Rocky Mountain Photography

The Maroon Bells of CO

2009-10-07T14:11:00.005-06:00

The Maroon Bells of Colorado

I spent most of last week shooting in Colorado. The Aspen leaves were turning and a storm had just dumped a little snow on the high peaks so I thought I should shoot it while I could. I spent most of this week hiking and photographing in the Maroon Bells.

The Maroon Bells are located just west of Aspen, CO. Take State Road 82 west of Aspen until you get to the traffic circle just outside of town and then turn south onto State Road 125. The Maroon Bells, which are a set of massive, vertical, 14,000 plus foot peaks are about eight miles up this road. Maroon Lake lies at the foot of the peaks.

In mid summer, when everyone in the world visits the Bells, you will probably have to take a shuttle bus to get to the lake. It is crowded but with all the trails in the area it is easy to lose 95% of them very quickly. In spring and fall you can drive all the way up to the lake but you will have to pay a $10.00 entry fee. For your money you get a very nice brochure and map of the Maroon Bells Scenic Area plus entry into one of the most beautiful areas in the world.

And the Maroon Bells are definitely one of the premier scenic locations not only in Colorado but in the whole world. The mountains are not only huge but extremely scenic as they lie at the far end of a classic U shaped mountain valley. In the fall they reach the peak of their beauty when the aspens that cover the high mountains on both the right and left sides of the valley turn yellow and gold and red. To top it off, the whole scene is perfectly reflected in the waters of Maroon Lake. It was all at it's best last week.

At dawn every morning, no matter the season or the weather, dozens and sometimes hundreds of photographers line up to photograph the magnificent, maroon colored Bells. Don't be put off by this huge crowd of photographers. In the first place, the picture that almost everyone wants, the Bells reflected in Maroon Lake, really is a terrific shot, one of the most famous in the world. It's worth it fighting for a spot in the line of photographers to take this picture. However, this main shot that everyone strives to take, is only a small part of what the Maroon Bells has to offer.

There is a terrific aspen forest right around the parking lot side of the Lake that offers all kinds of great aspen shots and scenic views of the lake and the surrounding peaks. There are also a number of great hiking trails that leave from the lake.

There is the 1.5 round trip Scenic Loop Trail which heads up the valley toward the Bells with a beautiful stream and waterfalls. There is the easy 3.2 mile Maroon Creek Trail that wends its way down-stream to the East Maroon Portal where a bus will bring you back to the parking lot.

However, I think the best trail is the 3.6 mile (round trip) Crater Lake Trail. This trail is a rocky, steep trail that climbs to the very base of the Maroon Bells where you will find Crater Lake. This trail is a great introduction to the Rockies. It's best to leave in midmorning when the sun is illuminating the Bells. There are tons of great shots all the way up to Crater Lake and beyond. If you leave at 10:00 am or so, the sun is in the right location to use a polarizing lens for shots of the Bells and the upper lake. Here is an article on how much a polarizing filter will improve your photography. There are some wonderful shots to be had here.

If you want to hike beyond Crater Lake there are two great trails to take. The West Maroon Creek trail continues on to the south over West Maroon Pass and eventually on to Schofield Pass and if you get really carried away, it goes all the way to Crested Butte. In the summer this is a classic wildflower trail and in the fall a classic aspen trail. There are shuttles so you only have to do the hike one way. This is one of the most famous hikes in the Rockies.

Another great trail to take from Crater Lake is the trail up to Buckskin Pass to the West of the Maroon Bells. From this pass there is another classic Rocky Mountain view, this time of Snowmass Mountain and the Elk Mountains. Again, this is one of the most famous views in the Rockies.

If you do the Crater Lake Trail in the late afternoon, the return trip back to Maroon Lake gives you some terrific shots of Pyramid Peak off to your right. A real bonus is that the sun is now in perfect position to polarize views of Pyramid Peak between the aspen trees and the leaves of the under-story bushes. There are some really nice views and photographs to be had here.

While you are on any of these hikes, be sure you don't give in to the urge to climb the Maroon Bells or Pyramid Peak or any of the surrounding peaks unless you are an experienced mountaineer who knows what he is doing on difficult ground. The Bells and all of the mountains in the vicinity are doubly dangerous because the rock on them is very loose and rotten. There are millions of tons of rock on all of these peaks just sitting there on ledges or loose slopes waiting to fall on you.

I came as close to being killed as I ever have on the Bells long ago when decided that I wanted to climb a couloir (a steep, snow filled gully) high on South Maroon Peak. I was with one of my then teenaged sons half way up the couloir when we heard a huge boom high above us. Twenty or thirty or so seconds later what seemed to be a huge dump-truck load of boulders swept over the cliff edge five hundred feet above us and fell directly towards us. When we saw the rock coming we ran as hard as we could for the cliff face hoping most of the boulders would fly over us. Unfortunately, we ran right through most of them. Luckily, incredible luckily, the only rock that hit us was one small stone that grazed my arm and hand with only minor injuries. That is as close to death in the mountains as I ever want to come. The Maroon Bells aren't called the Deadly Bells for nothing. Many climbers have been killed by rock fall on these dangerous mountains. Beware.

Anyway, stay off the mountains and on the trails and you will discover one of the most beautiful and satisfying places in the world.

All of the pictures in this article were taken on last week's trip to the Maroon Bells

The Aspens are Peaking

2009-10-02T10:48:00.001-06:00

The Maroon Bells,

Near Aspen, CO

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The aspens in Northern Colorado, and in parts of Central Colorado, are on their way out. However they are peaking in Southern Colorado and New Mexico.

I was at the Maroon Bells near Aspen on Wednesday. When I left on Wednesday evening, the aspen leaves were about 75% off the trees. Snow and much colder weather were predicted for Thursday, so I would thing that it is a bit late to catch the aspens at the Bells.

There was also considerable snow at Breckenridge and Silverthore on Friday, so my guess is that the aspens are pretty much on their way out there also.

Here is a summary of the aspen Color I saw on my trip from the Maroon Bells all the way down to Albuquerque, NM yesterday, Thursday, October 1.

Twin Lakes, CO Peaking
San Antonio Peak, CO Peaking
Salida, CO Peaking
Taos, NM Peaking
Santa Fe, NM Peaking
Jemez Mountains, NM Peaking
Sandia Mountains, NM Peaking

If you still haven't gotten out to see the aspens in Southern CO and in mid to Northern NM, now is the time to go.

The cottonwoods in the river bottoms of CO and NM also make great fall foliage pictures. The cottonwoods in Southern Colorado are a little below peak or at full peak. They looked very good in Salida, CO when I went through on Thursday.

Cottonwoods along the river bottoms in Northern New Mexico are about half gold and half green. They probably need another week or so. Albuquerque cottonwoods along the Rio Grande probably need another week or two depending on weather.

Aspen Trunk

Monarch Pass, CO

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Digital Disasters

2009-09-28T01:32:00.148-06:00

Stonington Harbour, ME

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Photography is now almost completely digital. All professional photographers are now shooting and editing and printing digitally. At least I don't any who are not. This is because digital photography is, hands down, far, far better than any photographic technology of the past. Simply put, it means we are now capable of making photographs far more beautiful and far more faithful to the real world than we ever have before.

And as everyone who regularly deals with computers knows, it also means living with a bunch of very complex, temperamental equipment that goes haywire pretty regularly.

Let me relate the digital disasters that have befallen me in the last month or so. My very large mainstay computer, a Mac Pro, disintegrated last week: two quad processors and the main logic board suddenly gone. I couldn't print on my Epson 9800 printer a couple of weeks ago because all of its printer drivers had suddenly and inexplicable disappeared. Just yesterday the same printer was making a string of ugly marks all down the right side of prints. Over the last several weeks the color calibration equipment that I use to make sure the picture on my monitor is accurate began doing odd and inexplicable, and very bad things. Today, the software program, Adobe DreamWeaver, that I use to build my website was producing pages that looked differently on my local website than online.

Sometimes it all makes you want to scream and go back to the old, simple world of film and optical enlargers and developing pans. But I can't, the pictures I make today are so incredible much better. And without the internet I could never make a living working at home or write a blog like this one. And besides that, the old analog world of photography wasn't really all that simple: pictures often printed wrong due to faulty or old chemicals or because processing temperatures were somehow way off. And cooling fans broke and prints caught on fire, bulbs blew out and were no longer available, processors chewed up pictures at a fantastic rate, film cameras captured pictures with all kinds of crazy color balances and even the best photographs were unbelievable dull.

So, I'm stuck with digital and all it's complications. Over the years I have learned to deal with digital disasters and somehow remain reasonably sane. Here are a few things that help.

In the first place digital disasters are usually not as bad as they seem; most often they can be solved much faster than it originally seemed. One basic rule: don't fool around trying to fix it yourself, go to the experts right away. This usually means calling tech help. When my computer blew up I called Apple Care support, they quickly referred me to my local Apple Store and I got my computer back in a week as good as new. I had no idea Apple Stores did complete computer repairs, but they do.

Luckily I had what is called Apple Care on the computer. I highly recommend this for any Apple product you buy. It cost about $300.00 when I bought the computer but gave me complete protection no matter what happened to the computer, plus I get amazingly competent tech help for free which I use very often. In my recent MacPro disaster, I got a $3000.00 repair job done absolutely free. Macs are great computers and Apple's service is always the very best. I love those guys.

The two problems with my Epson 9800 printer were fixed by two quick calls to the very competent Epson tech repair people. I was up and running again in an hour in each case. Again, Epson's people are the best.

When you call tech help, they will usually give you a case number. Be sure and save this; if the problem persists and you need to call tech help again, the new tech can quickly get up to speed on the problem by referring to the case number. Also, having a case number usually insures that you get help quickly without waiting around in the help line forever.

In the case of Adobe Dream Weaver the situation was a bit more complicated. Adobe's tech help is not, in my experience, nearly as good as it used to be. It used to be wonderful but, in my experience, it is now pretty much worthless. It takes forever to get to the tech person who is supposed to help you and then they are not very helpful once you get there. Nor do they seem to care much about your problem.

Adobe seems to realize they need to do something about their tech help department and just recently the wait to get help became shorter, but not much. I've given up calling them and now email my problems to them; I emailed about my latest DreamWeaver problem three days ago and still haven't heard from them. This lack of good service is quite disappointing since their programs, like Photoshop are so wonderful. Maybe it's just me and I have had an unusual experience but I continue to be unhappy with Adobe Tech help. I think I'm just going to have to forget getting help on my DreamWeaver problem and work it out myself.

One key to living with digital photography is backing up. It's not that someday, you may have a problem and lose data, it's that you are definitely going to have all sorts of digital disasters on a continuing basis and you will lose data. You absolutely have to back up all important data, especially image files, constantly and regularly. All my digital files all the way from raw shooting data to finished pictures is always on at least two hard drives and also backed-up regularly to DVD. I have lost only one image file in my entire career, and I'm still looking for that one; I know it's someplace.

The best external hard drives to use are raid arrays. Raid arrays contain at least two separate hard drives that can be set up to either mirror (make two or more duplicate copies of all data) or else to work in tandem to transfer data at very high speeds. I have had good luck with Iomega external hard drives. I also just bought a 1.5 TB external drive from Costco for $140.00 which looks pretty good. I'll tell you how it turns out.

At some point in the near future I plan to buy a very large raid drive from Data Robotics. Their Drobo raid setups are the state of the art and used by many photographers. Here is their website. Their large units can hold up to 16 TB of data.

So, when your digital systems falls apart, as it will, it really isn't the end of the world. Call your tech guy and you'll probably be back in business before you know it. It doesn't hurt to say an occasional prayer to the digital gods also.

Banks of the Swift River, New Hampshire

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Aspens Color in CO

2009-09-25T10:24:00.001-06:00

Dallas Divide, East of Ridgeway, CO

One of the best fall color locations in CO

Well this week's snowstorm in Colorado is over. I'm not quite sure what part of CO got snow and how much, but apparently it was mostly in the higher mountains. Denver and Salida got a lot of rain but no snow on the ground. However, the aspens seem to be peaking or maybe a little over peak in most places in CO right now.

What does this mean for photography in CO right now? I think it's time to get out and start shooting fall color and that we can expect to have snow in the mountains for background. I don't think the snow is low enough to provide foreground yet.

I talked to my friend Steve Peuser in Salida Wednesday. He said he had just made his annual loop trip through Aspen and Crested Butte last weekend. He said the aspens on Monarch Pass, Independence Pass and Cottonwood passes were excellent, in full peak. The aspens at Twin Lakes are just beginning. He said the aspens on McClure Pass were average, not great and that Kebbler Pass was not very good. He said a lot of the aspens on Kebbler Pass were still green and that another big bunch was a dull brown.

Steve and his wife Liz are old time friends in Salida and also the people to talk to about real estate in the Salida area. They know more about the whole surrounding area than anyone else I know in Southern Colorado. So if you are in the market for a home in one of the best parts of Colorado, give Steve and Liz a call. They work for Pinon Reality in Salida and can be reached at 719-539-0200. Steve and Liz are honest, extremely knowledgeable, and treat their customers like friends. In fact, many of their past customers, like Joan and I, have been their friends for many years.

I'm planning on leaving for CO to shoot for a week or so on Monday. I'll let you know how it goes.

Last Dollar Road, between Dallas Divide and Telluride

This is a great scenic drive in the fall

(Don't drive this if it's wet or snowy. It can be dangerous)

Here is an article I wrote about Last Dollar Road

The CO Aspens are turning

2009-09-23T09:38:00.000-06:00

First Snow of the Season, Rocky Mountain National Park

In Colorado the Aspens are turning, it has been snowing since Monday in the high country and it is supposed to continue until tomorrow.

I am in New Mexico where I live now so I am not seeing this with my own eyes. However I hear that the Aspen color is approaching its peak. I also hear that there is a significant snow storm going on in the mountains. I heard that Conifer had ten inches of snow yesterday and Conifer isn't all that high, so the really high country is probably getting a bunch.

The National Weather Service says that the snow is supposed to continue today and tomorrow but that it will be clear Friday. This means, that Friday will probably be the day to be in the mountains if you want to get some spectacular autumn leaves and snow pictures.

If all goes well that is. The great shots may never happen.

There is a chance that all this snow may knock the aspen leaves off the trees. It has been cold in CO, in the twenties at night in the mountains, and this may make matters worse. However, I doubt if all the leaves are on the ground, usually this doesn't happen unless there has been an ice storm. They may have turned brown though, but I doubt this has happened either. You never know though. Going on a shoot like this with incomplete information is always a shot in the dark. You never know what will happen or what the conditions will be like. What you hear is often wrong. My rule is that if it looks like conditions will be good, go.

Also, Friday may be too early. The smaller roads may still be closed or be too snowy and icy to drive safely. Check with CO highway conditions first before you head out.

However, this is also the time to get great shots like the one at the top of this page.

I would leave for CO right now but I've got some extenuating circumstances. My big Mac Pro computer had a serious hemorrhage last week involving both processors and the main logic board. It is in the Apple repair shop right now and supposed to be fixed sometime today or tomorrow. After I get it back, I have a whole pile of picture orders that I need to print and ship before I can leave.

So, I'm hoping to leave for CO by Saturday or Sunday or maybe next Monday. By then who knows what the snow and leaves situation in Colorado will be. I'm hoping there will still be good leaves, snow on the peaks, and with luck maybe snow still on the trees. Snow still on the trees is just too much to hope for though. Those great shots will probably happen on Friday and maybe Saturday only.

I'll do my best though. This is always the story of real landscape shoots. It's always "Get out there and do the best you can with what you've got in imperfect conditions." Conditions are never perfect. You are always too late or too early or something. Making good pictures always depends on searching for the best shot in less than perfect conditions and then looking for the best angle, the best light, the best foreground, the best background. Making a good shot in conditions that are less than perfect is what separates the good photographer from the mediocre one. Hopefully this time I'll be in the former category. It very definitely doesn't always turn out that way though. You never know.

Another picture on first snow on Bear Lake

Rocky Mountain National Park

Photoshop is Crucial

2009-09-21T14:27:00.001-06:00

Photoshop Is An Essential for the Serious Photographer

8196.5, Triangle X Ranch Road, Gate and Horse Meadow

Teton National Park

If you want to be a serious photographer in the 21st century, Photoshop is essential.

Unfortunately, there are still many people that think using Photoshop is somehow cheating. This is especially true in the case of landscape photography. True, Photoshop can be used to falsify photographs by taking out unwanted objects in a scene or by putting foreign objects into a picture. However, this is not the way most real landscape photographers use photoshop.

Mostly real landscape photographers use Photoshop to bring a scene back to what it actually looked like before the camera screwed it up. For example, cameras don't see nearly as many levels of brightness as the human eye does. This is why photographs often show what was originally a bright blue sky as blank white or why they show the gorgeous shadows at dusk and dawn as pure black. One of the main jobs of photoshop is to fix problems like this.

Photoshop is also for correcting color balances, for making pictures as bright and colorful as they were in the real world, for correcting contrast problems, for correcting all kinds of lens problems, for resizing pictures in all kinds of ways, and for a million and one other things that are absolutely indispensable to any real photographer. I couldn't be in business as a landscape photographer for even one day without it.

And Photoshop keeps getting better and better all the time. Every two years they come out with an update that once again revolutionizes the world of photography.

For example, for the past several updates, Photoshop has been making both Bridge and the Camera Raw module in Photoshop better and better. With Photoshop CS-4 they have got it pretty much perfected.

The files in your digital camera can now be downloaded directly into Bridge where you can sort, label, arrange, save them in many different ways and then open them directly into Camera Raw. Here you can edit one or more files all in one spot.

There are several advantages to editing in Camera Raw. For one thing, when you edit in Camera Raw, the original capture is never altered, you can always go back to it and start all over again. It is like the old days, when your original image capture on a negative or a chrome always remained the same no matter how many different ways it was printed. Secondly, many of the edits that are done in Camera Raw are lossless. For example it is possible to correct exposure by one or two stops and radically change the white balance without degrading the image at all.

In the new Camera Raw I can correct exposure big time. I can correct color balance, I can fix burned out skies and blacked out shadows. I can adjust contrast and sharpen the picture in a new and non-damaging way. I can reduce noise that the camera may have introduced and I can correct all kinds of lens errors. And I can do all this in one place with a few clicks in a matter of seconds and I can do most of it without degrading the image. And I haven't even gotten into the main Photoshop program yet.

So, if you are seriously interested in photography, you need Photoshop. And, you will need some help in getting started with the program. Don't try to learn it by trial and error. This is a huge mistake. Probably the easiest way to get started is to watch some good tutorials. And probably the best place to find great Photoshop tutorials is Lynda on the internet. For $25.00 a month you can watch all the tutorials you can stand, on just about every important graphics program that exists. After the first month you will probably know all you need to know about photoshop to use it well.

I'm a book guy though. My favorite series of Photoshop books are written by Martin Evening, a British fashion photographer who knows most of what there is to know about Photoshop and then some. He writes a big fat book on every new Photoshop edition every two years. His books are called "Adobe Photoshop for Photographers." If you are an total novice to Photoshop, you might want to put off buying Evening's book for awhile; he does tend to whip through the basics pretty fast and spends most of his time on the complex new stuff. Get on Amazon and find a beginner's book that you think you can handle, read it quickly and then move on to Martin Evening.

I used to recommend that novices buy Photoshop Elements which is kind of a Photoshop light that is much less expensive than the real thing. However, the new digital cameras are so good, and the new full Photoshop is so wonderful, that now I have a different recommendation, or actually two recommendations.

If you just want to take some great pictures of the kids and vacations and friends and what-not, I would buy the best digital camera you can afford, set it to take jpgs and use the default setup on the camera. I would forget about Raw Capture, Photoshop, editing pictures and all that time consuming stuff. As good as digital cameras are these days, you are going to get some pretty great pictures right out of the camera.

