Slickrock and Shadow

Wild Montana Increasingly seen these days, multiple-exposure photographs show off greater dynamic range of light and dark in a single scene.  The "old school" method was to use gradient neutral density filters.  I have those and they work well if the horizon is perfectly level. The "new school" method is to take multiple exposures and then blend them together manually in photoshop. There is also another method, which I'd call the "school dropout" method which uses an HDR program to create an automatic blend of these photos which the computer finds beautiful.  I own the most up-to-date HDR program and it does not create natural-looking shots. So, for this shot, I used the "new school" photoshop blending, relying heavily on the lightest shot to give this work a gorgeous luminance.  

Mustard in Bloom I have mentioned luck before as a photographic asset.  Luck gives you the unexpected ray of light, dramatic shadow, picturesque cloud or rainbow.  In this case, luck gave me a field of mustard.  Instead of traveling the usual route from Montana to Utah, I took a scenic route past Mesa Falls.  Just south of that, I came upon this gorgeous field of mustard flowers.  They were at peak bloom and covered the horizon. With luck, you have to drop what you had planned and take the opportunity.  I stopped the car and spent several minutes wandering the skirts of this field, photographing the immense field and sky, trying to take in the beauty of the many.  

Lupine Wildflowers and small Montana Cabin at sunset  I visit southwest Montana each year for one week.  Each years looks different depending on how much rain/snow they've had and how early/late in the summer I go.  This lonely cabin sits in a big valley and I've taken to shooting it each year.  Sometimes I try sunset, others at sunrise, others with different lenses, etc -- I want to get something NEW each year.  That's the challenge:  to get a quality shot that isn't a copy of prior years. This year the lupine wildflowers were out in force.  That's very exciting!  The last 5 minutes of direct sunlight shone on these flowers as the day ended.  I'd actually found this bunch of flowers an hour earlier as the best bunch in the area.  I'd picked a few stray grass blades out.  When I returned with a few minutes of dying light, I was so happy to find a perfect bouquet. This is the first time I've written about this 8-year projec...

Montana Bloom:  This photo obeys several landscape photography rules. Lupine wildflowers were in bloom last month in Montana.  Patches of purple mixed in with the green grassland, coloring the charming land.  How to capture this beauty?  I decided to go back to the "rules" of landscape photography and see what happened.  Here are a few of the rules I followed: 1.  Foreground interest.  The flower is the obvious choice here.  The challenge comes in how to include this flower and everything else.  A wide-angle lens positioned just above the highest petals allows the viewer to get a whiff of lupine but still see the wider landscape above. 2.  S-curve.  The S-curve is used mostly in figure photography, particularly the female form.  This same curve can be used when it appear in landscape.  The lovely stream makes such a curve and connects the foreground to the background, helping me obey two photography rules. 3. ...