mark

My favorite 12 (part 1)

I have been a regular visitor of Ian Plant’s Dreamscapes blog, http://www.ianplant.com/blog/

I like what he and the other bloggers on his team have to say about landscape photography. Someday I hope to get to their level of imagery. They have a lot to say about the photography ‘rules’ that are supposed to be followed. The Dreamscapes photographers generally follow them but they also disregard them; the 'rule of thirds', 'do not use backlighting'... When I am out shooting I usually forget some of the rules because I am still concentrating on basic composition, exposure, focus and the 10 or so other things I can adjust on a digital camera. Most of the time they work out without remembering everything.  Afterwards I can usually look at many of my images and see where I could have improved the image by changing this or that; a little less exposure, different focus, move the camera a foot or two to the right, left, up or down. I will get better as time goes on; I just have to get off my butt more often and shoot more.

Digital photography is easier than film photography in some ways but more challenging in others.  Once upon a time you put a roll of film into a camera you would shoot making the normal adjustments of lens aperture and shutter speed based on the speed rating of the film.  The drawback was that you would have to wait some period of time before you would see results.  With the digital cameras you do the same thing; with the aperture and shutter,  plus you can program the camera to automatically under and over expose multiple images, change color balance, adjust the flash output, saving image quality, ...  The great plus with digital photography is the instant feedback and not having to stop and load a new roll of film after 24 or 36 images.  Does this lead to shooting quantity instead of quality?? Probably, you can always throw away the bad ones, 'images are free once you invest in the memory card of choice'.  You have to invest your time to find which images you want to keep, or not.  I can only suggest to those of you new to digital photography to purchase the 'XXX camera' book for your specific camera to understand the bells and whistles on your camera (I found the Canon manual for my camera far short in explaining all the different options).

Back to the real idea behind this post...

In the Dec 29, 2012 Dreamscapes post Ian talks about selecting your 12 greatest images over the last year. So I looked through what I shot since I bought my DSLR and selected 12 images I like. If nothing else these are my favorites, they remind me of what I did and where I went this year. If you have been following this blog at all this year you will recognize some of the images. Over time I’m sure some images will become a bit more abstract which may turn some people off, or at least leave you scratching your heads at what I was thinking when I made that image. Let me know what you think as I post images over the next year.

I will post a bit of commentary with some of these images. They are in no particular order so do not consider the first image the best of the 12.  I will supply the 12 images over two separate postings.

The first two images are from my trip to the Great Bear Rainforest.  No matter how much planning I thought I had done and checking camera settings I got excited when the bears made their appearance and didn't get as many good shots as I thought.  I doubt that will ever change unless seeing wildlife like this around you all the time becomes common place.

The next two are also from my trip to the Great Bear Rainforest.  Being in a boat full of photographers heightens ones senses to pay attention to the area around you for a great photo. 

The next two photos are shot with my 100mm macro lens.  I like shooting closeup photos, they show things going on around you on a different scale than most people consider.  You have to be lucky, or patient or both to work on this scale especially with insects.  They have a mind of their own and generally do not sit around waiting for you to compose and focus the camera.  The bee image is more luck than patience since bees were going back and forth on this particular flower.  I've photographed very few images of a bee in flight AND in focus!  The dragonfly image was more patience with some luck.  There is a dragonfly pond at the Albuquerque Bio Park where dragonflies are in constant motion.  I hung around the pond for quite a while watching where they were landing and camped out above one of the reeds where they would sit for a bit.  After several attempts at different dragonflies I finally got one in focus and in a nice position.  (No dragonflies were hurt in the making of this image)

Thank you for stopping by,

Mark

New Image

I felt it was time for an update. Neither Pam nor I have been doing much beading or bear making in quite some time. In fact I’m not sure if Pam will be adding anything to this blog so in the mean time I will make an attempt at keeping your attention.

I have gone back to photography. I did it for a long time but after finishing school with a background in photography I decided that I didn’t want to pick up a camera again for a very long time, if ever. I did make photographs when travelling or seeing family but to go out to photograph for the fun of it, no way.

I started getting interested in it when digital showed up but not interested enough to invest the $$. I’ve worked with my point and shoot; all the past images in this blog are from my point and shoot. This year I decided I want a better camera, so I went for it.

I bought a Canon DSLR and a couple of lenses and have been out shooting for fun again. One other reason for the DSLR at this time was my vacation which I took in early October. I went to the Great Bear Rainforest to photograph the wildlife. The new photo in the title is from my vacation.

I will be updating this blog over the next few weeks with a running story on my trip along with photos and if I can figure out how to do it, some videos. I like working on computers, I do it every day at work, but I don’t keep up with all the new ways to get things on the web. We don’t have any children so we don’t have to keep up with all the new technologies.

I hope to do a better job of updating this blog; I noticed I’m pretty consistent if adding a post once a year is good enough.

Thanks for stopping by, Mark