However, if you are seriously interested in photography and you want to take and print gallery quality pictures (and this is a real possibility, for anyone), I would buy the full Photoshop. But, keep in mind that this is going to be a serious investment in both time and money.

Photoshop CS4 for Windows is $587.00 and $688.00 for Mac at Amazon. You can get student editions for around $200. 00 however. I don't have any experience with student editions and can't say if they are a good deal or not; however, my experience with other kinds of student editions is that usually something is missing. And, you really have to be a student. If someone reading this has some info on the student editions of Photoshop, let me know in a comment to this blog.

Becoming really proficient in Photoshop is going to take a serious investment in time as well as in money. By the time you are done learning Photoshop, you are also going to have become a much better shooter and printer. It all goes together, shooting and editing and printing. You can't become an expert in one with being an expert in all three. And it all takes some real time.

But, if you've got the money, the time, the inclination and the passion and the determination, I can't think of a better way of spending one's time and money. Making great pictures is incredibly rewarding.

P.S. Now-a-days a lot of photographers are using Adobe Lightroom instead of Photoshop. Lightroom is better at managing millions of picture files, it is a little less expensive and works a lot like the Camera Raw part of the full Photoshop. Beyond this I don't know much about it since I haven't used it. You might want to research Lightroom before you commit to the full Photoshop.

If someone out there does know a lot about Light Room, it would be nice if you would write about it in a comment on this blog.

8214, On the Grinnell Glacier Hike in Glacier National Park

The Glaciers Are Melting

2009-09-15T08:21:00.003-06:00

8296, Wildflowers and Foggy Dawn on Logan Pass

Glacier National Park

I first started hiking and backpacking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming some thirty years ago. As I mentioned in my last blog, the two real changes I have seen in the Winds over the years have been that the pines are beginning to die on a large scale and that that the glaciers are melting.

I remember one Wind River trip in particular that really brought this home to me. In about 1985 I went on a 12 day backpacking trip into the northern Wind Rivers with my wife's nephew Lon. In those days everyone doing any serious hiking in the Winds always carried an ice axe; it was just something you needed on a regular basis.

In the first couple of days of this trip I remember using my axe to cross a long snowfield the trail cut across; it was something I needed to do in case I slipped and needed to self arrest. The next day we crossed a high, trail-less pass to get into Tibcomb Basin and I used my axe to glissade seven or eight hundred feet off the pass and down into the basin. The following day we hiked up toward Dinwoody Peak, the highest peak in Wyoming, and spent all of one afternoon climbing a long, steep snowfield where we kicked steps and used our ice axes continually. Then, later in the trip, while hiking on a major trail we topped a rise to see that the trail had disappeared under a huge, very steep, very icey snowfield. In order to get down at all, ice axes were an absolute essential. And all this wasn't in the early spring, it was in the middle of September when most of the snow had melted.

Seven years ago I made the almost identical trip in the Winds with one of my sons and his wife. We were planning to climb some of the higher peaks so we took ice axes. We never used them the entire trip even on the highest peaks or passes. There wasn't even a hint on snow on any of the trails we used. The difference in Titcomb basin was particularly striking. None of the miles-long snowfields we had spent so much time climbing and descending with ice axes on the previous trip even existed anymore. They had all turned into large completely dry, snow-free scree fields. (Scree fields are areas of rocks and boulders that have fallen from surrounding peaks.) The Wind Rivers had turned from a land of ice and snow and rock into a land of rock and bare earth.

Even though we were climbing on large extensive snowfields on the first trip, not on any real glaciers, the glaciers are also disappearing in the Wind Rivers and all over the Rocky Mountains. This was very apparent on my long summer shoot this year. It was particularly apparent in Glacier National Park. In 1850 there were 150 named Glaciers in the Park. Now there are 26. Back in the 1990's the USGS was predicting that Glacier National Park would have no glaciers left at all by 2030, now they are predicting that this will happen by 2020. In 1850 there were 21.6 square kilometers of Glaciers in the Park, by 1974 this had shrunk to 7.4 square kilometers and today there are only scraps of glaciers left.

I can remember hiking the wonderful trail to Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park when I was a little kid of 10 or 12. I remember thinking that the glacier was huge, that it covered the whole side of the mountain. Undoubtable this was partially the result of my memory magnifying something I had seen as a kid. But still, when I repeated the hike this summer, the glacier seemed to be a shred of the gigantic expanse of snow and ice that was there on my childhood hike. And in fact, Grinnell Glacier has, by official measurement, shrunk by ninety percent over the past century.

Here is a very interesting article by the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center about the disappearance of Glaciers in Glacier National Park with tons of statistics if you are interested.

The Wind River Mountains, Teton National Park, Glacier National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park are all going to be glacier-less in the next ten or twenty years. Without glaciers they will be very different places ecologically and scenically. The old world of glacial clad peaks is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. It all makes me pretty sad.

Bill Atkinson was one of the first people to bring Global Warming to public attention in 1989 with his book, "The End of Nature." This book isn't really an ecology book, it is more of a philosophical discussion of what global warming means for human beings. The basic concept of the book is that the idea of nature has ended. For thousands of years human beings have thought of nature as something beyond man, something that would always endure no matter how badly man screwed things up; nature was something beautiful and eternal that was separate from man and which would last forever and never change. Atkinson says that with Global Warming this is no longer true. Now man is actually changing nature in his relentless consumption of the bounties of the earth.

The End of Nature is only one of Atkinson's many, many books and articles that are very much worth reading. I highly recommend him.

8298, Wildflowers, Dawn and Distant Peaks

Logan Pass, Glacier National Park

The Trees Are Dying

2009-09-10T09:10:00.008-06:00

8329, Green River Lake Afternoon

The two pines in the foreground and many in the background are dying of pine beetle infestation.

As a landscape photographer I have spent a fair amount of time in the Rocky Mountain high country in the last forty years. Over these years I have seen two major changes in the mountains and forests of this great and beautiful land: the trees are dying and the glaciers are melting as temperatures continue to rise. For me, these observances are not theoretical science or abstract computer projections, it is personal. I have seen this happening over the years with my own eyes and what I am seeing is not pretty. And the prospects for future years are not optimistic.

On my long photo-shoot this summer I drove from Placitas NM, up through Colorado, across Wyoming, and then up to Northern Montana, right on the Canadian border. The higher mountains of all of this country is filled with lodgepole pine, it is pretty much the dominant tree. And lodgepole pines, like most of the pines, are very vulnerable to the pine beetle.

One of my first stops this summer was in Summit County Colorado, in the area near Breckenridge and Dillon Lake and Silverthorne. What is happening to the forest in this area is absolutely shocking. Over the past five years, hundreds of thousands of acres of Lodgepole Pines are being killed by the pine beetle. Miles and miles long swaths of pines are turning red and then finally into bare poles covering the hillsides.

If you drive west on I-70 from Silverthorn to Frisco and on toward Vail, there are not many unaffected trees left. In some areas the trees are entirely dead, in others they are 80%, 60%, 40% gone. In other areas there are just a sprinkling of dead, red trees mixed in with the deep greens of the healthy trees. But the pine beetle trees are everywhere in the area, and once they get a toehold, all the trees will eventually die.

If you search google for "pine beetle" you will find hundreds of stories of immanent disaster for the forests of the American West. It is said that a million acres of pines have been destroyed in Colorado in the past year alone. Apparently 3.9 million acres in CO, MT, WY, OR, ID, WA and UT were destroyed in 2007. And this is nothing compared to what is predicted for coming years.

Both the Colorado State Forest Service and the Federal National Forest Service are predicting that all the lodgepole pines in Northern Colorado and the Front Range will be wiped out in the next five years. This sounds pretty unbelievable but it seems to be what they are saying.

My next stop on my summer shooting trip was at Green River Lakes in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. The picture at the top of this page was taken at Lower Green River Lake, one of my favorite places in the world. If you are interested in this area, here is an article I wrote on Green River Lakes a couple of years ago.

For as long as I have been going to these lakes, there has been a beautiful campground located just behind the spot where I took the above picture. When I got to this formerly idyllic spot this July, I was horrified to see that the campground was no longer there. All the pines had been cut down and sawed up into short logs; the whole place was now a barren patch of ground devoid of trees, grass and even brush and scarred with deep, muddy ruts left by logging trucks.

"What in the world happened here?" I asked a US Forest Service ranger who was about to drive off in his little green forest service truck. The answer was two words long, "Pine Beetles."

Almost every tree in the campground had been killed by pine beetles, leaving standing dead trees covered with ugly red and brown needles. According to the ranger, these trees tend to fall and kill people if they are left standing in campgrounds, so Forest Service policy is to cut them all down. The beautiful 100 site campground was now down to about six scrubby little sites way off to one side of what was once a great campground.

On the 45 mile gravel road leading to the campground I had noticed that the swaths of Pine Beetle killed trees seemed to be much more extensive than I remembered from my previous visits here. When I looked around now, there seemed to be almost as many dead trees as live ones in the hills that surround the Lakes. For the first time, the effects of global warming hit me really hard and up-close and personally. Here was one of my favorite places in the world dying right before my eyes.

I did manage to take a few shots without dead trees in them but it was tough. In the shot at the top of this page, many of the trees in the background are dead. You don't really see it in the picture but there are many, many dead trees here.

As I drove on to two more of my most favorite places in the world, Teton National Park and Glacier National Park, I saw the same thing happening, on an even bigger scale. In Glacier, the damage was particularly stunning. The Eastern part of the Park, particularly east of St Mary Lake is now a wasteland of beetle killed and fire killed trees, for mile and mile after mile. And in the places where the forest is still green and apparently healthy, there are many beetle killed trees mixed in with the live ones. Sometimes it is just a few and in other places it is an acre or two or even a 100 or more acres of infected trees.

It looks to me as if it is just a matter of time, not too far in the future, when all of the Lodgepole Pines in these two great parks will be gone forever. Some forestry people say the majestic pines will be gone forever to be replaced by various kinds of scrub growth like Scrub Oak. Others say the pines may regenerate in 50 years or so. At any rate, it looks to me like huge areas of the Rocky Mountains are going to change completely in the next few years.

And it is not only the Lodge Pole Pines that are dying. In one stretch of Montana along the Missouri River I drove through quite a few miles of beetle killed Ponderosa Pines. And as warmer weather is moving into higher and higher altitudes, other types of pines like White Bark Pines and Jack Pines are also dying from Pine Beetle infestation.

The consensus of opinion as to why this huge epidemic of Pine Beetle devastation has occurred is global warming. Winters are now much warmer than in the past. Pine Beetle larvae are killed only by long periods of cold in the minus 20 to minus 40 range and this kind of cold is just no longer happening in the Rocky Mountains. So, Pine Beetle larvae are now surviving and our pines are dying.

All of this should be a matter of huge concern for all of us. Not only is the incredible scenic beauty of our forests and parks about to be destroyed forever, but the loss of all these trees will have immense ecological consequences. Without trees hillsides will erode, without the shade that trees provide all the understory of grasses and flowers and shrubs will wither and die, the trout streams will warm and the trout will die, and wildlife habitat will be no more. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, if you want to see our Western National Parks pretty much as they once were or if you want to show them to your children or grandchildren, I wouldn't waste too much time. In five or ten years they may be vastly different than they are now.

8330, Green River Lakes, Log and Afternoon Light.

Without healthy pines like those in this picture, the Rockies will be a much different place.

Good Light

2009-09-03T14:13:00.001-06:00

8293, Wild Goose Island and St Mary Lake in Glacier National Park

A good example of excellent light

As I mentioned in a previous blog, when I set out on my extended summer shoot this July, it had been awhile since I had been out on a long trip where I did nothing but shoot, shoot, shoot. So I began by doing just that, shoot-shoot-shoot, without thinking much about the photographic basics that determine whether a picture is going to great, mediocre or just plain bad. I hate to say it, but it took me almost a week to get back into the swing of good photographic practice.

One of the most basic principles of photography is shooting in good light. Everyone knows, even non-photographers, that you should take photographs early in the morning or late in the evening. We all know this truism, but it is amazing how easy it is to forget it, since we have all taken lots of pretty good, mediocre but still pretty good, photos in all kinds of light.

But the right light it is still extremely important. If at all possible a photographer really should get up well before dawn and be in position before the sun rises. The pictures shot before dawn in the quiet predawn light are often very soft and beautiful. When the sun rises, if you are lucky, you will get all the gorgeous reds and oranges and yellows and pinks and purples of a perfect sunrise. It if happens, great, shoot as much of it as you can while it lasts. If it doesn't happen, the light is usually still good for quite awhile, until 9:00 or 10:00. This is a very productive time when it is possible to capture some really great pictures.

The same thing happens in reverse at sunset. I am usually out a couple of hours before the sun is scheduled to go down. A lot of good stuff can happen before the reds and golds of a spectacular sunset and you should be there to capture it; often the soft, low sunlight an hour before sunset is better than the actual grand finale.

And then there is the actual sunset itself; a time when the most magical things can and often do happen regularly. After the brilliant colors of the sunset fade, it is again a time of soft, low beautiful light that can create unforgettable pictures.

There is a second reason not to leave directly after the sun goes below the horizon. There is a very good chance that the best of the glorious sunset colors won't happen until even 20 or 30 minutes after sundown. I can't tell you how many times I have given up only to look in the rear view mirror when I am ten miles away from my perfect sunset location only to see the sky filled with tremendous color that it is now far too late to capture.

Mostly I don't shoot at all between 10 am and 4 pm, the time of the worst light. However, there are times when you have to shoot right now or never, bad light or not. This happens all the time. For example you are on a long hike to a great location. When the sun rises you have barely left and are miles away from the great location. Then when you get to the wonderful spot it is 1 PM and the light is bad. But you have to leave shortly, before the light gets good, since you want to be back at your car by dark or at least before midnight. The great spot has to be shot in bad light or not at all.

And then there is the problem of getting up early for dawn and staying up late for sunset, day after day, on a long trip like mine this summer. In the summer when the days are long and the nights are short this means getting up at 4 am to get to the perfect spot before dawn. And then since the summer sun often doesn't set until 9:30, you can be up until midnight before the final afterglow is gone and you have finally gotten home, had dinner, and gone to bed. As you can imagine, this just doesn't work for long, and soon some daytime shooting in less than perfect light is on the agenda.

And then there is the simple but real problem of getting up every morning at 4:00 am when it is black and cold and maybe rainy outside and you could be staying in your nice, warm, cosy, comfortable bed. I hate to admit it, but this is definitely a real problem for me. At the other end of the day, it isn't always easy to traipse off at 7:00 pm when your family or girlfriend wants to go out to dinner and a movie or the kids are demanding play time.

So, much as you would like to, there are times when you are going to have to shoot in plain old icky mid-day light.

One of the best things you can do when you have to shoot in bad light is use a polarizer. This won't make awful light into great light, but it will sometimes make mediocre light into OK light. I used this trick a lot on my recent summer trip. When I began the trip, I decided, "Oh what the heck, I don't need polarizers, they are too much trouble. I don't need polarizers with a digital camera anyway."

When I downloaded the first day's worth of shooting I was disgusted at how bad it was. "What in the world am I doing wrong," I wondered. After a bit of thought, I realized that I was shooting in bad light and I wasn't regularly using a polarizer as I usually did and that this might be part of the problem. So I started putting a polarizer on and I was amazed at how much better the pictures were.

Don't forget your polarizer if it is on your camera all day. You need to remember to set it before every shot as different kinds of polarization are necessary for different light. And sometimes it doesn't help at all and you should take it off.

I almost always take the polarizer off when I am shooting sunset and dawn. It is usually too dark at these times to use one and besides it is rarely needed.

And then there is the problem that polarizers need an extra two stops of light that can often make hand-holding a camera impossible. Don't forget this and end up with pictures that were shot at a slow shutter speed that often results in blurred pictures.

Here is an article I wrote awhile back about using polarizers. You might find it helpful.

In my next post, I'll tell you a couple of other tricks for dealing with mid-day light.

8216, Logan Pass Sunset and Silhouettes, Glacier National Park

Another example of good light

Image Stabilization

2009-09-01T10:52:00.003-06:00

8314, Vine and Wall, handheld picture shot at 1/30 of a second

A lot of image lenses have built in image stabilizers. If you plan on handholding your camera, as opposed to using a tripod, image stabilization is a huge plus.

The new Tamron 18x270 lens that I bought for my Canon Rebel has image stabilization. Tamron calls it Vibration Control but it's the same thing.

Since the whole purpose of buying the Rebel and Tamron lens was to have a very light camera that I could handhold, the Vibration Control feature was essential.

The vibration control on the Tamron lens gives me the ability to hand-hold the Rebel-Tamron combination at speeds two or three or even four stops lower than I would normally be able to. When using an un-stabilized lens, I normally don't shoot any slower than 1/125 or maybe 1/60.

With the stabilized lens, I find myself shooting at speeds of 1/30 or 1/25, 1/20, or even 1/15. I don't always get sharp images at these slow speeds, but more often than not I do. In the old days, using un-stabilized lenses, I would never of dreamed of being able to shoot at these speeds.

The ability to shoot at slow speeds makes handholding cameras much more attractive. Since I can shoot at slower speeds, I can use smaller f-stops and this enables me to get a much better depth of field. Often I don't have to resort to increasing ISO speed to get smaller f-stops, I just rely on the image stabilizer and shoot more slowly.

The picture at the top of this page was shot at 1/30 of a second. By shooting this slowly I was able to use the fairly small f-stop of f-16 which was was more than enough to give me plenty of depth of field that would keep all parts of the picture quite sharp.

I shot the vine picture at the 200mm position on the zoom lens. The longer the lens, the harder it is to hold it still. With this long a lens and this slow a speed, I could never have gotten this shot without image stabilization.

The fact that the vine picture was sharp is pretty phenomenal considering that I shot the picture with the 200 mm zoom positon. As I said, image stabilizers work better on short, wide angle lenses than they do on long, telephoto lenses. It is very hard to handhold using exposure speeds like 1/20 or 1/15 unless you shoot at at focal lengths below 150 mm or so.

Long lenses are harder to handhold than shorter ones because long lenses wobble around more since there is so much weight sticking out so far in front of the camera. It is very difficult to hold them steady. So, if you want to shoot at really slow speeds, try to keep your zoom position as close to the wide angle part of the lens as you can.

Just how slow can you shoot long lenses? In the old days the rule of thumb always was "shoot at the speed that is the reciprocal of the focal length." In other words, shoot a 500 mm lens no slower than 1/500 of a second. With an image stabilized lens you can now handhold this 500 mm lens at 1/125. You definitely wouldn't be able to shoot it at 1/20 though.

Another thing that can help you get sharp images with handheld cameras is very simple, find something to brace yourself against. When I am handholding at slow speeds I will often brace myself against a tree, or an old stump or a fence post or a rock or very often lie on the ground with my elbows braced on the ground. It also works well to sit and brace my elbows on my knees. Being close to the ground works well, since I am often using wildflowers or rocks or grasses as foreground and I need to be low anyway.

One final note. Don't use stabilized lenses when shooting on a tripod. In some cases this can result in less sharp images. When your camera is on a tripod, turn off the stabilizer. The switch is usually right on the barrel of the lens.

Get a Free Proof of Any Image

2009-08-30T12:53:00.005-06:00

8177, Steeple, Storm Clouds, Mt Massive, Leadville, CO

It is extremely difficult to get images to look as good online as they do in the real world. Actually it is impossible.

This is especially true on this blog. For some reason our images look much better on our website then they do on this blog. On the blog the images tend to be quite washed out and not nearly as brilliant and sharp and rich as they really are. I suspect this is because the blog doesn't support the correct profiles that are embedded in all of our images

For this reason we have always offered free proofs to anyone who wants one. Proofs are limited to three per person, per month. We also ask you to please register with us before asking for a free proof. There is a place to register on the top right of this blog. Or you can register by clicking here.

