New Years in New Mexico

I left Houston really early so that I could drive straight through to Philmont and get there before the roads got icy. So early that, a few hours after I'd been on the road, I saw this:



In case you're wondering, it's really quite difficult to take an in-focus picture of the sunrise in your side mirror while still driving, haha. It's also difficult to stay focused on a 15-hour drive all by yourself. I listened to a lot of knitting podcasts, and took lots of pictures of the scenery. West Texas and Eastern New Mexico are pretty boring, but occasionally there are some neat things to look at, like this lonesome tree:


(If you remove the tree, that's what most of the drive looks like! I told you it was boring!)

Or all the old-fashioned windmills that run well pumps to provide water for livestock:


(See that snow on the side of the road?!? Snow!!!)

Or the way that the colors of the landscape change when the sun starts to set:


(Please forgive the dust/dead bugs on my windshield, which are also illuminated by the setting sun...)

But the best thing to see is this sign, signaling my entrance into Colfax County:



Shortly after that sign, and conveniently right as I was waiting to turn onto a different road (so I could actually stop and take some better pics), the sun dipped behind the mountains:



Gorgeous!



See the plane streak up in the top left? I thought about editing it out, but decided to leave it. I think it gives the photo character. What do you think?

I finally made it to Philmont, stayed a few days, rang in the New Year at the good ol' St. James, and took about a zillion pictures of the mountains. Don't worry, you don't have to see all of them. ;) Here's Tooth Ridge:


(I know Montana likes to claim they are Big Sky Country, but I really think New Mexico could give them a run for their money!)

Last but not least, my heart belongs to tall, steep, cold, rocky, dear, sweet Baldy Mountain:


(Hi Mountain! I miss you!)

Happy 2008 y'all! I hope it is a wonderful new year! =)

My first published photo!

Ok, well sort of published, but still. =) The past five summers, I've worked at Philmont Scout Ranch, in Cimarron, NM. It's one of my absolute favorite places on Earth, and the source of many of my favorite photos. There is an organization called the Philmont Staff Association comprised of current and former staff members that exists to support the Ranch and the current staff, and to keep former staff in contact. They maintain a website that has a photo masthead that changes with the season. The webmaster was looking for photos to use for this winter, so I submitted a few, and one got picked!

Here's the original:

(as always, click to embiggen!)

And the screenshot of the page:


Woohoo! I am so excited! I took the photo, along with many others, when I visited the Ranch for New Years Eve 2006/2007. A huge snowstorm had shut down the state (literally) and so my travel plans were...well...slightly different than planned. Flights canceled, roads closed, hotels overbooked, etc. Luckily, when I finally made it, I was rewarded with some awesome scenery. It pays to persevere. =)

Eye-Candy Friday

This was taken one afternoon during Camp Director training this past summer. We'd had an afternoon thunderstorm, and the clouds started to clear away as the sun was just beginning to set. The effect on Tooth Ridge was awesome - it was literally glowing!

Philfolk - Don't you just love the first sentence of that Wikipedia entry? Do you think Ranger Bus Tour is an appropriate citation? =) Bonus points to whoever can name the CD in the foreground...

I heart computers. (Most of the time.)

One day, I'll graduate to Photoshop. For now, I can rock Picasa and Paint. Yes, Paint. No laughing. =)

One morning this summer, I was up at the mine, waiting, hoping, and praying that campers would show up for a tour. I know it was morning because I was bored enough to take this picture of myself:

Sometimes I like to pretend to be serious. =) It's an ok SOOC pic, but I see (at least) five problems:

(As always, click for bigger. The numbers show up better in the big one.)

(1) Big zit on chin. We didn't have running water. Cut me some slack.
(2) Greasy hair. See (1).
(3) Fly on hat. Again, no water = no shower. And the flies were bad no matter how delightful you smelled!
(4) Distracting ore bucket and rocks in the background.
(5) My arm.

Thanks to the computer, I can knock out all of those problems! First thing's first: crop! I love cropping, because I'm still not very good at composing pictures on the spot. I do much better looking at an image on a screen, and then figuring out where I want my focal point to be. I like the rule of thirds a lot. That probably is because I like fractions a lot. Sue me. So anyways, in this pic, I cropped out (3) the fly, (4) the distracting bits, and (5) most of my arm. I also got my eyes close to one of the rule of thirds lines.

