Slickrock and Shadow

Pebbles, Rocks and the Lines of Yant Flat As I wandered around Yant Flat, I discovered more and more photo compositions.  This location is rich in potential.  It's pretty amazing to visit an amazing place like this and not have every great corner previously discovered by someone else.  I'm thinking of The Wave (Coyote Buttes North) when I say this.  That's an amazing place I've visited 6 times but I had to wander wide and work hard to shoot an original shot.  That is NOT the case at Yant Flat.  It's so new, so untouched that any shot may be the first time for this virgin rock.  So, enjoy some landscape shots of Yant Flat. Red Dot of Yant Flat All part of Utah's Red Cliff Desert Reserve Yellow Hill resembles a Shell Dead Tree in Shape of Cross Hiking around Yant Flat to discover many gems

Unexpected Beauty:  Wildflowers find a Home in a Sliver of Sand Planning for a specific shot in Chesler Park, I wandered all around the sandstone towers at dawn and sunrise.  After I had done a a lot of photography, I took a break for breakfast with my daughter.  We climbed on top of a boulder to enjoy the view.  Between our boulder and another boulder, a sliver of sand allowed yellow wildflowers to grow.  This was unexpected yet so beautiful, I had to stop and try to capture this.  This unexpected moment is now one of my favorite memories from that morning. Another view from my breakfast boulder

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.  

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...

Red Poppy Flowers of France Going to California each spring, I loved to see the wonderful wild poppy flowers.  I came to associate poppies with that wonderful orange color so common on the west coast.  Little did I know they come in another color in Europe:  blood red.  Seeing this fields filled with red poppies or smaller clusters of them here and there delighted me every time.  I could see Monet and his wife in these flowery fields as he painted her.  This particular field was south of Sarlat, France.