If you would like a free proof, just email and ask. Please include the complete name and number (if available) of the pictures you want. Also include your physical mailing address. These are hard proofs, remember, real pictures. They have to go in the physical mail, not email.

There is also a link for ordering proofs on the top right of this blog, so you can order from that spot also.

You might like to go to our website before you order your free proofs, so you can really see everything we have to offer. You can order the free proofs from the website also.

You can also order a free proof by clicking "comment" at the end of this post.

Enjoy your free proofs.

8181, Green River Lakes, Grasses, Pines, Squaretop

Wind River Mountains, Wyoming

More on Depth of Field

2009-08-30T12:30:00.001-06:00

This image has excellent depth of field

See a larger picture of this image

In my last post I talked about how increasing ISO speed allows you to use smaller f-stops and thus get much better depth of field.

There are a couple of additional things you can do to assure that your picture is sharp from close foreground to distant background.

The flower picture that I used yesterday to illustrate bad depth of field is on the left. If you remember, I shot this picture at 1/250, f-8, with a zoom setting of 35mm.

If I had zoomed out to 18mm, which I could have done using this lens, rather than using the 35mm zoom that I did use, the depth of field would have been much better. Wider angle lenses always result in better depths of field.

The other thing I could have done to get better depth of field would have been to back up a bit from the foreground flowers. This would have helped a lot.

Unfortunately, if I had done either of these things, it would have been a different picture. I would have destroyed my nice composition where the foreground is good and close and the background recedes into unimportance.

So, since I really did want this particular composition, using a higher ISO and thus a smaller f-stop was probably the correct solution after all. I would have kept the nice composition, gotten a lot of depth of field, retained my fast exposure speed and gotten a very sharp picture front to back.

Speaking of composition, it could have been much better. I really should have used an even tighter crop and cut off some of the dry grass at the bottom of the picture which is unnecessary and distracting. Put your finger over the grass at the bottom and you'll see how much better the picture gets. I should have also moved my camera position to the left just a bit which would have moved the yellow flowers to the right; as it is the flowers are too centered.

However, cropping tighter would have necessitated a less wide-angle zoom, maybe 50mm and my depth of field problem would have gotten even worse.

See what I mean about about everything in photography being a trade off. There just is no free lunch in this game.

This little scenario also demonstrates how many things a photographer has to think about, all at the same time to get a good picture. It isn't easy, especially if you are as easily distracted as I am.

High ISO speed and Noise

2009-08-30T12:16:00.002-06:00

8167, San Luis Valley, Green Grass and Yellow Flowers

The two images on this page were both shot in the San Luis valley on day one of my long photo shoot trip. Both are close to the flower image in the previous post.

In this previous post we were talking about raising the camera's ISO speed to 800 so we could use a small aperture like f-22 while still using a high exposure speed like 1/250. I explained that this is a great way to get much better depth of field and much better sharpness throughout the picture.

Sounds great, right? Not always, there is a downside to using higher ISO's; the higher they are the more noise you add to a picture. In the case of the Rebel, I'm lucky, it's a very good camera and there is not much noise added even at ISO 800. There definitely is some though; however if the picture is not sharpened, almost all of this noise can be removed later in Photoshop and it will never be noticed unless the picture is printed to billboard dimensions.

This is not true on all cameras though. Many cameras will fill a picture with lots of nasty noise at ISO 800. I once had a five megapixel Nikon that was really bad at this. Before you try shooting at high ISO's, test your camera at these high ISO speeds.

At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of professional cameras can be shot at 800 or 1000 or even 1600 ISO without producing any noise at all, or very little anyway. But, like everything else in photography, there is always a trade off; these great cameras come a very high prices. My Canon 1Ds Mark II can shoot at very high ISO's with no noise at all, but it cost $8000.00. And, it is too heavy to carry on a strap around my neck, use on backpacking trips or to use as casually and creatively as I use my new Rebel.

One quickly learns that in photography, there is no free lunch; everything is a trade off, everything has a price in dollars, or weight, or time, or lower image quality, or something.

If you want a little more info about getting good depth of field using smaller point and shoot cameras, see my article on depth of field.

8168, San Luis Valley, Yellow Flowers, Dead Tree

Depth of Field and Handholding

2009-08-30T11:17:00.002-06:00

8170, San Luis Valley Flowers and Grasses Vignette

As you can see from the title of this post, I am still carrying on about shooting handheld pictures.

I shot the above picture in mid July on day one of my month long summer shoot. I was driving through the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado on my way to our old home in Howard, Colorado. I had my new Canon Rebel with the new Tamaron 18-270 lens on the passenger seat right beside me. It was so easy to stop and take pictures that I was stopping fairly regularly, wandering around a bit in the close vicinity of the car and shooting whatever looked good. In the location of the above picture I shot half a dozen pretty good images.

Since I was handholding the camera, I was shooting at fairly high speeds as I didn't want any movement blur in the images. As a result, the lens apperature was not all that small. This picture was shot at 1/250 at f-8 with the lens zoomed to 35mm. And as a result of that, the picture is not sharp all the way to the distant background, ie it has poor depth of field.

What happened was that I forgot I wasn't shooting my Olympus point and shoot camera that has a small sensor and thus lots of depth of field. (If you really want to know why small sensor cameras have more depth of field than large sensor cameras, here is an article that explains all that technical stuff.)

If I had shot this picture with my Olympus using the 28mm lens zoom and the same aperture of f-8, I would have had tons of depth of field and the picture would have been sharp all the way from the foreground to infinity.

Take a good look at the picture above and you will see that the yellow flowers are sharp but the background is very fuzzy. In this case, the picture doesn't really look all that bad because the important stuff is in focus and it's only the far background that is blurry. This is often OK as the sharpness of the foreground separates it from the blurry background and sometimes this is actually very nice; sometimes I actually try to do this.

Other times, like this time, I really wanted the whole picture to be sharp all the way through and this meant I had to have good depth of field. You get depth of field when you use a very small f-stop like f-22, a wide angle lens like a 18mm or a 28 mm lens, and you are three or four feet away from the close foreground.

In this case, I really intended the whole picture to be sharp all the way to infinity and I blew it. The main problem was that my f-8 aperture was too large. To get good depth of field with a close foreground, using a larger sensor camera like the Rebel, you really have to use f-22.

However, if I had used f-22, then my shutter speed would have dropped to a 1/30 of a second which is generally to slow a speed to handhold the camera without getting motion blur.

What to do? How do you handhold the camera, get good depth of field and sharpness, and avoid motion blur?

There are several things you can do. One of the best is to use a higher ISO speed. In the old days this meant changing film to a higher speed film. However on a digital camera you just set the camera ISO at a higher speed. When handholding the Rebel, I quickly began shooting, not at the default speed of 100, but at ISO 400 or even 800.

Shooting at ISO 800 would have allowed me to shoot the picture at f-22 and still keep the exposure speed at 1/250 of a second. This would have given me a good depth of field and keep the whole picture in sharp focus with no motion blur.

Summer Photo Shoot

2009-08-29T17:38:00.003-06:00

Grand Teton, Old Barn and Aspen Trunks

Taken on my summer trip.

On July 19th I left New Mexico on a planned month long photo shoot. The shoot turned out to last 20 days rather than 30 but it was still a memorable trip. This was going to be mostly a National Park trip where I visited Teton National Park, Glacier National Park, North Cascades National Park and Rainier National Park. Also included in the itinerary was the Saw Tooth Range in northern Idaho.

The goals for the trip were to shoot 5,000 to 10,000 pictures, try out my new ideas on handheld shooting and to have a good time if possible. It turned out that the trip turned out to be a pretty good learning experience for me as lots of the picture taking turned out a bit disastrously.

As you will see, I made some pretty dumb mistakes. Partially this came from the fact that I hadn't been out on a really long shooting trip in some time where I planned on shooting a lot of pictures. It had been awhile since I had shot every day, covering both dawn and sunset and a lot of stuff in between. In short, I was a bit rusty and made a lot of dumb mistakes before I managed to get back into photo-shoot-mode again. Actually this seems to happen to me pretty regularly when I go out to shoot seriously after a break of six months or a year.

However, all was not disaster as I got maybe 200 to 300 really good pictures in amoung all the goof-ups

My first stop was Howard, CO where we used to live. Here I picked up my camper and strapped it to the back of my pickup. On trips like this one I always live in my camper. When I am out for two weeks or a month or more I find it is almost impossible to live and eat and sleep in the back of my Explorer which I often use for shorter trips. I find that I need a little more comfort, a place to cook easily and a good place to set up my computer so I can see how my shooting is working out. On this last trip, this turned out to be essential. I was making so many mistakes that if I hadn't caught and corrected them daily, I would have been in deep trouble.

Triangle X Ranch in the Tetons

Taken early in my summer trip

The Canon Rebel Xsi

2009-08-28T18:31:00.232-06:00

Birch Trunks and Maples in Maine shot without a tripod

This post continues my thoughts about handholding cameras for increased shooting flexibility and creativity that have been the subjects of the three previous posts.

When I got back from my weeklong July trip on the Green River in Utah, I looked at all the pictures I had shot on my handheld Olympus camera and was quite pleased. Hum, I thought, maybe I ought to be taking the whole idea of handheld photography a little more seriously. So I looked back at a picture I had shot in Maine last year. I remembered handholding a shot with my Canon 1Ds Mark II that I decided was too much trouble to use a tripod for. Also pretty darn good. The picture is at the top of this page.

However, even though my Olympus was doing a pretty good job, I thought that maybe I needed a camera that had a little larger image size than the Olympus but that would still be very light, easy to handle and could be taken on long backpacking trips. Also, when shooting in RAW format, the Olympus is unbelievably slow and I really wanted to be able to shoot in RAW.

After a bit of research on my favorite camera reviewsite, dpreview, I came up with the Rebel Xsi, also called the 450D. This is actually last year's Rebel, but for my use it looked better than the newer one. The newest Rebel costs a bunch more but its only real improvement seemed to be a measly 3 extra megapixels and a greatly improved video function. I figured the 3 megapixels weren't worth that much and I didn't really want a video function. The Rebel 450D has 12 megapixels and my big Canon only has 16. Also, I liked the fact that the Rebel only weighed a pound.

Here is the dpreview review of the Rebel 450-D if you are interested. Be sure and read the conclusions page at the end, as this is the most important part of their reviews. The camera has a "Highly Recommended" rating, which coming from dpreview really means something. Also the image quality is rated as 9.0 which dpreview rarely awards. If you are interested in this camera you should go to the conclusions page and read it as there are some cons as well as a lot of pros. For me, the pros easily outweighed the cons.

Now I had a camera but I still needed a lens. The Rebel is not a point and shoot camera like my Olympus, it is what is called an SLR, a single lens reflex. This means that it will take exchangeable lenses. Going along with my idea that I need a very easy-to-use camera, I decided to get just one lens for this camera, one that would zoom from very wide angle to a pretty decent telephoto. I wanted to be able shoot with every focal length I might need without breaking my concentration by fumbling around for a new lens when I needed one.

Generally speaking, trying to get all the focal lengths needed in one long zoom lens is not all that great an idea. The longer the zoom, the less image quality a lens usually has. However, I was willing to compromise on this lens.

I wanted a system that would allow me to shoot light and free and be creative. I knew I would have to sacrifice something and it was going to be a little bit of image quality. I knew I would lose a little image quality going from my Canon 1DS MarkII to the Rebel and I knew I would lose a little more going from my large, heavy, short-zoom Canon lenses to the new long-zoom lens. And also, I found what looked like a very good lens with as good as or better reviews than most of the rest.

The lens I finally picked after looking at the dpreview lens reviews was the Tamaron 18-270. The review was very good, the lens had the zoom length I needed, it had a built in vibration stabilizer and it was light. Here is the dpreview discussion of this lens.

The Rebel and Tamaron combination weighs 2.5 pounds which is much, much better than the 17 pounds for my large Canon, three lenses and my lightest tripod and head. And this doesn't count an extra battery which weighs another pound.

I paid $648.00 for the Rebel and $601.00 for the Tamaron Lens at Amazon.com. Amazon tends to be my favorite place to buy camera equipment. There are places where you can buy cameras for less but I trust Amazon and I have a free two day shipping deal with them.

The picture below is the almost first picture out of the new Rebel-Tamaron outfit. I took the picture in the New Mexico desert behind our home in Placitas.

The almost first picture taken with the Rebel and Tamron Lens

The Green River in Utah

2009-08-28T17:56:00.003-06:00

Along the Green River in Utah

Sometime this spring my son Mike asked me if I wanted to go on a raft trip in July on the Green River in Utah, the Grays and Desolation section to be specific. He said there would be his family and a bunch of friends, altogether 17 people in three rafts and several kayaks.

I told him, "Sure, I'l be able to get some good pictures." That seems to be my first reaction to anything these days.

Unfortunately, I seem to be like all the other good photographers I know; we all tend to be very obsessive, single minded people. All we can think of is photography; all we can do is take pictures. My wife and the rest of the family tend to think this is pretty limiting; I really have no idea why.

It had been a long time since I had rafted Desolation and Grays. The last time was at least 30 years ago when Mike was 13 and his younger brother Jeff was 6. That was the trip when Jeff and his mother Joan topped a high curling wave in their raft and dropped unexpectedly into Surprise Rapid. That was the moment Jeff renamed the rapid for all time as "Holy-shit-Mom-rapid." It had been a good trip and I was ready for a replay.

My first thought was that I didn't want to take my good camera; it was sure to get full of sand and wet and ruined before the trip was over. So I decided to take my trusty Olympus C-8080. As described in my last post, I had good luck handholding it in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming the previous summer and I thought it would be perfect. It was.

I have always had trouble shooting tight narrow canyons like the one the Green runs through. I have problems capturing Zion Canyon and I have problems even in the Grand Canyon. Everything seems to be right on top of you and there isn't any room for close foreground with a distant background which my favorite shot that I tend to overuse. Somehow my favorite shot never seems to work in these tight canyons.

This time however I was using a very light camera without a tripod and I decided to just let myself go and shoot whatever seemed good, whatever seemed beautiful and not worry about the right way to do it. I would just shoot and have fun and sort it out later.

This actually worked out pretty well. It wasn't long before I was shooting a lot of close up detail on the beaches and in the grasses and rocks along the river. This was different from what I had done before and I liked it. I was actually feeling liberated without a tripod and huge camera and I was getting pretty creative, at least for me.

Here are a few of the shots I took along the eighty miles of the Green River that Mike and I and family and friends ran last summer.

Rocks, Wood and Sand, Along the Green River in Utah

A Layered Rock along the Green River in Utah

Rocks, Grasses and Gravel along the Green River in Utah

None of the Green River images I took this summer are up on the website yet; they will probably appear sometime next spring.

I shot almost 800 pictures on the trip and ended up with about 100 good ones. I was really quite happy with them. This was the trip that really sold me on learning to shoot cameras handheld rather than on a tripod.

The Olympus C-8080

2009-08-28T13:00:00.001-06:00

In the summer of 2008 my oldest son Mike and I did a ten day backpack in the Wind River mountains of Wyoming.

I had been in the Winds many times before and taken many pictures using film cameras but I had never been satisfied with the results. This year I wanted to shoot the Winds digitally. I wanted the best quality pictures but my best quality digital camera (a $8000.00 Canon 1Ds MarkII) weighed almost 7 pounds with a single lens and with my lightest tripod and tripod head the whole outfit weighed over fifteen pounds. This was just out of the question for someone who was no longer a young man. The maximum pack I could carry comfortably was no more than 40 pounds max, and I really wanted to go with no more than a 30 or 35 pound pack.

So I decided to take my Olympus C-8080 and no tripod. This whole outfit weighs 2 pounds.

The Olympus C-8080 is basically a point and shoot camera. It has a 8 megapixel sensor, a built in 28-300 lens, and a built in flash. It is capable of shooting RAW images but does so only very slowly, so I decided to shoot jpegs instead. I brought along 3 extra batteries and a 4 gigabit card that held 800 jpg images. I paid $800 for this camera about six years ago. Surprisingly, you can still buy this camera used for about $300.00 these days. Search for it on line and you will probably find a few. The last time I looked, Amazon had several. They definitely won't be on sale forever though.

The question was, could I handhold this camera and get good, professional looking, sharp pictures with lots of depth of field. Surprisingly to me, the answer was yes. Almost all of the pictures were very good. I have enlarged many of them to 24x36 and I think some of them would go to even larger sizes. I have sold several of these pictures to customers who all loved their sharpness, color and depth of field.

So, how was it possible to get such good pictures out of a small, handheld camera?

First of all, this is a really good camera with a great lens. Not all 8 megapixel, point and shoot cameras are anywhere near this good.

The best way to figure out which cameras are the best, is to read the reviews in dpreview.com. Here is their review for the Olympus C-8080 in 2003. Be sure to read the conclusions of the review; this is always the best part. I have also written an article on how to use dpreview to find the best cameras.

The second reason this camera worked so well is that small point and shoot cameras all have very wide angle lenses. These lenses are actually much wider than they appear to be. For instance the Olympus C-8080 has a lens that is rated at 28 mm to 300 mm. In actuality, the widest position of the lens is more like 6 mm than the rated 28 mm. This is all kind of technical and related to the small size of the camera sensors.

The result of using this 6 mm lens is that you can get really good depth of field at fairly large f-stops. If you use the widest angle end of the zoom, set the f-stop at its smallest setting (f-8 on the Olympus), shoot from 2 feet away, and focus on the foreground, then everything from the closest foreground to the farthest background will be in sharp focus.

If all this is kind of confusing, read my article about depth of field.

The bottom line is that it is possible to get great depths of field with this camera at f-8 which means you can shoot a speeds like 1/125 which are easily hand-holdable without a tripod.

The picture at the top of this page is of the outer wall of the Cirque of Towers deep in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. It was taken with the Olympus C-8080 which I was handholding. If you want to see more pictures of the Wind Rivers, all taken with the Olympus C-8080, all handheld, look at the first two galleries of my Wind River Pictures.

To see a much larger version of this picture click here.

I am quite satisfied with all of these pictures. No they aren't quite as good as those taken with my primary camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, especially in very large image sizes, but then again it was impossible to take them with this large, heavy camera.

Handholding cameras

2009-08-28T11:04:00.005-06:00

For almost my entire career as a landscape photographer I have used a tripod for almost every shot. I have written articles about the importance of tripods and I have touted them constantly.

However, for the last couple of years I have become more and more interested in shooting professionally without using a tripod.

There is actually a lot to recommend shooting with a hand-held camera. First, it is quick and easy while shooting with a tripod is difficult and cumbersome. Number one, you have carry the damn thing and this can be difficult to impossible on a multi-day backpack or even on a long day hike. Good tripods and heads are heavy, anywhere from five pounds to twenty pounds.

Second, it takes a lot of time to setup for a shot with a tripod, sometimes up to three or four or even five minutes.

The result is that you think long and hard before setting up for a shot or more likely you don't bother at all and go on looking for something better. In short, you miss tons of potentially great shots and even worse you lose all the spontaneity and creativity you may have had.

Hand holding a camera will immediately make any photographer much more creative and spontaneous. This is especially true if the camera has a long range zoom lens and you don't have to break your train of thought to dig out an new lens and put it on the camera. You can quickly shoot a distant scene with three different kinds of foreground or flop down on the ground and get all kinds of great close ups. It takes no time at all to take twenty shots from all kinds of different angles and positions that you would never have gotten had you been using a tripod.

Handheld shooting also works well from the car. When I am driving to a distant shoot or driving back-roads I never used to stop when I saw a scene that looked good or when the light was suddenly wonderful or when I saw a great rainbow or sunset. If I had to dig out the tripod and put the camera on it, I just wouldn't stop; I would never get to where I was going. And I missed bunches of great shots as a result.

Nowadays, I drive with a camera and lens on the passenger seat and jump out at a moments notice and capture many images I never would have gotten had I insisted on using a tripod.