Ok, so now we're left with (1) zit and (2) greasy hair. Hair is easily taken care of by ditching the color. I think lack of color also works well since I was portraying a miner in 1922, and we like to think that "the olden days" were black & white or sepia, since those are the only pictures we see from then. (I wonder what people from back then would think of that. Obviously they lived their lives in full color. Would they think it's strange that we think of them as black & white?) Anyways, back to the photo. Here's the b&w:



It's alright, but sort of ick. I don't like b&w pics of me. I think it has something to do with my skin tone. Here's the sepia:

I sort of hate sepia because it looks washed out and faded. I have enough problems looking washed out and faded because of my pale skin. I don't need the computer to help me out on that one! So instead, I "warmify" the b&w. Warmify is a command in Picasa that I love. It helps rescue color pictures where the white balance is off, and can be layered on top of the b&w to give this:

I suspect it has an equivalent in Photoshop, because Ree does a similar thing to her pictures. So that hides (2) the greasy hair, and I like the tone. Last but not least, (1) the zit. Open that baby in Paint, magnify, and pencil over it, sampling colors from all around to get a good blend. If you look closely, you can see it's still a bit smudged there, but I'm ok with that. If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd never see it. I also added some glow in Picasa. (I like to think of it as a combo of two of Ree's favorite Photoshop tricks: Portraiture and Slight Mug Shot Pop.) Et voila!

My new Facebook photo. =)

Wild Roses, and Depth of Field

I took a ton of flower pictures this summer, because I love flowers, and because there were so many. Northeast New Mexico has been in a drought for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. This past year, however, was really wet, and some of the old-timers think this is going to keep up for at least the next few years. *crosses fingers* That would be excellent, if true. Enough water means so many good things for the region, including great flowers! We had more wildflowers this summer than I've seen in ten years of going to Philmont, and luckily I had my sweet new camera to capture them.

Over the course of this blog, you'll probably see most of the good ones (or you can go check them out on Flickr...see the sidebar badge), but for now, here are two pictures of the same flower, a wild rose, and a mini-photography lesson.

Disclaimer: I know very very little about photography. But I am capable of reading (thank goodness) and am teaching myself, little by little. To learn more, click here and here.

Ok. Back to the photos:

Do you see the difference? In the top photo, the petals are in focus. In the bottom one, the stamens are. I like the bottom one better, because...well, I don't really know why, I just do. This is one of the things I really like about my D40, is that I have control over where to focus. I also have control over depth of field.

Now, up until about three days ago, I didn't really understand depth of field or aperture settings or how they are connected. I always got shutter speed, because that makes sense to me. (The faster the speed, the less light comes in, the darker the pictures. And vice versa.) I shot on S a lot, and let the camera control aperture. I had a vague idea that aperture had to do with how wide the lens opened to let in light, but didn't really understand how that made a difference. I decided that I should probably learn. I found these two great articles (one and two) and they made a ton of sense. I also liked the Wikipedia article on aperture because it explains the math. (Yay math!)

Which got me thinking about the flower pics. I reckoned that the aperture must have been set very wide (which corresponds to a low number...) to get such a shallow depth of field that I could have either the petals or the stamens in focus, but not both. So I zipped over to Flickr and checked out the Exif data (for some reason I prefer to look at it on Flickr instead of on my computer...don't ask me why...), and sure enough, the aperture for both was f/5.3, which is close to the max for my lens at that zoom level. This means the lens opened really wide to let in a lot of light, and, as I suspected, made the depth of field very shallow. Cool!

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it made sense. Please feel free to comment and let me know other cool things about aperture, depth of field, wild roses, etc. (Also, please let me know (kindly!) if I have said anything incorrect.) Ooh, and if you know how to blog multiple Flickr photos into one post (I can only figure out how to get one photo in the post using 'blog this'), please please let me know!

Thanks y'all! Have a great week! =)

Eye-Candy Friday!

A few of the blogs I read do "Eye-Candy Friday" features, posting pretty pics on Fridays. Here's one for you...with the focus on the "Eye" part of "Eye-Candy".

I took this at the beginning of the summer, when I spent a morning over at Cattle Headquarters watching and photographing the ordeal that is shoeing all the horses after the winter. Horses are pretty dumb, but beautiful anyways. =) You can see some other great horse photos here. Have a great weekend!