The Daily Photograph™

Her favorite book

Still life is still a challenge for me.

This photograph is underexposed by about 2 stops, but with a ‘proper’ exposure, I got none of the flavor I wanted. Here, after bumping the exposure in the editing program, I came at least close, and the wonderful Phase1 digital back gave me far less noise than I expected to see. For those who want tech info: Zeiss 150mm, f5.6, 1 second, 50 ISO, available light. BTW, at these slow speeds, you definitely want to raise the mirror before hitting the shutter.

I’ll write something later to explain why the tech info is nearly always useless to another photographer.

But the sagebrush, not so much

Vast distances are a challenge

From my position, it’s about quarter mile straight down and easily a half-mile outward to the cattle, and then it’s another three miles and more up the other side. Getting all that distance into a photograph and still holding a sense of scale can be difficult. I attempted to include a bit of a nearby pine tree to anchor the eye, but it was too close for focus, thus going against the accepted wisdom that one should never have an out-of-focus foreground in a landscape photograph.

So you judge: Does the pine tree work as a anchor, out of focus or not?

We get two or three of these every summer

Photographing Rainbows for Fun

I expect most everybody who has tried to photograph a rainbow with an ordinary camera has come away a bit disappointed. Here’s why:

Ordinary digital cameras are designed to take the light in front of it and ‘optimize’ it to fit a pre-conceived scheme. This works about 70% of the time. At other times, the picture turns flat and dull. Sunset is one of those times. Notice the over-all golden tone in this photograph. The ordinary camera will shift that toward the blue-green (the complement or ‘opposite’ color to yellow-red) to compensate for what the little computer chip inside has been told is ‘bad light.’

And, often the ordinary camera will read the light from the rainbow as brighter in comparison to the rest of the scene. The result is an underexposed frame, again removing much interest. Other times, the camera might meter the overall frame but ignore the rainbow, leaving it overexposed.

Sometimes you can fix the photograph with the editing program that comes with the camera. Photoshop Elements is especially good for this. But, you will never get good results of a sunset or a rainbow using the ‘autofix’ function. You gotta do it by hand.

To the curve of the horizon

Jackson Canyon, South of Casper

The air this day, the last day of June, was fairly damp for this country, and so the horizon is a little shrouded. This mountain range, called the Laramie Range, is the eastern edge of the Rockies, and rises abruptly from the plains you see beyond the open end of Jackson Canyon.

By mid-July, this land will be sere and brown

That’s Immigrant Gap off yonder, and beyond is Independence Rock

This year has been unusually wet, almost six inches of rain the last three months. It won’t last. And if you’re on the Immigrant Trail (as the Oregon Trail was known, then), you’re almost too late. You must make it to Independence Rock by the 4th, to have enough time to comfortably get to California or Oregon before the snow flies. It’s forty or so dry miles from here to the Rock.

I wish you could see this at its full size of about 24 inches wide by 18 inches tall. The web simply won’t let me show the vastness as it really is.

Here they raise cattle

The pond is man-made and is called a ‘catch pond.’

Its purpose is to capture some of the spring rains for use later in the summer by the cattle. The flowers are entirely natural. By mid-kuly, the meadow will become brown and dusty under the relentless sun.

It's sandstone, a sedimentary rock, 7500 feet above sea level

Wyoming was, more than once, completely covered by the primordial oceans. The sandstone ‘cap’ on Muddy and Casper Mountains (this is Muddy) was then unbroken seabottom. The excellent Rising from the Plains by John McPhee tells all about this, and much other geology of Wyoming.