The shot at the top of this page is a good example. I shot it while backpacking in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming a couple of years ago. We had stopped for a snack and I spotted some great windflowers in a nearby gully. If I had had to wrestle my tripod out of my pack, get the camera out and attach it to the tripod, haul the whole ungainly outfit to the bottom of the gully and then struggle with setting up on a steep hillside, I would never have bothered. Instead I quickly scrambled up to the gully, grabbed my camera which was on a strap around my neck and shot six or seven images, the best of which you see at the top of the page.

Click to see a much larger version of the picture at the top of this page.

Unfortunately, hand-holding cameras not only leads to much greater spontaneity and creativity but also comes with a huge raft of problems, the main one being, "Is it possibly to take professional quality, sharp pictures with lots of depth of field with a small, light, hand-held camera?

I will explore these issues in the next several posts.

Moving to New Mexico

2009-08-27T19:13:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure if all of our old friends and customer know, but Joan and I are now living in New Mexico, not in Howard, Colorado where we lived for the last 14 years. At first, I was very hesitant to leave Howard as I love Colorado and I love the house that Joan and I built there in the Colorado mountains.

However, after 14 years, Joan was sick and tired of four or five or six feet of snow every winter at the 7600 foot level of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where we lived. It wasn't just the snow she hated, it was also the fact that we lived a half mile off the main county road that was the only regularly plowed road in the area. The 1/2 mile long spur road to our house mostly got kind-of-plowed by locals with snowplows on their jeeps and pickups, but often the only way into our driveway was a narrow, one car wide track surrounded by five foot walls of hard packed snow. One little twitch of the steering wheel and you were in for a several hour shoveling session unless some samaritan came along and pulled you out.

So, it was four wheel drive and chains all winter long which usually ended sometime in late May. The oak leaves didn't come out until early June. And it was usually mid to late June before the Aspens really got rolling. But, then again, as I always told Joan, we had Ponderosa and Pinyon and Juniper all year long. Joan didn't think that was much of a consolation.

And then there was the fifteen mile drive to town (town being Salida, with a booming population of 7000) and the fact that all of Joan's golf friends lived in New Mexico and the golf course in Salida that Joan thought was something of a joke.

So, after a particularly hard and lonely winter, we decided that it was time to move back to Albuquerque where we had lived for 25 years before moving to Colorado. To make a long story short, we bought a beautiful old adobe home in Placitas, NM which is about ten miles north of Albuquerque on the way to Sante Fe. Placitas is right at the base of the Sandia Mountains where we have great views of mountains, the vast and empty plains to the West and the Pinyon and Juniper covered foothills that surround us. We both love it here now.

Below is a picture of our new home in Placitas, NM. The picture was taken just after a rainstorm.

What this blog is all about

2009-08-26T18:59:00.003-06:00

Since this is my first post on this blog, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Fred Hanselmann. I am a professional landscape photographer and this blog is all about landscape photography: how I make landscape photographs and how you also can make great photographs of the mountains, rivers, deserts and natural scenery of wherever it is you live. And, it is also about the daily trials and tribulations of making and printing landscape images as well as about all the hassles of making a living as a landscape photographer.

I pass along these hassles and trials and tribulations, goof-ups and paths wrongly taken, partly because this has been my life for a lot of years and, like everyone, I love talking about what I am doing. Secondly, I do this because I suspect many of you will enjoy reading about all the errors us professional photographers constantly make and usually never tell anyone about. Thirdly, because learning from someone else's mistakes is one of the best ways of learning how to be a pretty decent photographer yourself, and part of the purpose of this site is to pass along what I have learned about photography.

The picture below is one that took on a ten day backpack in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming in the summer of 2008. This picture is typical of thousands that I have taken over the years. Here is a larger version of this picture.

Many of you already know me from our website. Many more know both Joan, my wife, and I from the hundreds of fine art shows we have done over the last 19 years.

Joan and I retired from doing shows this fall and it seems to have left a bit of a gap in my life. I miss all you folks out there who I have spent many hours and days and years talking about images and cameras and photo techniques. So I decided to write a blog and talk to you about what I am doing and share the new pictures I am always taking and printing, as well as telling you everything I have ever known about how to take and print great landscape pictures.

And I really do tell you all I know. I strongly believe that knowledge about photography and all the great places to take pictures don't belong to any one person, they belong to all of us. I think this is especially true about the great scenic places in our National Parks; these great spots really and truly belong to all of us.

As many of you know, I've actually been doing a lot of this for a long time on my website via the articles I have written and published for the last many years. Click here to go to all my articles.

Wind River Odyssey 1

2008-11-07T07:35:00.001-07:00

Wildfllowers at the foot of Bonnyville Peak, deep in the
Wind River Range of Wyoming

A Wind River Odyssey: Part 1
The Wind Rivers Range of Wyoming and Ultralight Backpacking

This is the first part of a multipart article on my recent (August 2008) eight day photographic backpack trip into the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. It is the story of the trip plus several digressions into what I think are interesting aspects of what it takes to do such a trip: equipment, ultralight backpacking, the lost arts of topographic map reading and off-trail route finding, wilderness fishing, what does and doesn't work with lightweight wilderness photography, and the joys and tribulations of extended wilderness foot travel. This article will be continued in the next newsletter.

All of the pictures in this article where taken on this year's Wind River Trip

Ragged black clouds race across the sky. Huge granite walls rise two thousand feet to the west, and behind us the East Fork Valley falls a thousand feet into a lush green meadow cut by the deep green river looping through it. We move higher and higher through jumbles of boulders that were left by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago. In between the boulder fields are grassy slopes filled with stretches of wildflowers: brilliant red Indian Paintbrush, bright yellow Old Man of the Mountains and lush purple Perry Primrose. I feel the first hard raindrops pock my red, knee length parka. And then the wind hits us. The grasses and flowers bend double in the staggering bursts of wind and we are bombarded with sheets of rain. It looks like a serious storm is coming over the mountains to the west.

The pass still lies two miles ahead of us and I can make out the snow and scree fields that guard the approach between curtains of sleet and rain. The pack straps cut into my shoulders, my legs are already beginning to feel a little rubbery and I wonder if I have enough left in me to get through the scree and over the pass before the storm develops into something that will be very hard to deal with at this altitude. We are five days into a sixty mile trip, deep into the heart of one of the wildest areas of the Wind River Range in Wyoming.

The trip began last winter when my oldest son Mike gave me a call from Albuquerque. "Hey Dad" he said, "Are you up for a trip into the Winds this summer. Just you and me." Of course I was interested. I had made a dozen or so trips into the Wind Rivers in the last forty years, most of them when I was much younger or at least young enough not worry much about carrying sixty pounds or so on a multi-day trip into some of the lonesomest country in the continental US.

Things were a little different now. I was older and not sure that I could do a long, hard trip in rugged country. Also, previously I hadn't been sure I could find anyone to go with me. My wife Joan had let me know in several subtle but polite ways that long backpacking trips were no longer at the very top of her agenda. And none of the various friends I have backpacked with on previous trips seemed to be very interested in standing around for hours in cold, windy spots while I waited for the light to be just right to transform this or that scene into a great landscape photograph. And I hadn't wanted to do a trip like this alone. In the first place, backpacking is just not much fun alone and secondly, I didn't much like the thought of lying in some 12,000 foot scree field with a broken leg or severe cardiac pains and no one around to help.

So, Mike's offer sounded great. It would be a great chance to spend some quality time with one of my sons and also get some much needed support for a photographic trip deep into one of the most scenic parts of the American Rockies--country that not many people ever have a chance to see, much less photograph. (Mike is the guy in the photograph directly below. His dog Daisy, who accompanied us on the trip is on the left, busily looking for ground squirrels.)

So we began planning. One of the first questions was how heavy or light we should go. There are two schools of thought in backpacking--the old school idea is to take everything you might possibly need on a long trip into the wilderness. The new school of thought has been dubbed Ultra Light Backpacking. As you might imagine, this school advocates taking absolutely nothing except what will definitely be needed and not much of that and then only the lightest possibly gear. Old school backpacks typically weigh anywhere from 50 to 80 pounds for a multiple day trip like the one we were planing while ultralight backpacks weigh from 20 to 30 pounds for a similar trip. Mike, being young (forty) and strong, is pretty much an old school backpacker. And I, being old (sixty-seven) and no where near as strong, am, from necessity, an advocate of the ultralight style school of backpacking.

So, how does one get from an 80 pound pack to a 20 pound one? The quick answer is "Probably never and maybe only then with huge sacrifices." The longer answer is that if you totally immerse yourself into the concept of ultralight, many, many, many pounds can be discarded and as a result a long trip can be infinitely more comfortable, and in my case the impossible can become possible.

Really fanatic ultralight backpackers insist that the real secret of cutting weight is mental. They say your head has to be seriously into lightweight mode before you will cut many pounds. Every item and ounce that you carry on your back has to be carefully scrutinized and lightened to the absolute degree. Real fanatics talk about cutting off unneeded lengths from all those multitudinous straps that adorn most backpacks: "You can easily save 3 ounces that way you know." Real aficionados will look at their toothbrush, cut the handle in half, drill holes in the remaining half and then throw out the tooth paste and even reject tooth powder to save weight; seriously, they really do this. The very thought of carrying a book to read during a rainy day in the tent throws them into paroxysms of disbelief that anyone could be so stupid as to even consider such a thing.

My cousin Bob who is a highly skilled canyoneer with many first descents into the Grand Canyon is a diehard ultralight backpacker who has managed to reduce his base load to 14 pounds (everything he needs for a ten day backpack trip minus food and water). In a Rocky Mountain environment where it is not necessary to carry water since abundant water can be found every few miles, Bob needs to only add 1.5 pounds or so of dried food for each day of the trip. So Bob's real-world pack only weighs somewhere in the mid twenty to thirty pound range. In my opinion this is an absolutely phenomenal achievement.

I'm not quite this serious an ultralight backpacker, but I did succeed in getting my weight down from the 65 pounds I carried on my last Wind River trip six years ago to 40 pounds this time. And I could have gotten it down to 30 pounds had I not made a few mistakes by taking some stuff I didn't need and if I had not been tempted by the evil influence of Mike into carrying about six or seven pounds of yummy pita bread, sausage and cheese.

Some of the things that need to be lightened are not at first obvious. Boots, for example.

Boots are carried on the feet, not on the back, but their weight is still very important. An old saying is that one pound on the feet is like ten pounds on the back. This, I think is correct. There is no need to wear the stiff, heavy, full leather mountaineering boots that wilderness walkers once wore. These old-fashioned clod hoppers could weigh six or seven or eight pounds or even more.

Continue reading this article on my website. There is lots more to it.

Buying a Digital Camera

2008-11-05T14:24:00.002-07:00

How to Buy a Digital Camera

All of the pictures in this article are from our page
New Pictures for 2008

Buying a digital camera can be complicated. If you go to Best Buy or WalMart or some such big box discount store you are confronted with a whole rack of cameras and about the best you can do is maybe choose a name brand and megapixal size and hope for the best. However, there is a much better way of going about this. It is called dpreview.com. This site is hands down the best way to decide how to buy a digital camera and end up with the best in the style/cost class you choose. Click here to go the dpreview home page. Their web address is http://www.dpreview.com

In my opinion and experience, the reviews in this site are 100% honest, non-biased, non partisan and reliable. I believe them, trust them and rely on them. As you know, there are not many places that you can give such wholehearted support to in this day and age.

It is not the whole site I am raving about here. I am talking exclusively about what the site calls their "Full Reviews." There are many cameras listed on the site but not all of them have full reviews; as a matter of fact, only a few of the cameras have "Full Reviews." Don't bother looking at any of the cameras listed if they are not marked as "Full Review".

One way to look for cameras on the site is to start with good reliable brands. The ones I usually start with are Canon, Nikon and Olympus because I have had good luck with all of these brands. Browse all the cameras listed in these brands, looking at cameras in the style and price range you are interested in. All of the cameras that dpreview has done a full review on are labeled "Our full review" in aqua letters at the bottom of the presentation box. These are the ones to look at.

After clicking on the "Our full review" link and the "Full Review" opens, look for the white link near the top of the page that says "Introduction". Click on the drop-down symbol on the right and you will see all the various parts of the review. I usually read the introduction first. This often has a list of various on-line stores where you can buy the camera at an assortment of prices. I often end up buying at Buydig.com. They usually have the best prices and I have had good luck with them. I have bought two cameras from them and have had good service and no problems . This may not be true for everyone in all cases, but they have done well for me.

After reading the introduction, go back to the drop down bar and click it again. I usually go straight to conclusions, which is at the bottom of the list. This is the most important part of the review. Here is how I look at the conclusions page of a dpreview article. So that you can see what I am talking about, click here to see an example of the conclusions page . This will take you to the conclusions page of a full review written for the Canon EOS 1000D, a camera which has earned the "Highly Recommended" seal of approval.

In this section all the Pros and Cons of the camera in question are concisely listed. Don't be terribly put off by the Cons; every camera is going to have Cons, there are no perfect cameras out there. It all depends on what is most important to you.
At the bottom of this section is the "Overall Conclusion." This is the most important part of the review. If this camera is listed as highly recommended, it is absolutely going to be a great camera. Personally, I would never buy any camera that is not listed by dpreview as highly recommended. There is a ton of information on this page to help you make a decision. In the case of the camera on this page, the CanonEOS 1000D, there are some problems but it gets high marks in image quality and tonal response and dynamic range. These are the main things I look for in a good camera. I can do without some of the bells and whistles but I absolutely can't do without first class image quality.

Click here to continue reading this article on our website. There are several more important points.

Wind Rivers 2

2008-09-30T07:23:00.001-06:00

Wyoming's Wind River Mountains, 2

Part two: Hiking and Backpacking in the Green River Lakes Area

This is part 2 of a four part series. Read Part 1

The Wind River Mountains of Wyoming are a huge area with everything from ultra popular spots where, in high season, it can be difficult to find room to put up your tent to some of the most isolated, never-trodden-by-man spots in the world. The Green River Lakes area, in the Northern Wind Rivers, is someplace in between.

The Green River Lakes area is one of the most beautiful places in the Wind Rivers. There are two lakes, an Upper Green River Lake and a Lower Green River Lake. Even though Lower Green River Lake can be reached by car and has a Forest Service campground on its western shore, it is still a gorgeous spot. Many people use the campground as a base camp for day hikes into the Winds and many others use it as an entrance to thousands of square miles of wilderness that contain some of the most beautiful alpine areas in the world.

The jumping off place for Green River Lakes is Pinedale, Wyoming, which used to be a wonderful little town on the Wyoming plains at the foot of the Wind River Range. Now-a-days the oil drilling industry and all it's related problems have pretty much taken over Pinedale and destroyed it's earlier ambience, so I wouldn't plan on spending much time there.

Drive north of Pinedale on US 191 and turn right at Cora onto 352. Follow this road for twenty or so miles until it dead-ends at the Green River Lakes Campground. The drive to the lakes parallels the headwaters of the Green River for a number of very scenic miles. Yup, this is the headwaters of the very same Green River that ends up running through Utah and Canyon Lands National Park and finally flowing into the Colorado River not to far above the Grand Canyon. There are numerous places along this road above Pindale to capture classic shots of the Wyoming plains as they gradually climb into the high mountains. This is a good road to travel in the early morning when the smell of Wyoming sage is strong, the air is still cool and crisp, and the grasslands gradually turn into piney hills covered with lichen covered boulders and cut with numerous clear, cold streams. In the mornings or evening,you may very likely see moose or coyotes or bald eagles in the river bottoms.

The campground at the end of the road, at the lower Green River Lake, is a great place for car camping. There are a number of short to medium length hikes to some of the best scenery in the Rocky Mountains that begin right here. The lake-shore of the lower Green River Lake is just a few feet from the campground. And this is no ordinary lake-shore; this is one of the most scenic spots in the entire Rocky Mountains. The deep green waters of the lake stretch several miles down a long valley surrounded by some of the most majestic peaks you have ever seen, culminating at the far eastern end with Square Top, a huge square block of majestic mountain that dominates the whole valley. The picture directly below is of Square Top and the Green River above the upper lake.

There are endless photographic possibilities at the lower Green River Lake and all the way up the valley to Square Top. Great foreground can be found all along the lake shore using partly submerged boulders, logs, grasses, beach sand and the water of the lake itself. Square Top makes a wonderful background and the the blue Wyoming sky is usually filled with puffy, white cumulous clouds that are made for perfect pictures. This is a good spot for late afternoon and sunset pictures. Even though the light is coming from the wrong direction at dawn, it can still be a great scene, especially if the lake is foggy in the the cool early morning. The outlet stream of the lower Green River Lake is also a great place for pictures, particularly the area a little further downstream that is filled with ponds, long grasses and cattails.

Continue reading this article on our website. There is lots more.

Wind Rivers 1

2008-09-30T07:14:00.000-06:00

The Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, 1

The Wind River Mountains of Wyoming are one of my favorite places in the entire world; I'd say they are tied for first place with the Teton Mountains, also of Wyoming. I've been hiking and backpacking in the Winds for the last forty years and they have been the scene of some of the best times in my life.

The Wind Rivers are a big place. They fill a large hunk of western Wyoming from Farson in southern Wyoming to Dubois in the northern area of the state. They run for over a hundred miles from South Pass in the south to Togwotee pass in the North. And almost all of this area is roadless, car-less, machine-less wilderness. In the Wind River Range there are 40 peaks over 12,500 feet high, more than 2000 high mountain lakes filled with trout, endless numbers of gorgeous creeks, the largest Glaciers in the US Rockies and the highest mountain in Wyoming, Gannett Peak at 13,804 feet. This is a land of truly world class hiking, backpacking and mountaineering. And, indeed, people do come from all over the world to do just these things here.

One of the things that makes the Winds such a great place to hike and backpack is the existence of a broad bench that runs north and south along the western edge of the range. This bench is mostly above timberline, right at the base of the high peaks and since it is mostly uncut by deep canyons, it makes a great place for backpacking. In most locations in the Rocky Mountains it is difficult to hike parallel to the ranges because deep canyons cut deep into the mountains. The result is endless trips descending thousands of feet down into steep canyons and then thousands of feet ascending the other side. It isn't like this on the western slopes of the Winds; you can wander for miles and miles without having to cross much in the way of deep canyons or huge passes. There are definitely ups and downs, but they are minor compared to what is found on most Rocky Mountain backpacking trips. The eastern slopes of the Wind River range however aren't like this at all; here the approaches to the mountains are cut by numerous deep, nasty canyons. So, for the best experience in the Winds, stick to the western approaches.

When is the best time to plan a trip to the Wind Rivers? About the earliest you can expect to get into this massive range is June. And even then it is best to plan on staying in the lower elevations. There are two reasons for this. This early in the season, a hiker is bound to run into snow anywhere above 10,000 feet or so. And snow means that you are constantly breaking through the surface up to your knees or thighs, postholing this is called, and it isn't fun. Your hiking speed drops almost to zero and it isn't long before your boots fill with snow and your feet are soaking wet and freezing. If you have to go in June, a pair of knee high gaiters are an essential piece of equipment to keep your feet dry.

The other problem with hiking in the Wind Rivers in early season is stream crossings. The Winds are crisscrossed by countless streams and rivers that are often knee deep to thigh deep to waist deep and moving at the speed of a freight train. In June it is difficult to very dangerous to impossible to cross many of these streams and there are very few to no bridges. It is very frustrating to be 30 miles into a long loop trip only to encounter a high running steam that you just cannot get across.

July and August are great months to hike the Wind Rivers. The stream crossings are manageable, the wild flowers are out everywhere and the skies are usually blue. However, this is also when everyone else goes to the Winds and certain popular areas are often too populous for me. My favorite time to go to the Wind Rivers is September and even into October. If you do go at this time, keep in mind that there can be a snow storm any time, even a killer blizzard. As a matter of fact, there is often a spell of bad weather with a good snow in early to mid September followed by an Indian Summer of fine weather that can last well into October. If you are in the range at this time of year, I would be cautious of venturing onto the high peaks without a pretty careful look at the weather reports. I remember one trip I took in early September, twenty years ago, when we ran into bad weather and snow at Island Lake, deep inside the Winds. We got back to the Green River Lakes and civilization in two long hard days without serious problems, but shortly after we were back at the trailhead, the whole area was hit with several days of blizzard conditions.

Continue reading this article on our website. There is lots more.

Last Dollar Road

2008-09-20T16:15:00.000-06:00

The Sneffles Range near the beginning of Last Dollar Road

Last Dollar Road
Finding and driving one of Colorado's best back country Roads

The drive takes you from Dallas Divide, over the west end of the Sneffels Range, to Telluride. The road isn't difficult and can often be done in most two wheel cars that have a decent amount of clearance. An SUV is the best way to drive the road though. There can be mud puddles on the Telluride side that may stop two wheel vehicles. If it is wet or snowy, I wouldn't attempt it even in four wheel drive. There is a lot of gumbo on the road that can get very slick and deep in the rain. Also, there are a couple spots where if you slide off the road you are going to go a long, long way down. And you definitely don't want to do that. I'd take an SUV to drive this road, that's the best bet.

Last Dollar Road is one of the all-time-best Colorado back roads. There are great Colorado vistas around almost every corner, and believe me, there are lots of corners on this road. I try to drive Last Dollar Road every year and I never come home without at least one good image. Don't try this road until at least late June. The very best time to see Last Dollar Road is in the fall when the aspens are turning. This usually happens sometime between the 20th of September and the 10th of October. Right around the end of September is usually the peak of the fall folliage in the San Juan mountains. Any time from late June through the summer and up to perhaps the end of October is a great time to travel Last Dollar Road.

To find Last Dollar Road drive south of Montrose on US 550 about twenty miles until you come to Ridgeway. At Ridgeway turn west onto Colorado 62 for about ten miles until you reach the top of Dallas divide, a small 8970' pass. Don't forget to look off to your left, south, as you drive up the pass. This is truly some of the most glorious scenery in Colorado or anywhere else for that matter of fact.

To the left is a picture of some of that scenery.

Continue driving over the top of Dallas Divide. Just over the top, turn left onto Last Dollar Road. There is a sign at the turn. There are lots of beautiful scenes almost immediately. For a while you drive along a flat bench At aproximately 6 1/2 miles from Dallas Divide the road forks. The right fork goes down to Sawpit which is on CO 145. Don't take this right fork. Take the left fork which takes you over the mountains and down to the Telluride Airport with tons of gorgeous scenry along the way.

Shortly after taking the left fork mentioned above, Last Dollar Road starts climbing in easy switchbacks over the end of the Sneffles range which you see to the left. About ten curves up you come to the place where I took the picture I call Aspen Road which you can see below. You probably won't even recognize the spot. I've been back several times and even I hardly recognize it. The last time I was there, almost all the leaves were off the trees, the white trunks were all mud spattered, and the road a badly rutted mixture of mud and old, crushed Aspen leaves. I had thought I might try to get another Aspen Road picture but when I got there it looked so un-scenic that I didn't shoot a single shot. I never seem to be able to remember that all good photographs are one-on-a-kind things; they exist for a split second in time and are then gone forever. They never seem to be repeatable.

Enjoy your trip on Last Dollar Road. If you feel like it, drop me an email and let me know how it went. Below is another scene from Last Dollar Road.

Rocky Mountain Nat. Park 2

2008-09-14T07:04:00.001-06:00

Rocky Mountain National Park

Part II, Hiking and Photographing in the Bear Lake Area

All of the pictures in this article were taken in Rocky Mountain National Park
Click here to see more pictures taken in Rocky Mountain NP

In Part I of this Article, I discussed hikes and photo opportunities on most of Bear Lake Road. This article is about the area right around Bear Lake itself plus a few more areas on the eastern slope of Rocky Mountain National Park.

In midsummer, Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park is literally crawling with tourists. However, as soon as you get away from Bear Lake itself and out onto the trails, 99% of the people are instantly gone. Most people content themselves with a brief walk around the lake on the nature trail and never walk even a little way into the back-country. Also, very few tourists get up for dawn or tarry when the sun begins to go down. So, it is possible to get away from all the people, even in midsummer to enjoy this truly special place. And, Bear Lake is such a gorgeous spot that it is one of those places, like Maroon Lake at the foot of the Maroon Bells, that it really is worthwhile visiting in spite of the hordes that also congregate there.

There are some wonderful pictures that can be taken in the very first view spot at Bear Lake, not 100 feet from the parking lot. This shot is especially good during aspen time. There is a lot of good foreground on the shoreline in the form of grasses and stumps and logs and rocks, there are nice rocks a hundred feet or so out in the lake for middle-ground and the fir-aspen forest across the lake makes a wonderful background. Often there are ducks in the water as well. If the wind isn't blowing, there are always wonderful reflections of trees, mountains and sky. If it is aspen time the brilliant yellows, oranges, reds, and golds of the trees are reflected in the deep green water of the lake. Nope, this isn't a pristine wilderness location reached after a 50 mile treck through unpopulated back-country, but it is still a gorgeous place. Many of the pictures I have taken from this spot have been among my most popular images. The picture at the top of this page was taken from this spot. The picture to the right is Bear Lake at sunset looking toward Long's Peak.

There are innumerable other shots scattered around the lake shore also. These shots can be anything from intimate little close ups of shoreline detail like a few grasses and rocks or maybe cloud reflections in the water to full blown landscapes of the lake in the foreground with Long's Peak in the background. The intimate little close up shots are a lot of fun to take. These shots are more about composition than anything else. Walk along the lake shore and look for little groupings of grasses, twigs, pine cones and pebbles that seem to make a picture. When you find something that looks good shoot it from different angles and levels and distances and try to let the different elements of the picture fall into some kind of harmonious composition. When that happens, you will probably realize it right away. The picture will just look right. No fair picking up things and moving them around, this takes all the fun out of it.

There is a good place to take a Long's Peak shot about half way around the lake on the right hand side. There is a nice grouping of boulders here that can be shot in lots of different ways and the ridge that Long's peak is situated on is in the far background. You are looking at the back side of Longs here, not the usual view of the vertical East Face that one usually sees. This is also a pretty good place for a sunset shot where you can often capture great light in the sky that is also reflected in the water of the lake. Yes, you are looking mostly toward the east, but don't forget that at sunset, it is not only the western sky that lights up. The more muted reflections of sunset colors in the the eastern sky are often more beautiful than those in the western sky. The sunset picture above was taken from this spot.

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Rocky Mountain Nat. Park 1

2008-02-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

Rocky Mountain National Park
Part One: Bear Lake Road

All of the pictures in this article were taken in Rocky Mountain National Park
More pictures of Rocky Mountain NP

Bear Lake and early snow.

Rocky Mountain National Park is the gem of the Colorado Rockies. The Park spreads out on both sides of the continental divide and its mountainous terrain can be seen from the eastern plains of Colorado to the deserts of Utah. In the winter it's massive summits are covered with up to 20 feet of snow, in the summer it is one of the best wildflower viewing areas in the Rockies, and in the fall there are tremendous displays of quaking aspen. As a result, Rocky Mountain National Park offers some of the best hiking, climbing and scenery in the American West.

There are several parts to Rocky Mountain National Park. The western part of the park near Granby and Shadow Mountain Lake is a good place to see Elk and to walk less crowded trails than those found in the busier parts of the park; the western side is very beautiful, but not as spectacular as the more famous eastern side of the park. The western and eastern parts of the park are connected by Trail Ridge Road which is one of the most famous mountain roads in the world. Here the high tundra areas are resplendent with high altitude flowers in mid summer. Near the middle of Trail Ridge Road, just east of Iceberg pass, a mass of lichen covered rocks called the Rock Cut offers a great view of Long's Peak. This view of Long's Peak framed in the Rock Cut at sunset is one of the classic views of Rocky Mountain National Park and one that makes a great photograph. The Mummy Range area is on the northern side of the Park and contains a huge area of lonesome trails as well as completely trail-less regions; it is a great place for the adventurer who wants to get away from the crowds. The Long's Peak area lies in the south-east part of the park and can be accessed from highway 7; the main attraction here is climbing the Keyhole Route on Long's peak which hundreds of stalwart hikers do every summer. Even further south is Wild Basin which provides access into the Thunder Lake area, yet another great place to get away from the thousands of tourists that throng the park every summer; here one can visit some of the most beautiful lakes and streams of the Rockies. The cascade to the left is in Wild Basin.

However, the best known and most spectacular part of Rocky Mountain National Park is the Bear Lake area which is the subject of this article. I shall return to the other areas of the Park in subsequent articles.

Most people enter Rocky Mountain National Park through the Beaver Meadows entrance which is just west of the little town of Estes Park. After you pass though the entrance station, the turnoff for Bear Lake Road is about half a mile down the main road. In the first mile or so of Bear Lake Road there are a couple of horseshoe curves that take you down into Moraine Park, the valley below. Between these curves, before you get down into Moraine Park, there are some great views of Long's Peak and the Front Range. Most people whiz right past this spot but it is a good place to return to later for a bit of photography. This is actually one of the very best places to photograph Long's Peak in the park. This is mainly a long lens (telephoto) shot, even though mid range lenses also work well here. The view can be very spectacular at dawn with the first red rays of the sun on Long's Peak. I have taken some very nice panoramic shots of the Front Range from this spot at dawn. This shot is definitely best in the morning. As a bonus, in June it is usually possible to find some very nice wildflowers in the area to the right of the highway just before you reach the valley floor; if you search around a bit, it is possible to use these flowers as foreground for shots of Long's Peak.

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Glacier National Park 2

2008-02-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

Glacier National Park: Part II

All of the pictures in this article were taken in Glacier National Park.

See larger pictures, more pictures of Glacier & picture locations.

McDonald Lake Sunset

This article is the second article in a series of three articles. You might like to read the first article before beginning this article. The first article ended with a description of the trail of the Cedars and the Avalanche Creek Gorge.

After leaving the Avalanche Creek Gorge area, resume traveling east on the Going to the Sun Highway. After a few miles the road leaves McDonald creek and heads up a steep, narrow highway toward Logan Pass. Oversize vehicles and trailers are not allowed on this part of the road. If you have one of these vehicles, you can reach the east side of the park by taking US 2 on the south edge of the park.

Many people have praised the Going to the Sun Road as one of the most beautiful and scenic mountain roads anywhere. In my opinion they are not far wrong. The towering mountain wall that the road switch-backs up is called the Garden Wall, so named for the hanging ferns and wildflowers that line its crevices and ledges for thousands of vertical feet. Many of the pull offs on this road are worth stopping at for a picture. The picture below was taken on this part of the Going to the Sun Road.

\When you finally reach Logan Pass at the top be sure to stop at the Visitor Center. The Visitor Center itself isn't all that wonderful but the meadows and mountain peaks that surround it definitely are. If you are unlucky, the wind may be howling at about 150 miles per hour and it may be sleeting or snowing with sub zero temperatures as very often happens at this spot. If this is the case, take a quick look around, get back in your car and come back another day. However, if it is midsummer and the skies are blue and the sun is warm, you are now at one of the most perfect places in the world. Perfect, that is except for all the hordes of people from all over the world who also realize that this is one of the most perfect places in the world. However, it is possible to escape most of these people by getting out and walking. The further you go the less people and amazingly soon almost all of them are gone.

One hike that you have to take, no matter how many other people do it with you, is the Hidden Lake Nature Trail. This is an approximately three mile round trip hike to Hidden Lake through the famous Hanging Gardens, one of the premier wildflower locations anywhere. You have to be there at the right time of year of course to see it in all of its glory but when it's right it's really great. Sometime in July is usually the best time, depending on the year. This is a great place to get wildflower shots with tremendous mountain scenery in the background. (You might want to read my article about How to Photograph Wildflowers as well as the article on Depth of Field if you really want to do it right.) This trail is also a good place to see mountain goats, marmots or possibly even golden eagles. Be sure to stay on the trail though. This is one of those places that way too many people visit and it is very easy to love a place like this to death. The Alpine tundra is very easily damaged by only a few footsteps into it.

The other great hike you can take from the Visitor Center at the top of Logan Pass is the Garden Wall Trial that goes along the edge and top of the Garden Wall to the Granite Chalet which is a back-country chalet about seven miles away. You don't have to go all the way of course; the first part of the trail is the best part anyway. The views on this trail are truly spectacular. This is also a very easy trail to do as the ups and downs are relatively minor.

You certainly don't have to stop with these two hikes. There are over 600 lakes in Glacier National Park and hundreds and hundreds of beautiful peaks and streams and meadows all connected by well maintained trails. Most of Glacier's trails are open by mid June and with a little luck can be hiked well into October. I have been in Glacier in October however, when the road over Logan Pass has been closed because of early snow.

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Glacier National Park 1

2008-02-07T06:34:00.001-07:00

Glacier National Park: Part I

All of the pictures seen in this article were taken in Glacier National Park.
See larger pictures, more Glacier pictures, and location information.

This is an introductory article on Glacier National Park in Montana, perhaps the most dramatic and magnificent of all our National Parks. Since I can't cover all of Glacier National Park in one article, this article and the following one will be an overview of the main areas of the park along with some of the most popular hikes and photographic locations. These first two articles will be continued next fall with a third article in which I will cover some of the longer hiking and photography trails in the park in more detail.

Our favorite time to visit the park is in the fall when the leaves are turning and most of the summer swarms of tourists have left for the season. The disadvantage of visiting in the fall season is that pretty much everything shuts down by the middle of October; it can be difficult to find a restaurant that isn't boarded up, or even an open grocery store or a place to buy gas at this time of year. It's amazing how quickly the bustling park of the summer months returns to the solitude of rural western America--and just how isolated rural western America actually is. However, the lonesomeness and quiet and solitude of one of the most beautiful places on earth as well as the gorgeous fall colors make this season more than worth while, at least for us.

Having said this, mid summer is also a good time to visit. The campgrounds will be full, the trails will be packed with tourists from Kansas City and Milwaukee and highways will be bumper to bumper with cars. On the plus side, and it is a very big plus, the wildflowers will be out everywhere, it will be much warmer and it probably won't be blizzarding on Logan Pass. I wouldn't go much before mid June though as many of the trails are not open until then.

There are two main parts of Glacier National Park, West Glacier and East Glacier which are separated by Logan Pass. I usually start a Glacier trip in the western part of the park, so I'll start this article there also. Coming in from the west, Kalispell, Montana makes a good jumping off point.

This western part of the park is the wettest part since most of the storms coming from the Pacific hit the mountains and drop their moisture on the western side of the mountains. As a result, the vegetation in this part of the park, even though it is part of the Rocky Mountains, is somewhat reminiscent of the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. The forest is dominated by Cedar, Hemlock, Spruce and Larch which are not trees usually found in typical Rocky Mountain areas further east. In the western areas of Glacier it is even possible to see the occasional hanging curtain of Spanish Moss.

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Yankee Boy Basin

2008-01-20T16:03:00.007-07:00

The Wildflowers of Yankee Boy Basin
The best wildflower location in Colorado

Yankee Boy Basin, high in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, is one of the premier wildflower locations in the West. Joan and I have photographed this high basin half a dozen times the last ten or fifteen years . The huge meadows of Columbine, Indian Paintbrush, daises, and bluebells surrounded by towering peaks is truly an enchanting place.

The peak of the wildflower bloom in high basins like Yankee Boy varies from year to year but is usually best sometime between early July and early August. Mid July is often a good time to go. It's hard to say when it will be best this year. We had a hot early spring but there was a good bit of snow in the mountains last winter. I talked to a young couple on Memorial Day who said they had just gotten back from a great ski trip in Yankee Boy the weekend before. My guess is that mid July should be good this year.

Yankee Boy Basin is not far from Ouray Colorado. Head south out of Ouray and turn right onto Camp Bird Road just as you leave town. This road is marked as County Road 361. The last time we were there, a sign for Yankee Boy Basin also marked the way. It is somewhat of an adventure getting up to Yankee Boy but if you take it easy it should be no problem. To get up into the basin itself you do need a four wheel drive vehicle, however some people do take a regular passenger car to the foot of the basin and then walk the half mile or so up into the basin itself. Four wheel drive is definitely much better though, especially if you have little experience with Colorado back-country roads. The four wheel part of the road is not tough; any SUV will have little problem. It is about seven miles from Ouray up into Yankee Boy basin.

If you are not up to driving to Yankee Boy Basin yourself, there are a number of tour places in Ouray that offer jeep trips into the surrounding mountains. They all offer trips to Yankee Boy as well as other trips over Imogene Pass, the Alpine Loop, Engineer Pass, Black Bear Pass, and much more. http://www.ouraycolorado.com/Jeeping will get you all kinds of information on jeep trips and other guided trips in the Ouray area.

The first part of the road to Yankee Boy Basin is easy and very scenic. After several miles the good gravel road becomes a bit more narrow and challenging however. About halfway up to Yankee Boy, you cut across the face of a steep cliff with the river far below on your left. There are a few blind curves on this section also. Be sure to take this part of the read slowly and carefully and watch for cars coming the other direction. There are spots where one car will have to get into a pull-over to let the other pass. If you have trouble with heights it might be a good idea to let someone else drive this short stretch.

Actually, the road is not as bad as I'm making it sound; it's a good two wheel road, it's just a little bit scary.

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There are more directions and info in the full article

Wildflowers of Shrine Pass

2008-01-14T15:52:00.004-07:00

The Wildflowers of Shrine Pass

All the pictures on this page were taken on Shrine Pass. If you are interested, there are many more Shrine Pass wildflower pictures in my Breckenridge/Vail section.

Note: Clicking on any of the pictures in this article will take you to a larger picture and more information about the image.

Shrine Pass, near Vail Pass, is one of the very best wildflower locations in Colorado. Shrine Pass is located between Frisco and Vail off of I-70. To get there turn into the rest area on I-70 just east of Vail Pass. From the rear of the parking lot the Shrine Pass road winds up to the top of the pass which is a good bit higher than Vail Pass. Even though wildflower peak blooms vary from year to year in Colorado, Shrine Pass usually is at its best sometime around mid July. Since 2006 is looking like a pretty hot year with an early spring, the peak might be as soon as the last week of June or the first week of July, but I'm still betting on the second week of July.

As you start up Shine Pass Road, watch for meadows full of wildflowers to the left of the road. When you find a good parking place, stop and hike down into the valley toward the south. If you wander around for thirty minutes of so, you will probaby find some gorgeous patches and hidden glades ofwonderful flowers; there are lots of Showy Daises, Indian Paintbrush, Lupine, Columbine, Tiny Elephant Heads, Alpine Daises and all kinds of stuff that I don't know the name of. A little later in the month Fireweed and Coneflowers become numerous. This is a heavily used area so be careful not to trash the environment. At this time, access off the road may even be closed; if so, you should respect this closure.

When you get tired of this area, go on up the road until you get almost to the top of Shrine Pass. In a large meadow on the left, a prominent road goes south to a group of cabins and the beginning of the Shrine Ridge Trail. I think the Shrine Mountain Inn, a great mountain restaurant which is also located here is still open. You have to park on the left side of the main Shrine Pass Road since the road to the cabins and Inn is closed. You can't miss it; almost any day in July there will be twenty or more cars parked here. I know this sounds like a mob scene but once you get off the road and on the trail, it's all worth it. If you hit this in a wet year, at the right time, the Shrine Ridge Trail can be one of the best wildflower experiences in Colorado.

Anyway, walk down the road to the Inn and the cabins where you will find the Shrine Ridge Trailhead. The trail is short; the best stuff happens in the first couple of miles of so. A good time to go is late afternoon, maybe even after 5 PM. The crowds are gone and the sun is low or even over the horizon which makes for excellent picture viewing light. The picture to the left was taken on the Shrine Pass trail at almost nine pm on a gorgeous Colorado evening. An even better time is dawn; there are no people and the low early morning light through the wildflowers can be spectacular. I've gotten some of my very best wildflower pictures here over the past ten or fifteen years.

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There are a lot more pictures and some pertinent information.

Framing Large Photographs

2008-01-07T14:05:00.001-07:00

Framing Huge Pictures

Many new homes have very large walls that seem to beg for huge pictures. To meet this need, extremely large pictures are becoming more and more available from all kinds of artists. Not to be left out, Rocky Mountain Photography also has the ability to make some really large photographs, some of which can be as large as 150 inches long and even longer. Mounting and framing photographs this large presents some special problems. Here are some solutions.

Don't Despair: Framing large pictures is not as hard as it may seem. There are definitely many framers who can handle the problems of framing very large images even though you may have to look a little harder to find them. Don't despair though, there are many, many framers who handle the problems of huge pictures routinely. Thirty minutes or so on the phone will usually solve the problem. I have found that it is usually more productive to use the phone than the internet; find a large and reputable looking framer in the yellow pages. If he can't do the job, he can usually recommend someone who can. Don't limit yourself to just framers. Often large photo labs and graphics presentation places will mount and laminate large photographs. If you are buying a very large photograph from us, we can often help you find a place to get the job done.

120 inches long is a good limit: When pictures are longer than 120 inches, the problems multiply. Frame usually comes in 120 inch lengths although it does exist in somewhat longer lengths. Huge mat is also hard to find and probably nonexistent in lengths longer than 96 inches. (For larger sizes, mat can be pieced together however.) Also,the limit of a lot of framing equipment is often120 inches or less. Unless you plan to have me print the picture on canvas (see below), you should probably limit picture length to 120"; this will solve a lot of problems.

Glass: It is a good idea to avoid glass in very large pictures. Glass is very heavy in large sizes, it can be dangerous if the picture falls off the wall and it causes lots of glare and reflections that are very objectionable, especially in huge sizes.

Lamination: One solution is to laminate huge pictures and then mount them on either 3/16" Gator Board, Rhino Board or Mighty Core. This is the solution that we like the best. Laminated pictures are covered with a thin layer of flexible laminate material which eliminates all glare and reflections and completely protects the picture so it can be displayed without glass. See our article on laminated pictures for a complete discussion of the pros and cons of laminating. We can laminate pictures up to a maximum length of 80 inches. Many large photographic labs including Reed Photo in Denver, and Calypso Photographic in Santa Cruz and BWC in Richardson, TX routinely laminate pictures up to 120 inches long for very reasonable prices. If we laminate your loose photograph for you, be sure to inform your framer that the picture has been laminated and that he should use a cold press to mount it. A hot press may damage the lamination. Almost all framers have the ability to cold mount pictures although difficulty may occur when pictures get very large. Lamination comes in several surfaces such as glossy, pearl and mat. Our lamination comes only in mat.

Canvas: Another way to frame huge pictures without glass is to have me print the picture on canvas instead of on photo paper. This is probably the best solution for pictures over 120 inches. The most practical way to frame huge pictures, like some of mine that are over 200 inches long, is to print them on canvas, and then have a framer stretch the picture onto a stretcher frame. Canvas is certainly the most economical way to deal with immense pictures. Because of the rough texture of canvas, pictures are not quite as sharp or as finely detailed as pictures printed on paper. However, from the proper viewing distance, pictures printed on canvas will look just as sharp as pictures printed on paper. For pictures over 120 inches long, I definitely think canvas is the only way to go. An additional plus is that if you are at all handy with tools, it is not that hard to build your own stretcher frame and do the job yourself.

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Framing Photographs

2007-08-14T13:44:00.001-06:00

Tips for framing loose photographs

Don't Panic: When your loose print arrives, it may not look very impressive at first. Don't panic, this is a very common reaction. Keep in mind that all photographic prints look ten times better framed than they do as loose prints. Really, at least ten times better. Many people don’t realize how good their loose print will look when properly framed. There are several reasons for this. First, loose prints are not completely flat; they are a tiny bit uneven and all the little ripples and waves in the print reflect light differently which is very distracting to the eye. Second, loose prints tend to look rough and unfinished since they are only half way to completion. Third, since they are much smaller than framed prints, they look less impressive. Finally, and maybe most importantly, a good frame subtly enhances and blends with the colors of the print to make a very pleasing whole. In short, framing entirely changes the look of your loose print

A quick framing job: One very easy and inexpensive way to quickly get a framed print on the wall is to order one of our matted 11x14 photographs. The overall dimensions of these matted photographs are 16x20. This is a very standard size frame that can be purchased anywhere ready-made frames are sold. Walmart, Hobby Lobby, and Michaels and many other stores carry surprisingly nice looking 16x20 frames that are quite inexpensive. You can buy any of our pictures as a 16x20 matted picture by clicking on the "Begin online order here. Select Size" button on the top of any large picture page of our website. Our current price for a 16x20 matted print is $59.00 including shipping and with your membership number you can get 10% off.

Lamination: We offer our pictures both laminated and plain. Laminated photographs are covered with a thin, flexible sheet of non-reflective laminating film that we put on with a large press. The photograph is completely protected and can be displayed without glass. Since there is no glass, there are absolutely no reflections or glare. All the sharpness and brilliance of the photograph are right there to be seen; looking at a laminated photograph is almost like looking out a window. The lamination also gives the photograph extra protection from UV light which is always damaging to art. When you frame a laminated photograph, matt is not used. This is because matt must be protected by glass. In our opinion, lamination is the ultimate way of presenting photographic art.

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Laminating Photographs

2007-08-14T12:44:00.004-06:00

Laminating Photographs

This is a laminted photograph that has been framed

Laminated photographs are covered with a very thin, strong, invisible sheet of lamination material. This covering is anti-glare, anti-reflection and anti- UV, yet it perfectly protects the photograph so that it can be shown without being covered by glass. Of all the methods to eliminate reflections and glare, this is by far the best.

Even though glass isn't used, the photograph is completely protected by the lamination material. The lamination can easily be cleaned with a damp rag.

A laminated photograph looks so real and so vibrant it almost seems you are looking out a window. In the larger sizes, these laminated photographs make you feel as if you are right there, in the scene. We have had many people tell us that it looks as if you can walk right into these images.

Laminated photographs are framed much like oil paintings are framed. No glass is used and wide frames, three or four inchs wide, work well. Fillets and linen liners also work very well.

Mats are not used when framing laminated photographs. Since no glass is used, and since mats need to be protected by glass, you can't use mats . One down side of this is that laminated photographs look smaller than matted photographs since mats add size. One way to get around this is to simply buy a larger photograph to begin with. If you want to frame using mat and glass, you should buy one of our plain photographs, rather than a laminated one.

Click here to continue reading this article on our website.
There is a lot more including the pros and cons of lamination.

Art Photography

2007-08-07T12:37:00.003-06:00

The Art of Landscape Photography
Attempting to turn ordinary landscapes into art photography

Good landscape photography is always a combination of good camera technique and a more creative element that is usually called something like artistic vision. (Words like art and artistic sound hopelessly pretentious to me, but I can't seem to come up with a better word so I guess I'll have to use them.)

Anyway, the technical part of photography consists of things that can be fairly easily learned like getting the proper exposure, making sharp rather than blurry images, choosing the right lens, and the using filters correctly.

The artistic part of landscape photography deals more with composition, aesthetic balance, light, how the photographer sees the world, what he thinks is important in life, and what he is trying to communicate in his pictures. There are lots of different views of what the art of photography should be and how to go about achieving it, probably about as many different opinions as there are different photographers. Even though I really don't think much about art when I take pictures and tend to do what I do more instinctively than logically, my recent temporary move to Maine got me thinking about art and photography. Below are some of the conclusions I came to about the "art" in my photography and how I go about doing it.

For the next four months I'm living and taking pictures in Maine, and, being a Colorado boy and not completely familiar with the local photographic possibilities, I was a bit hesitant about exactly where to go shooting next. So I started thinking seriously about what kind of pictures I was really interested in making, and what I was trying to say with my pictures and where I might go to take such pictures. The fall foliage in New England was peaking and it wasn't going to last long--maybe another week or ten days. It was probably my last chance at getting fall color for another year. Did I want to go to the lower lying areas of Vermont which is mostly a lot of small villages and barns and covered bridges and churches, or did I want to go to Stonington, Maine where the pictures are mostly the harbor full of lobster boats with a background of great old Maine Victorian homes, or did I want to go to Acadia National Park or did I want to go to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was not so much where I went, or whether I shot churches or wilderness rivers or lobster boats; it was more about how I shot the pictures rather than where I shot them. I began realizing that the art of what I try to do comes more from my photographic style than from the specific subject matter. And then I realized that when I shoot pictures I always shoot in basically the same way, with basically the same goals in mind, no matter what the subject matter is. In other words, for me, artistic style is more important than subject matter. It didn't really matter where I went, what mattered was how I did it. So here is how I go about taking pictures and what, for better or worse, my personal artistic style is.

To me, the most important part of making pictures is color, light, composition and what I call magic. When I shoot, I look for warm, rich colors: reds, yellows, oranges, browns, tans. Great color often comes from autumn leaves, summer wildflowers, sunsets and dawns. It seems to be important to me that these warm colors are not huge swaths of color but are instead accent colors in a larger background of neutral or cooler colors like grays, greens, blues or cyans. A whole picture of just warm autumn leaves is boring, there has to be a contrast with complementary and contrasting colors like the warm oranges contrasting with the cool greens of the trees and the neutral grays of the rocks in the picture of the Swift River in New Hampshire above. As a matter of fact, I think that most good art is based on some kind of contrast. For instance, the dark grays and blacks of a stormy sky contrasting with the warm colors of a tranquil country church like the ones in the picture on the left are what really make a picture sing. Or the contrast of dark green firs against the brilliant oranges and reds of a Southwestern canyon also works well. The warm colors and the cool colors by themselves don't seem to make it, the contrast between the two is the important thing. The same thing seems to be true in music; it is not the notes themselves that are important, it's the spaces between the notes, the intervals, that make music work. All art I think depends on intervals and contrasts and juxtapositions.

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Professional Photography

2007-08-01T12:26:00.002-06:00

How Professional Landscape Photographers Work, Overview

Note: All the pictures in this article can be clicked on for more information about the picture.

One of the questions I am asked over and over is "Why don't my pictures look like your pictures. I see this gorgeous scene and I take a picture of it and then when I see the picture later it looks nothing like the scene I saw. It's usually just terrible." I usually mumble something like, "Well, I have forty years of experience," and let it go at that. It's not that I don't want to tell people how it's done, it's just that to really explain how to take good pictures is way beyond what I can say in a few minutes. One of the things I try to do in these newsletters is answer that question in detail. In this article I want to give you the big picture, the overview, of how professionals go about making great landscape photographs. The details of the process won't be in this article. I plan to flesh out the details of how great landscape pictures are made in the months and years to come, one article at a time. As I implied above, forty years of experience takes a while to communicate.

A good place to begin is with cameras. Professional photographers use professional equipment and this makes a big difference. They use only top of the line cameras and lenses that they spend a lot of money for. It isn't absolutely necessary to spend fifteen or twenty thousand dollars or more for a camera system but it does help. Landscape pros use both film and digital cameras for shooting. In the film camera department, some professionals shoot 35mm cameras; these are the guys (and gals of course) who are shooting for magazines and for stock in general. Stock photographers are professionals who shoot large amounts of pictures in a specialized area and then sell them to stock photography companies who re-sell the pictures to all kinds of clients for advertizing and journalistic purposes. Landscape photographers who plan on selling their pictures as prints to be framed and hung on the wall generally use larger cameras such as medium and large format cameras. A medium format camera makes either negatives or chromes (what the pros call slides) in sizes like 6x6 or 6x7 centimeter. This is roughly 2 x 2.25 inches in size. Large format cameras make a 4"x5" negative or chrome. A few pros will use an 8"x10" large format camera but this size camera is extremely rare these days. 8x10 cameras are mostly a relic of the old days in the thirties and forties and fifties when film was so bad, a huge camera was needed. Now-a-days, film is so good, there is no need to use such a slow, cumbersome, awkward camera. I have several friends who decided they were going to go the absolutely top-of-the-line route and bought an 8x10; all of them junked the camera as too impractical after the first year. The 35mm film cameras most pros use are Canon and Nikon. The most often used medium format cameras are Bronica, Hassalblad, and Pentax. Large format cameras are Swiss Arca, Wista, Calumet, and other brands not as recognizable as the more popular 35mm brands.

In the past five years or so many professional photographers began switching to digital cameras. Landscape photographers will probably be the last to switch. This is because the necessities of landscape photography are much more demanding than those of journalistic, style, or stock photography. There are several reasons for this: landscape photographs are full of tiny detail, they are often printed very large, and extreme sharpness as well as smooth transitions between varying levels of brightness are both absolutely necessary . Only in the last two years have digital cameras become good enough for landscape use. The top digital cameras used by landscape pros are Nikon and Canon, with Canon being the most popular. The Canon 1Ds line is probably the best. The Canon 1Ds Mark II is a 16 megapixal camera that sells for $8000; with the lenses that go with it, this is easily a $15,000 plus camera system. The pictures that come out of this camera are extremely sharp with great tonalities and brilliance.

I began my professional career with two Pentax medium format cameras and 8 lenses. Soon after, I added a 4x5 Calumet and a 4x5 Wista camera with another seven or so lenses. For the past two years I have been using the Canon digital 1Ds Mark II. I think the quality of the pictures that I have gotten out of these cameras is pretty similar; all of them are equally capable of taking professional quality pictures. The main differences are ease of use. The 4x5's are not particular heavy as most people assume but they are akward and clumsy in that it is quite time consuming to set them up and then focus and shoot them. Film is also very expensive, both to buy and to develop. As a result, not many pictures get taken with these cameras; in fact I have missed a lot of good scenes because by the time I get all set up, the light is gone or the wind as come up or it has started to rain or something. The Pentaxes were my favorite camera for many years because they are fast and easy to use and because the results were always good. Now-a-days, the Canon digital is my favorite. It is fast and it has a lot of features that make it a great camera for a landscape photographer. For instance I get exceptional sharpness, I can change film speed on the fly, I don't have to use filters to correct for unusual light, I can check exposure instantly, I get much cleaner images, and I don't have to scan the film. In addition I can combine four or five shots to make a very high dpi image that is, I think, as good as an 8x10 image. As I have heard several pros say, "I wouldn't go back to film even if it were free."

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Digital Photography 5

2007-05-20T10:06:00.000-06:00

How To Set Up Your Digital Camera
Part V: Difficult Exposures

In this article on how to set up your digital camera, I discuss difficult exposure problems and also explain setting the sharpness, saturation and contrast functions of digital cameras. This is the fifth article in a series of five that deals with setting the more important functions on a digital camera. As usual, the article goes a bit beyond camera setup to a discussion of the basics of using a digital camera. If you haven't read the first four installments of this article you might want to do so before beginning this article. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

Difficult exposure problems: In the last article I discussed how to use exposure compensation to to resolve difficult lighting situations. However, there are times when even exposure compensation will not solve the problem. These are the times when there is simply too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture; the shadows and highlights are too far apart to capture detail in both. This is the kind of situation when the overexposure warning on the LCD screen will usually blink to tell you that something in the picture has been overexposed. If you don't solve the problem, the sky will be pure white or the shadows will be pure black in the picture. And this is a problem that cannot be fixed during editing. You have irrevocably lost essential detail in the image.

The usual scenario is that you are shooting a landscape and trying to include both close up foreground which is often quite dark and far off mountains and sky which are very bright. The picture looks fine to your eyes since they can see much more contrast than a camera can, but the camera will capture the picture with either the foreground completely black or the sky and mountains completely white. Cameras, even very good digital cameras, simply cannot see nearly as much contrast as the human eye can. Cameras can see at most five stops of contrast and the human eye can see twenty or more stops of light.

The way of fixing this problem in the old days of film, was to use a square piece of glass about 4"x5" in size that is called a graduated neutral density filter. This filter is very dark at the top and gradually gets lighter and lighter until it is completely clear at the bottom. The photographer would hold the filter in front of the lens, or use a filter holder to hold it in place, so that the top part of the filter darkened the sky and the bottom part let all the light into the lens. This evened out the light and, if you were very lucky, resulted in a perfect exposure. Unfortunately, this process was time consuming and inaccurate and generally didn't work very well; usually the skies ended up too dark and the foreground was still underexposed.

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Digital Photography 4

2007-05-15T09:58:00.001-06:00

How To Set Up Your Digital Camera
Part IV: Exposure

In this article on how to set up your digital camera, I discuss setting the built-in exposure meter and exposure compensation. This is the fourth article in a series of five that deals with setting up the more important buttons and dials on a digital camera. As usual, the article goes a bit beyond camera setup to a discussion of the basics of using a digital camera. If you haven't read the first three installments of this article you might want to do so before beginning this article. Part I, Part II, Part III.

Exposure meters: Most digital cameras have two or three different ways of metering exposure, which means that you can pick the best metering mode for what you are doing at the time. Most digital cameras have provisions for spot metering, center weighted metering and evaluative metering.

Spot metering means the built in meter is reading light from just a very small spot in the image. When the camera is set to spot metering, a small circle will appear in the middle of the view finder and this is the spot that is being metered. I very rarely use this kind of metering but it can be useful if you need to make sure one tiny area has the correct exposure, such as person's face. It can also be helpful in making sure you have detail in both dark foregrounds or bright clouds. You can also use it to figure out the overall contrast of a picture--how bright the brightest spot is and how dark the darkest spot is. Since cameras only see five stops of contrast at most, it is possible to see if the picture has too much contrast to register detail in both the dark end and the bright end of the picture. In the old days of film, I used to be a believer in hand-held spot meters, nowadays I rarely bother with metering like this. There are other metering modes in modern digital cameras that will give much better results with far less work.

Another way to set the camera's exposure meter is to use the center weighted metering option. This will set the exposure for the picture by giving most emphasis to the brightness of the central area of the picture. This usually works alright, but again I rarely use it as there is a better option.

Most cameras have a metering mode called something like evaluative or multi-zone. In this method of exposure calculation the camera looks at many different zones in the image and figures out the best possible exposure for this particular scene. Some cameras use up to 60 or 70 separate zones when calculating the exposure. I leave my digital cameras set to this option all the time. In most circumstances it will work very, very well and you really don't even need to think about exposure; just let the camera do it all. For almost all exposure situations, modern cameras set to evaluative mode will do as good or better job than a professional photographer using a spot meter.

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Digital Photography 3

2007-05-10T09:49:00.001-06:00

How To Set Up Your Digital Camera:
Part III

In Part I of How to Set Up Your Digital Camera, I discussed the various shooting modes of digital cameras such as program mode, aperture priority, shutter priority and manual mode as well as an introduction to exposure and depth of field. In Part II of How To Set Up Your Digital Camera,choosing the correct file format as well as an introduction to Adobe Photoshop and Epson printers were covered. You might be interested in reading these articles if you haven't already done so, since a lot of basic information about using digital cameras is covered in these two articles. In this article on digital camera setup, I will discuss setting your camera for the correct image size, image shape, white balance, digital zoom, flash settings and ISO.

Image size: Choosing the correct image size is easy, just use the largest image size the camera offers. There are only a few reasons for doing otherwise. One possible reason to use a smaller size is that the memory card in your camera is very small and you are afraid it will run out of room so you use smaller images in order to get more of them on the card. However, a much better solution than using small images is to buy a larger card. Digital camera memory is pretty cheap these days so you should use at least a 250 MB card and even better a 500 MB or even a 1 G card. I use a 4 G card which allows me to shoot large images all day without running out of card space.

About the only other reason I can think of to use small image sizes is that you plan to use the pictures you take in a website which uses very small images. However, even this doesn't make much sense as it is very easy to make images smaller in an imaging program like Photoshop. So, always set the camera on the largest image size possible--you can always make the images smaller later with little or no quality loss. However, it doesn't work the other way around; you will never be able to make small images into larger ones later on since there is a definite limit to how big you can enlarge images--two or three times larger is about the limit pictures can be digitally enlarged without also adding all kinds of nasty stuff like noise, blurriness and other aberrations. If the camera is set to save smaller size images, sooner or later you are going to shoot a really great photograph and decide that it needs to be large, like maybe 24x30 or maybe even 30x40 and guess what, the small image size you set the camera for is not going to have nearly enough pixels to do the job and nothing is going to change that fact. Always shoot at the maximum image size the camera allows.

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Digital Photography 2

2007-05-07T09:39:00.009-06:00

How To Set Up Your Digital Camera Part II

File Formats, PhotoShop Elements and Epson Printers

All of the pictures in this article were taken in Mt Rainier National Park in Washington. To see these pictures in larger sizes plus many more pictures of Rainier National Park, click here.

In Part I of Setting Up Your Digital Camera we looked at setting the shooting modes correctly. In Part II, we will discuss choosing the proper file format for your digital camera. This sounds a bit technical and complex but it is actually very simple. Once you understand the basics, you can set the proper file format in a few seconds or easily change it when your photographic goals change. Even though setting the file format is very simple, it is also very important. If you make the wrong choices in your original settings, you will have to live with the pictures you take with these settings forever. If you're like me, you will resurrect a picture you shot five years ago which is a terrific shot and exactly what you need for the present project but it is totally unusable because the wrong file format was used. As a matter of fact, this holds true of all your original settings choices, not just the ones discussed in this part of the Settings Article: once you shoot a picture using these settings, you can't go back and change it later.

Like the first article in this series, this essay contains a bit more than just choosing the proper file format for your digital camera, it is also an introduction to digital imaging programs and printers.

The basic file formats for digital cameras are TIFF, JPG and RAW. Different cameras vary a bit in which buttons to use to set the file format, but a little research in your camera manual usually makes it simple.

I would not use TIFF file format. TIFF files are either so small they are useless or if they are large enough, they are so slow they will bog your camera down to the speed of an ant stuck in molasses; you may have to wait 30 seconds or a minute or even more between shots, depending on the speed and buffer size of your camera. Waiting this long between shots is pretty worthless. Don't use TIFF files. TIFFs are high quality images when they are in large sizes, but when they are large they are very slow. There are much better ways to get both high speed and high quality images.

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Digital Photography 1

2007-05-01T08:53:00.044-06:00

In 2007, I wrote a series of articles about "Setting Up Digital Cameras" that was published on my website. This series turned out to be about more than just setting up cameras. It was actually a pretty good introduction to the whole subject of digital photography. Below is part I of the series. All of the other parts are included in my May 2007 posts, even though they were actually written in later months.

Part one of the series is about shooting modes, but also includes an introduction to exposure. If you don't understand the ins and outs of exposure, this is required reading for a lot of my other articles.

Setting up a Digital Camera, Part 1

All of the images in this article are from the New England pictures I shot in the fall of 2006.
These are brand new images for the website. To see a larger picture and information
about the image, just click on the image.

Modern digital cameras come with operating manuals the size of telephone books and have an over abundance of dials, buttons, functions, gizmos and special features that can be quite bewildering. Actually, it isn't as bad as it looks since most digital camera options can be simplified into just a few categories. It is important to understand the more important of these options; if you don't, you are going to miss some of the best features of digital photography. An added bonus is that once you understand the basic setup of a digital camera, you are well on your way to a solid understanding of digital photography. So, this series or articles is about more than setup, it is also an introduction to basic digital photography. The basic setup categories that we will cover are listed below. All digital cameras have these same settings. Sometimes they are accessed a little differently, but usually even the access is pretty much the same. In this first article I will cover the first set of options: shooting modes. We will cover the rest in the next three newsletters.

Shooting Modes
Image Size and Compression
File Type: Jpg or Raw
White Balance
Metering
Focusing
Sharpness, Saturation and Contrast
ISO

Setting Up the Shooting Mode Options on Digital Cameras

All digital cameras have several shooting modes. These modes are generally accessed from a dial on the top or back of most cameras. The various options will usually contain settings called P, A, S, M and maybe a star and moon logo for night and a mountain logo for landscape. More expensive cameras may have a bunch more, but these are the basics.

"P" on the mode dial stands for program or fully automatic mode. If you are a novice photographer I would begin by setting your camera to this setting. The "P" setting is also a good place to leave your camera set to when you are not using it for a special purpose. The "P" setting will choose the best overall setting for lens aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance and whether or not to use flash. It is important to realize that this setting is not just for idiots who know nothing about cameras, it actually works very well in most situations. If you are going to be hand-holding the camera, i.e. not using a tripod, the "P" setting will get very good results. You would be suprized at the number of pros who use the P setting most of the time.

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Composition 2

2007-01-30T12:07:00.006-07:00

Composition Two:
Foreground, Rule of Thirds, Balance, Image Depth, Image Frames, Shooting Moving Water, Color

This is part two of a two part article on composition. Go to part one.

The use of foreground is a very important composition technique. It is something that I use constantly in my landscapes. Foreground is that area in the picture that is from quite close up to perhaps four or five feet from the camera. To be effective, foreground usually must be very close--one to three feet from the lens. Wildflowers are a foreground I use a lot. For flowers to really work as foreground they need to be quite close to the lens, as close as the lens will allow. This means, of course, that you must use a very long depth of field if both the foreground and the background is to be in focus. I discuss how to get a very long depth of field while keeping both the foreground and the background sharp in my article on depth of field. If you don't know how to do this, be sure to check this article out. Keeping both the close foreground and the distant background in sharp focus is absolutely critical to making good landscape photographs.

Occasionally the photographer comes upon a whole field of wildflowers--acres and acres of gorgeous reds and yellows and blues and pinks and whites. The temptation is to get it all in the picture. Forget it. This never works. The whole field is too big. If you try to get it all using a wide angle lens, you end up with teeny wienie little flowers too small to even see. The right way to take this picture is to select the best bunch of flowers in the field, get as close to them as possible and use them as foreground. The rest of the field then becomes middle ground and background. The corollary to this rule is that it is not even necessary to find a whole sea of flowers in the first place. Just one small, magnificent bunch will do. Get good and close to the one lonesome bunch, and they are better than a whole sea of flowers. You can do the same thing with reflections in a lake. A whole lake isn't necessary for a good reflection shot; if you get close enough, a small pond or even a puddle will fill the picture and work just as well as a whole huge lake.

Lots of other stuff also works well as foreground for landscapes: old gnarled logs or stumps, a big rock with colorful lichens, dried grasses. Almost anything is better than nothing, even a nondescript bush is better than no foreground at all. One on the best foregrounds is water. Lakes are great. They often have wonderful reflections of the sky or mountains. Using lakes as foreground serves another purpose; they're great for simplifying the scene. They eliminate all that attention grabbing clutter and often provide simple, strong lines for organizing a picture.

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Moving water also works well as foreground. When you shoot moving water there are two choices. First, you can freeze the water in place by shooting at a very fast shutter speed like 1/250 or 1/500 or more. This results in a shot where every drop and sparkle and rivulet of water stands out sharply and clearly. Wildlife photographers use this technique in the classic shot of the black bear catching the jumping salmon in mid air.

Most landscape photographers use a second way to shoot moving water. They shoot very, very slowly--perhaps a one, or two, or three second exposure. The slow exposure blurs the water. This is the way I like to shoot moving water. The results can be quite beautiful. The water looks like steam or liquid mist as it pours over rocks and down cascades. One plus to shooting at a slow speed is that slow speeds mean very small F./stops and this in turn means large depths of field. In fact if you plan on using moving water as close fore, and still keep the background sharp it becomes necessary to blur the water.

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Composition 1

2007-01-20T12:00:00.011-07:00

Composition One

Learning to See, Simplicity, Lenses, Filling the Frame.

This is part one of a two part article on composition. The second part of the article will appear in the next newsletter. In part two, foreground, probably the most important part of photographic composition will be discussed along with the rule of thirds, and picture depth.

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Composition is one of the most important and least studied photographic skills. It is about framing the picture (i.e., selecting just the right piece of the real world in your camera view finder), making sure the picture has a subject or at least a main point of interest, using foreground, developing depth as well as using line and space and shape and color to create an image that pleases the eye and the soul. Without good composition, a photograph can never be more than mediocre. It is an essential tool.

Composition basically means giving order to a photograph. It's something all artists do, not just photographers. Visually, reality is a chaotic jumble of forms, shapes, lines, details, colors, clutter, and junk--even the most beautiful scene. If you don't believe this, just try shooting twenty shots randomly without looking through the viewfinder; the pictures will be filled with disordered, meaningless details and clutter. Whenever you put a camera to your eye, you are automatically practicing elementary composition: you choose to frame a certain subject rather than another, you position certain elements of the picture in a certain way rather than another. The goal of this article is to help you to refine this simple, automatic sense of composition to much higher levels. Even if you don't make your own pictures, a knowledge of basic composition will help you to appreciate good pictures and good art of all kinds.

Some people seem to have an innate sense of good composition. I'm not sure if they are born this way or somehow learn composition, but they seem to automaticcally know how a scene in the real, three dimensional world should be organized to make a good two dimensional picture. People like this are usually visually oriented people who tend to think in pictures rather than in ideas. These people are often said to have a good eye and they often say things like "I can't understand it unless I can see it." The visual person has something of a head start as a photographer. He can often look at a scene through his lens and just feel the way it ought to be. By changing position or by framing the picture in slightly different ways and fiddling with this and that he can often arrive at a picture that feels right and is right. If you are this kind of a person, it usually works to trust your instincts and feelings. You can often produce a very good picture instinctively. I often work partially in this mode. I do depend a lot on my intuitive inner eye, but I also depend greatly on learned rules of composition and years of photographic experience.

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Depth of Field

2007-01-14T11:51:00.001-07:00

Foreground and Depth of Field

If there is one single technique that is most important for taking dramatic, professional looking photographs of all kinds it is the proper use of foreground and depth of field.Look at these two pictues. The picture of Mesa Arch on the left is doubly dramatic becasuse it is framed by very close foreground on both the top and bottom of the picture. Without this foreground frame it would be a just another blah picture of a hazy Canyonland's scene with no real interest. The same is true of the wildflower picture on the right. It's the close up flowers that really give this picture zing. Wildflowers in the distance are tiny specks of color in a big boring monochrome background. Close forground that is very sharp along with a background that is also sharp is a technique that I use in almost every picture that I shoot. Photographers call this sharpness at both near and far distances good depth of field.

Take a look at that batch of pictures you took on your last vaction trip to the mountains and I'll bet most of them are all distant background with no foreground or even middle ground. This is something we all instinctively do. Even I do it once in a while when I'm not thinking. When I see a pretty scene I pick up my camera and snap it and think, "Wow, that'll be a great picture." But it never is. These are the pictures that look so great when we take them but turn out dull and boring. We've all done this. This happens because our eye/brain and a camera see a scene differently. Your eye/brain sees that pretty forground and middle ground and background all at once and thinks wow, great. But the camera can't see it all at once when you just pick the camera up and snap away without much care or thought. You have to think and know some technique and have some experience to get the whole scene that looked so great to your eye.

So, how do you take pictures with both sharp foreground and sharp background? Look at the pictures on this page. Notice that both the foreground and the back ground are very sharp at the same time. It is very important that both are sharp at the same time. If you just pick up your camera and get good and close to a nice bunch of wildflowers and fire away the result is a picture of either very sharp flowers and very blurry background or very sharp background and blurry foregroud. Sometimes when the foreground is sharp and back ground is blurry it is actually very nice; the difference in focus isolates the foreground from the background and the result can be beautiful. This works well with really, really close foreground. I do this once in a while, but it gets old fast.

What if you want the very close foreground and distant background to both be razor sharp? Now you're thinking like a pro. There are several distinct things you need to do. This gets a tiny bit technical here, but don't worry it doesn't last long and once you get your head around it, it is quite easy. After a while you will do it without even thinking about it. In the following discussion I am assuming you are shooting with a medium price digital camera that has a built in zoom that so many people shoot with today. I'm also assuming you don't know a lot of the technical stuff about photography. Don't despair, you can take some fantastic pictures with this simple camera and just a little bit of knowledge. Hang in here for a few more paragraphs and we'll be there.

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Using Polarizers

2007-01-07T11:44:00.002-07:00

Using Polarizing Filters:
How to add intense, rich, brilliant color to your photographs

There are two main kinds of filters that photographers generally use: color correcting filters and polarizing filters. Color correcting filters are exactly what they sound like; they correct color in many situations where the color of the existing light will result in a bad picture. Polarizing filters are a different kettle of fish altogether. Polarizing filters don't change the color of light, they filter out glare and reflections. This is hugely important in landscape photographs. Light is always reflecting off shiny surfaces in nature; leaves, water, wet surfaces, the sky, and any kind of foliage are always reflecting a lot of ugly, white light that ruin many landscape pictures. Your eye doesn't usually see all these reflections but the camera definitely will. When you use a polarizer on your camera, the picture will immediately become richer and much more colorful. With the glare gone, you see pure color, not color mostly hidden behind the glare. You aren't changing the color or intensifying it, you are simply making the color that was always there much more visible. Using a polarizer can make the difference between a very mundane, blah picture that you toss in the trash can as soon as you see it and a picture that has a chance to be a real work of art. All of the pictures on this page were taken using polarizers.

Polarizing filters are composed of two pieces of dark looking glass sandwiched together into a singe filter. One piece of glass is fixed and the other one rotates. The filter has to be screwed onto the front of your camera lens. This means that your lens has to have filter threads. A few of the less expensive or very small digital cameras don't have lens threads; if this is the case, it is a good sign that it is time to upgrade to a better camera. Luckily, almost all lenses do have threads but they may be small and hard to see, so look carefully. You can buy polarizers at any camera store; just be sure you get one that will fit your lens as they come in many different sizes.

Using a polarizing filter is easy. In the first place they only work when you are shooting at right angles to the sun. They don't work if you are shooting directly into the sun or if the sun is directly behind you. Focus on your scene and then turn the polarizer ring. If there is a lot of light reflecting from the scene, which there almost certainly is, the entire scene will suddenly shift from a lousy picture with flat colors to a gorgeous scene of rich, brilliant colors. It is pure magic, one little twist of the wrist and the picture is suddenly 400% better. It is really unbelievable. One of the most dramatic changes can be seen in a blue sky. Blue skies include a lot of dust and dust reflects tons of light. One twist of the wrist and that pale, nothing sky becomes a deep, rich blue that will really make the picture.

Click here to continue reading this article on our website. There is a lot more.

Shooting Wildflowers

2007-01-01T11:32:00.010-07:00

How to Photograph Wildflowers

Wildflowers are an important part of landscape photography. Using them as foreground almost guarantees a good picture and the color they add is often the most important part of the picture. Shooting wildflowers isn't difficult once you know a few tricks. Here are a couple that work well.

I'm often asked when is the best time to shoot wildflowers in the Rockies. Well, we are still a couple of months away from wildflower time in the Rocky Mountain high country, but we're getting there. In Colorado, it's possible to begin shooting wildflowers in the lower elevations (5000 foot level) in mid to late May and early June. By mid to late June it is usually possible to find wildflowers at the seven or eight thousand foot levels. However the real displays of high country wildflowers found at the ten and eleven thousand foot level usually don't peak until mid July, late July and even early August. However, in these days of warmer weather, the bloom dates are becoming earlier and earlier. In the 1980's, I didn't get serious about wildflower shooting until the first of August. Now-a-days, if you wait until that late, you may miss everything but the last crispy critters.

The most important secret of shooting wildflowers is photographing them in the correct light. The correct light for taking wildflower pictures is indirect light like the hazy light on a cloudy day, or the light found just before dawn or after sunset. Even shade, though it is not perfect, is better than direct light. The worst kind of light is direct sunlight and the absolute worst is direct sunlight in the middle of the day. Direct, bright sunlight on wildflowers or any other kind of vegetation, foliage, trees or bushes creates all kinds of shiny, hot-spots and dark, impenetrable shadows; a picture taken in this kind of light will be a jumbled, confusing mess of too-bright and too-dark colors that is awful. Bright sunlight simply results in far too much contrast to make a good picture. Avoid it like the plague when shooting wildflowers.

Taking pictures in diffused, indirect light is absolutely the most important part of shooting good wildflower pictures. The flowers in bright sunlight will look great to your naked eye but the camera most definitely will not see them that way. There are several ways to fix this problem. Even on a bright, blue-sky sunny day there will often be a few clouds in the sky; wait to shoot until a cloud passes in front of the sun. Or get up before dawn and shoot in the early morning. An added bonus to shooting very early is that you may be able to catch a little dew on the flowers which will make them even more beautiful. Even if the sun is already up, early morning light and late afternoon light is much better than the mid-day light that you find between 9 am and 3 pm. Pictures taken in these kinds of soft, diffused light will be soft and rich and sharp with wonderful detail and color.

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Archival Life of Photos

2006-08-20T13:34:00.003-06:00

The Archival Life of Photographs
How long do photographs last?

The life of a photograph is mostly dependant on how it was printed. Now-a-days, photographers print their images on either photographic paper or using inkjet printers.

Photographs printed on photographic paper all have several things in common. All photographic paper is an emulsion coated paper which is sensitive to various colors of light. These papers are first exposed by some kind of light from an enlarger and are then developed in photograpic chemicals in a processor. There are many different kinds of photographic papers. Black and white photographic paper is used to print black and white images. Most of these images are very stable and will last a hundred years and sometimes many times longer. The most stable black and white prints are printed on fiber paper; the least stable are those printed on glossy black and white paper. Black and white images are mostly printed and developed by hand and the archival life of these images is determined to a great degree by how well they have been fixed and washed.

The life of color photographs printed on color photographic paper can vary greatly. Before the early 1990's, all color photographs began to fade and discolor sometime before twenty years. Some of them, particularly photographs printed on some of the early Kodak papers, began to discolor as soon as three to five years after printing.

In this period, Cibachrome photographic paper (later called Ilfochrome) was the best paper around. This paper lasted almost indefinitely if stored in the dark with the proper temperature and humidity but in normal viewing conditions it began to fade and discolor in thirty years. In about 1992 Fuji developed their Fuji Crystal Archive Photographic Paper which was the first big archival breakthrough in color photographic papers. This paper lasts sixty-five years or more in normal viewing conditions. As far as I know, this is the only photographic paper that lasts anywhere near this long. Many other kinds of photographic paper such as Kodak and Ilford and Agfa are still made, but all of these papers have an archival life of less that twenty years. All modern, serious, professional fine-art photographers who print on photographic paper and who care about how long their images are going to last, are printing on Fuji Crystal Archive Photographic Paper.

Ink jet printers have been around for some time now but it is only in the last three or four years that the prints they produce are both archival and as good as images printed on photographic paper. Even now many inkjet prints are of very poor quality and many last less than a year.

Epson made the big breakthrough in fine art ink jet printers. And it is only the most recent generation of their printers that are really successful. Currently the Epson 2200, 7600, 9600, 7800, 9800 and 4000 printers using the new UltraChrome inks printing on selected papers are producing photographic prints as good and better than prints on photographic paper. In addition, some of these new ink jet prints have an archival life much longer than that of traditional photographic paper. This printer/ink combination is currently the best thing going in inkjet printers.

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Great Art Show Disasters

2006-08-15T07:52:00.004-06:00

Great Show Disasters:
Stories of Disasters on the Art Show Road

Click any picture in this article to see a bigger picture and get location and information

Most shows take place in the great outdoors, in local parks, parking lots or on main street. All artists use flimsy aluminum and nylon tents to show their wares and most of these tents all chock full of costly art works, sometimes worth as much as several hundred thousand dollars worth of art in one small tent. As you might imagine, this is a disaster waiting to happen. Wind is usually the culprit. Most artists are pretty well prepared for rain, heat, cold, hail and snow, but wind is something else again, not to mention hurricanes, tornadoes, and violent thunderstorms, all of which have hit most artists at one time or another.
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The basic space that artists buy at art shows is a 10'x10' square, so show tents are that size also, unless you rent a double space which is 10'x20'. No matter how you cut it, a nylon and aluminum box 10'x10'x10' is pretty vulnerable. There are all kinds of show tents that range from very, very, very vulnerable to just plain vulnerable. One of the tents in the first category is the Easy Up which pops up from a compact bundle the size of an elongated suitcase to a full blown tent in about five minutes. Of course there is a down side to this ultra-fast set up: Easy Up tents very soon came to be known as Easy Downs since they were always the first tents down when even a mild thunder storm blew through. After ours blew down in the very early stages of our career we moved up to the heavy duty Cadillac of show tents, the Craft Hut. These tents have a solid steel frame, many individual, small, strong, steel and aluminum parts that unfortulately take about two hours to set up. The long setup time is a huge hassle, but it is worth it since Craft Hut tents are much less likely to blow down.

Over the years artists have devised more and more sophisticated ways of storm-proofing show tents. The first tents had no sides at all and so every one would have to completely take down and re-setup every day of a show. It wasn't long before artists were wrapping tents in forty foot long sheets of plastic so they could leave them safely overnight. After a few years of this, zip-on sides began to appear and now-a-days, at the end of a long show day, 99% of all artists zip up their tents in just a few minutes and head for the nearest bar or restaurant. This was all very cool, but the downside was that now you had 200 tents full of very expensive artwork, which were vulnerable to every storm and which were left unattended all night long. Soon there were lots of horror stories of more and more blown down tents.

So, the next thought was how to keep these lonely tents from blowing down in the middle of the night in the event of a storm. The obvious answer was more weight, so artists started tieing all kinds of objects to their tent legs: cement blocks, sand bags, water bags, solid cylinders of steel, body building weights and PVC tubes filled with concrete. This worked pretty well until one day a huge storm came along and picked up the weighted tents and threw the weights through the sides of their neighbor's tents and into the windshields of nearby cars. Oh yes, this has happened many times. Then people started nailing tents down to the asphalt in parking lots with cement nails, driving two foot long steel stakes into grassy show sites and screwing those corkscrew dog leash fasteners into the sod of parks. The latter two tricks worked great until too many people pounded their stakes into sprinkler system lines and flooded the whole park (and the whole show) in the middle of the night when the sprinkler systems came on. And that was pretty much the end of stakes.

All of these precautions helped greatly, but it's impossible to tame Mother Nature forever and some pretty spectacular disasters still take place every year. Certain areas have gained a reputation as fearsome places to hold an art show. There is a long running art show held every spring in downtown Fort Worth that has a wide-spread reputation for high winds. And high winds have been a part of every show I've done in Fort Worth . I have seen a whole row of tents tumbling down the middle of the street like tumbleweeds in a spring dust storm on the Texas plains. I have seen tents hanging from stoplights suspended over a busy street corner. I have seen tents impaled on balconies three stories above the street. After a while it got so bad and the losses so high that the show promoters set up their own tents made of two inch steel pipe and weighted down at all the corners with fifty gallon drums of water. These tents definitely didn't blow away but they were so leaky that artists had to pitch their own small tents inside these larger tents which made an already difficult setup twice as hard.

Continue reading this article on our website. There is quite a bit more.

Teton National Park

2006-02-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

This article on the Tetons was written on 8-28-06

It appeared originally on my website

Grand Teton National Park, located in Jackson Hole in the northwestern corner of Wyoming just below Yellowstone National park, has got to be one of my all-time favorite spots in the world. I guess you might say that I have a full-blown love affair with the Tetons that has gone on for most of my life. The jagged, craggy peaks of the Tetons are, I think, the most magnificent scenery in America and certainly deserve to be called the American Alps. Here are many more of our pictures of the Tetons.

I first went to the Tetons when I was seven years old. I grew up in Wyoming and when I was a little kid, our family used to take at least one vacation in the Tetons every year. One of my most vivid childhood memories is pulling into Jenny Lake campground, finding the world's best campsite, setting up our antique, 100 pound, canvas umbrella tent and listening to the sound of stakes being pounded into the ground, loud in the still, sweet, pine scented air of the Tetons. I remember the quietness of the Teton forest, the absolute crystalline clarity of the waters of Jenny Lake, boat trips on the lake, hikes around the lake, fishing in Cottonwood Creek, Crandall's black and white photography studio, and most of all the towering, hulking, brooding, presence of the Tetons on the other side of the Jenny Lake. When I was maybe twelve or so, I promised myself that I would be back and that I would climb these mountains one day. And I did; I have returned to the Tetons many times and I did climb a number of the Tetons including the Grand in my young manhood.

Today, Crandall Photography, the black and white photo studio is long gone (it first turned into the ranger station and then into the general store) and Jenny Lake campground now has a waiting list several months long, but almost nothing else has changed. The Tetons and the surrounding forests and rivers and lakes are the same as they were in my childhood: the waters of Jenny Lake are just as crystalline, the sky just as blue and the peaks as majestic as I remembered them as a small boy. In the almost sixty years since I first visited the Tetons, few years have gone by that I haven't found some excuse or another to come back for yet one more visit. If there is a single reason I'm a landscape photographer today, it is almost certainly because of these early experiences in the Tetons.

Click here to finish reading the rest of this article on our website; there is a lot more information about the Tetons in the complete article, including some of my secret spots.

Gothic Valley in Colorado

2006-02-01T17:12:00.002-07:00

This article first appeared in our Website.

Gothic Valley is just north of Crested Butte, Colorado. Get there by driving from the town of Crested Butte to Mount Crested Butte where the ski area is located. Follow the road through Mt Crested Butte and out the north end of town, to Gothic, where the University of Colorado Science Camp is located. Keep going another 1/2 mile or so and you are in Gothic Valley.

While you are in Crested Butte I recommend that you stop in one of the several book stores on Elk Street, the main drag, and pick up a copy of the Aspen, Crested Butte, Gunnison Recreation Topo Map. This is a water-proof map of the whole area that is quite good. The maze of back roads and trails in the area can get quite confusing.

A good place for dinner in Crested Butte is Slogar's where they serve family dinners of fried chicken. It's kind of an upscale place with down-home food at reasonable prices. People come from all over to eat here.

I suspect Gothic Valley isn't the official name for this beautiful valley surrrounded by towering Rocky Mountain Peaks. However it is in the shadow of Gothic Mountain, near the town of Gothic and Gothic Road runs through it so most people call it Gothic Valley. At any rate it's a great place to spend the weekend. There is a campground in the valley but it is very small and I wouldn't count on finding a place to camp. There are various spots in the upper part of the valley that are not official campgrounds but they are signed as OK to camp in. These spots get more plentiful as you go up the valley. There used to be another campground a couple miles beyond Schofield Pass which is a few miles further along Gothic Road; I think it's still there. If you are going on a weekend, I would get there as soon as possibly if you want to find a place to camp. Be aware that there is often a snow drift that closes Gothic Road about mid way up the valley until the middle of July or so. There is also a peaceful picnic area on the right about half way up the valley that is a great place for lunch. Gothic Valley can be a busy place in mid summer and the main road can get a bit dusty but there are a such a multitude of trails and side roads to get away from the hoardes that it turns out to be a great spot. The terrific scenery especially makes it worth the trouble.

Except for the snow drift, Gothic valley is a good place to go in June when much of the rest of the high Rockies are inaccessible. In early June there are usually lots of Glacier Lilies, especially at the far end of the valley. Later on in July there are Columbines, Lupine, Alpine Dasies, Paintbrush, Fireweed, Showy Daises and many other wildflowers.

Click here to continue reading this article on our website. There is lots more good information in the entire article.

Artistic Parking???

2006-01-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

What is the hardest part of being an artist? Most people think it is making the art. They think that if only they could paint or draw or sculpt or pot or take pictures as well as so-and-so, all the rest would be easy. Wrong. If you are a professional artist, making art is always hard, serious work but it is always fun; making art is something you look forward to, not dread. You don't worry about the next creation, you are very confident about making art and you can't wait to get at it, but usually there is that accounting that just has to be done right now or you have to pack the ten pictures that should have been shipped last week or you're three weeks behind on the bills or you have to do the next show. When you finally do find a little slot of time to make a few pictures, all the time hassles and business and money worries fade into the background and the hours fly by until the picture is done.

Making art for a professional is fun; that's why we do what we do. But there are a lot of un-fun parts too and one of the most un-fun is setting up at art shows, and the most totally un-fun is finding a parking place before you can even begin setting up. Really, I'm not kidding, the hardest, most dreaded part of being an artist is the parking.

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Shut Your Eyes and Jump

2006-01-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

Here we were in 1974 trying to live like Thoreau

We have a very daring, four year old grandson named Stevie who came up with some advice for his indecisive Grandma while they were playing firemen the other day, "Just shut eyes, jump." After Joan and I decided to drop out of graduate school, to become potters and to earn our living on the art show circuit forty years ago, our rule of thumb for living the good life was pretty similar to our grandson's.

One of our first decisions, following our sixties, nonconformist, hippy tendencies, was to live closer to the earth, closer to nature. (See what trouble four years of reading books like Walden Pond can get you into.) So, we saved up and borrowed a few thousand dollars and bought two acres of land along the Rio Grande River in Corrales, NM in an area of small farms, fruit orchards, adobe homes, dirt roads, huge cottonwood trees and irrigation ditches. In the field next to our acreage was a large, productive apple orchard that seemed unbelievably wonderful to us (at least until we learned that real apple orchards needed to be spayed with toxic chemicals many times every summer.) At the time, Corrales, which is a suburb of Albuquerque, seemed like the perfect place to us; it seemed to be the place where the coolest, the most artsy, the most nonconformist people in the world lived.

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Once a Hippy, Always a Hippy

2006-01-01T07:43:00.004-07:00

Some of the pottery Joan and I used to make

A couple of years ago during a very busy art show in Breckenridge, Colorado, I was taking a break on a bench a few yards away from my booth. A well dressed gentleman and and an equally well attired young son of twelve or so stopped in front of me and looked at my booth. The father pointed at my booth and said to the son, "And here is a good object lesson for you son. Pay attention in school and study hard or you may end up on the streets just like these poor folks." Here is the story of how I drifted away from a life of comfort and respectability to became an artist selling my work on the art show circuit.

Back in 1970, I was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico finishing up a PhD in American Literature and American studies. (See, I was already biased towards idealistic, impractical lifestyles.) I had pretty much had my fill of big university life where research was far more important than students and most of one's time was spent in political in-fighting and ass kissing. I sent a hundred or so half hearted job application letters out to big universities and got some offers to teach in the deep south and in a few back-east big city colleges. None of this appealed much to me.

While I was dealing with seminars and dissertations, Joan had gotten involved in hand-crafted pottery. She had a potter's wheel and a small electric kiln set up on the back porch and was busy learning how to make coffee mugs and teapots and casseroles. And it turned out she was very, very good at it; in fact she was a natural. After a year's hard work she was making very professional functional, stoneware pottery. So, as I drifted away from my dissertation on the novels of Joyce Carey in my last year of graduate school, I began drifting more and more into pottery.

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Making our Photographs

2005-01-14T14:54:00.011-07:00

How We Make Our Photographs

A history of how we make our landscape and nature photographs

Note: This article was originally written back in the late 1990's. Even though I have added a number of updates, it is mostly about how we made our pictures in the early days of the digital era. This article does have a huge amount of information about making digital pictures, but it is not really up to date. However, if you are interested in the details of digital imaging, I think it is a very valuable article

What has always interested me most about photography is something I call image quality.

Even though I have been taking photographs all of my life, I first became seriously, professionally interested in photography in the early 1980's. I had always loved the black and white photographs of Ansel Adams. When his three volume book on black and white photography came out in 1980, I read it all avidly. I bought a 4x5 camera, built a black and white darkroom and became a black and white photographer. I quickly learned that what I really liked about Ansel's photographs was the incredible sharpness, richness, and depth of his prints, in other words, his image quality. So I spent my first ten years as a photographer struggling to make the best black and white prints I could. In 1990, when I decided to make my entire living as a photographer, I became a color photographer. I quickly found that all my training in making quality black and white prints transferred to color photography.So, when I make photographs today, the main thing I concentrate on is still image quality.

Image Capture (Shooting)
Photographic quality begins with capturing a quality image. I shoot most of our images with film; currently I'm experimenting with digital cameras and I suspect that in a few years all or our images will be shot on very high end digital cameras.

None of our images are made with 35mm cameras. These cameras are often called small format cameras. Given the size of our images, 35mm film just doesn't have enough size to create sharp, clean images.

Over the years I have used both medium and large format cameras for my landscape photographs. The medium format camera I have used the most is a 6x7cm Pentax. The negatives and chromes (slides) produced by this camera are 6 cm high and 7cm wide. The picture of at the top of the page was made
on this camera. This camera is legendary for the sharpness and overall quality of its lenses. I wouldn't trade this camera for any other medium format camera. Joan is above photographing with her Pentax 6x7 medium format camera. She is on McDonald Lake in Glacier National Park.

I own two large format cameras: one is a Cambo 4x5 made by Calumet Photographic. The other is a Wista. Both of these cameras make negatives and chromes 4"high and 5" wide. The Wista is a type of 4x5 called a field camera and the Cambo is a studio camera. Even though I never work in the studio, I much prefer the Cambo over the Wista, which is more limited in several ways. For one thing I can't use long telephoto lenses on the Wista. For another, the Cambo gives me more perspective control. In the pictures below, the Cambo is below.

There are advantages to both medium format and large format. The medium format camera is much easier to use and thus the photographer can be much more spontaneous in capturing light and colors that tend to shift and change amazingly quickly. Medium format is good for shooting in dim light and inclementconditions. It is great for capturing closeup detail in wildflowers and aspen leaves.

On the other hand the large format camera is much larger and more cumbersome. Once I get set up someplace, I tend to stay there for a while. Focusing is difficult as it is necessary to focus the image on a piece of ground glass under a dark cloth. This image is upside down, backwards and often very dim. All of this becomes much worse when a large depth of field is involved. When the photographer wants to keep everything from the extreme foreground to the distant background in sharp focus, things become much difficult in 4x5. However, the rewards of large format photography are large also. The extreme sharpness of a 4x5 chrome is truly wonderful. Also, the tonalities (the transitions between lights and darks) are much smoother; even the colors seem richer and more vibrant. It's all a trade-off. I use both cameras and I love them both.

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There is a ton more good information here.

Shoot Digital or Film?

2005-01-01T14:11:00.020-07:00

Should Your Next Camera be a Digital or a Film Camera?

How to buy a digital camera

Note: This article was written in 2005 so the advice on particular digital cameras is now out of date. There is still a lot of valuable information here though. Here is a more recent article about buying digital cameras.

If I were in the market to buy a new camera for personal use, it would be a digital camera not a film camera even though there are a lot of very good, new film cameras on the market. Here are my reasons why.

In the first place, I think the average non-professional photographer can get far better photographs of the kids, friends, vacations and most of the other subjects we all photograph regularly with a digital camera, than with film. I'll go a little farther, I think this is even true of most professionals taking personal pictures. And I'm talking about using the camera right out of the box without even reading the directions. If you can get around to reading the directions or even better, reading a good book about digital cameras, the results can be out of this world good.

Here are a couple of examples of why I personally think digital cameras are great. I've been taking family pictures since the 1950's using slide film and various hand-held 35mm cameras including very fine Nikons and Canons. Most of my pictures captured by these film cameras are good but there are few that are really great. I bought my first five megapixel digital camera two yeas ago and right away there was a huge improvement in my personal and family pictures: they were sharper, they had the proper color balance right out of the camera, the colors were better, and the even the composition was better. I attribute the improved composition to the fact that these cameras are very light and easy to use and to the fact that they can be hand held rather needing a tripod. All of this makes composition much easier. In short, my new digital pictures were, overall, far better than anything I had ever done on film. I was absolutely delighted.

Another example: I just bought an inexpensive Olympus three megapixel digital camera for my seven year old granddaughter. Right out of the box, her pictures of people were just as good as mine: all this with zero experience and zero training. Her pictures were maybe a little crooked once in a while, but the image quality was terrific. Then her five year sister started using the camera and her pictures were also just a good as mine. OK, they weren't shooting landscapes which are much more difficult, they weren't making huge prints, and they were shooting mostly people pictures which are usually fairly easy pictures to take. For the kind of pictures they wanted, the picture quality was wonderful. And the kind of pictures my granddaughters wanted to take are mostly what we all want to take: people pictures, vacation pictures, casual whatever pictures. For this sort of thing, even low definition, inexpensive digital cameras are great.

A second advantage of buying a digital camera is the obvious advantage of not needing to buy film or developing or scanning. This can actually be pretty huge if you take a lot of pictures. When you couple this to the ability to print your pictures easily on your own computer and printer, the savings can really add up, not to mention that printing your own pictures can make you feel a lot like Ansel Adams. Printing your own high quality, long lasting pictures is a lot easier than you might think. It's amazing the quality that is possible these days with a $100.00 Epson or HP printer. And with the built in color management that comes with all digital cameras and printers, perfect pictures with no adjustments at all are the standard. In fact you can usually sort the pictures right on the camera, delete the junk, and print the rest by sending them directly to your home printer without even looking at them on your computer. If you're not into printing your own pictures, it also works well to take the digital images to Walmart or any other photoprocessor and they will will print great looking photos for you.

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Rocky Mountain Photography

The Maroon Bells of CO

The Maroon Bells of Colorado

The Aspens are Peaking

Digital Disasters

Aspens Color in CO

The CO Aspens are turning

Photoshop is Crucial

The Glaciers Are Melting

The Trees Are Dying

Good Light

Image Stabilization

Get a Free Proof of Any Image

More on Depth of Field

High ISO speed and Noise

Depth of Field and Handholding

Summer Photo Shoot

The Canon Rebel Xsi

The Green River in Utah

The Olympus C-8080

Handholding cameras

Moving to New Mexico

What this blog is all about

Wind River Odyssey 1

Buying a Digital Camera

Wind Rivers 2

Wind Rivers 1

Last Dollar Road

Last Dollar RoadFinding and driving one of Colorado's best back country Roads

Rocky Mountain Nat. Park 2

Rocky Mountain Nat. Park 1

Glacier National Park 2

Glacier National Park 1

Yankee Boy Basin

The Wildflowers of Yankee Boy BasinThe best wildflower location in Colorado

Wildflowers of Shrine Pass

Framing Large Photographs

Framing Photographs

Laminating Photographs

Art Photography

Professional Photography

Digital Photography 5

Digital Photography 4

Digital Photography 3

Digital Photography 2

Digital Photography 1

Composition 2

Composition 1

Depth of Field

Using Polarizers

Shooting Wildflowers

Archival Life of Photos

The Archival Life of PhotographsHow long do photographs last?

Great Art Show Disasters

Teton National Park

Gothic Valley in Colorado

Artistic Parking???

Shut Your Eyes and Jump

Once a Hippy, Always a Hippy

Making our Photographs

Shoot Digital or Film?

Should Your Next Camera be a Digital or a Film Camera?

How to buy a digital camera

Last Dollar Road
Finding and driving one of Colorado's best back country Roads

The Wildflowers of Yankee Boy Basin
The best wildflower location in Colorado

The Archival Life of Photographs
How long do photographs last?