Monthly Archives: October 2015

Stop Look At Me

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Sometimes you’re just walking along minding your own business intent on getting somewhere cool where you can take incredible pictures. Someplace where the light is fantastic, the content perfect, and all the elements are exactly where they should be. That place is probably down this path, around the corner and will be there right in front of you, the perfect incredible view. You just have to hurry so you get there before the light changes.

In your mind you see the type of images you want and you single-mindedly forge ahead, eyes down, brain shut down to everything but what might be right around the corner. You haven’t been to this spot yet and you haven’t actually seen the views you believe are there but you’re pretty sure they must be. So you don’t look to the right or the left you just plow ahead.

 As a photographer you train yourself to be aware of your surroundings, to look everywhere because that great shot might be right next to you and that works until you let your imagination put blinders on you. When that happens you can pass right by the picture you were looking for. That’s what happened when this picture was taken.

What had been a non-descript image because the light was flat and hidden behind a cloud made this view one you would walk right by, not giving it a second glance. The wall was ok but nothing special and the background wasn’t even noticeable. Let’s go, don’t waste your time here, let’s get to where the good pictures are. Then the sun came out. And like a deep-sea Angler fish dangling its lighted bait in front of it, it highlighted the spectacular lime green leaves to draw you in, painted the grass a beautiful golden orange and caused the small trunks of the willows behind it to go pure black in perfect contrast, and there you were, you were hooked. Here it was the image you had been hunting for, the one you had written off in your mind, right here in front of your face. Your red embarrassed face. You nearly lost this shot. The morale of this story is. Keep your imagination but turn the blinders off. Keep looking everywhere, and most importantly, a picture in your viewfinder is worth two in the bush.

Note: If you want to see this view for yourself go to Aztec Ruins National Monument near Farmington, New Mexico. Take the path to the left and watch. Pay particular attention to the drab, non-descript foliage and when you see the sun come out and the foliage begins saying Stop Look at Me, take your picture.

Eye Candy

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This is eye candy. It’s up there today because it’s time for something so pretty that you can’t believe it actually exists. Yet it does. Many of you may recognize it as the Narrows in Zion National Park where the Virgin river wends it way through the park and you may have even walked through its icy waters to see other wonders further up-stream. If you have, isn’t it incredible.

It’s the middle of the week and you might just need something like this to brighten your day and give you hope that you can make it ’til the weekend. If so and it worked, you’re welcome. Tune in again and we’ll try and help you with another shot of beauty.

The Art Of Snarling

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An important lesson in a young grizzly cubs life is the art of snarling. There is an etiquette to it. A time and place where it is acceptable behavior, and first and foremost, the actual act of snarling itself. How to hold your mouth, what kind of stance you should take, the volume, intent, sincerity, all these things have to be learned, then practiced endlessly until perfected.

This cub has just been informed that it is soon going to be nap time and like all kids he doesn’t need a nap. He’s not sleepy and definitely wants to stay up, winter or no winter. Mom says you’re going to take a nap whether you want to or not. Mother grizzlies do not have long conversations with their young about what she wants them to do. There is none of this convincing stuff, or cajoling, or offering to take them to Wally world if they’re good and take their naps like good little grizzlies. She just gives them a swat, picks them up in her mouth and stuffs them in the den. The “don’t come out or you’ll really get it” is understood.

But this is a young grizzly and some defiance is not only understood but expected otherwise it wouldn’t be a grizzly, it’d be like a black bear. No, no, no, not that, not like a black bear, defiance is definitely called for. So drawing on the limited knowledge of snarling etiquette the young bear moves the proper distance away from mom which is the swiping range of that big front paw, turns its head slightly to the left and emits a low growl and forms the proper mouth position. This is not the equivalent of a full-blown, foot-stamping, screaming in the aisles, tearing open the candy bag, type of snarl. That would get it a shot across the snout that would knock it half silly. This is the “I don’t want to go to bed yet” snarl. It’s been done well, mom pretends she didn’t hear it and the youngster has just completed his first successful snarl.

It’s feeling pretty good about things right now so it wanders off to snarl and growl at the grass and the opening to the ground squirrels hole, and it’s really wishing a magpie or even a raven would come by so it could really give them a good snarl. It would go up the hill a little to give those boulders what for too, but actually it’s feeling a little sleepy and mom is digging up that ground squirrel and maybe it will just go down there and lay down and watch her. Just for a minute. Not to take a nap. Just to rest a minute. Then it’ll get up and really snarl a bunch.

Nature’s Calligraphy

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As you drive along the Mississippi river near Lacrosse, Wisconsin you will pass along the blue stone cliffs that line the river bank. There is barely room for the highway between the cliffs and the river’s edge. You must stop and get out of your car to see the cliffs in their full glory.

The foliage that grows on the cliff face ranges from full-grown trees to shrubs and small plants, and were carefully chosen by nature to fit harmoniously into this picture. Being Wisconsin and being Fall every single color imaginable was trotted out for your amazement. For those among you who have to say “Those colors aren’t real. He must have Photoshopped that.” You’re right I did. I didn’t add any colors but I sure as hell enhanced that red. It was more than red enough but there was something about the way it contrasted with the blue of the stone that I loved, so I kept bringing out more red and more red, and more until there you have it. Red. Like tons of it. I was younger then. And besotted with the incredible range of colors that are so different from my home in the west. I take full responsibility for it. So to those of you purists out there who feel somewhat vindicated that you called me on the red and some of the other colors too, I can only say ” Yeah, I did it, Deal with it.” If you can’t and it just makes you crazy I say “OK you’ve made your point . Move along here. There’s nothing more to see. Thanks for stopping by.”

After looking at this picture for years, it was actually taken back in 2003, it dawned on me that it looked like calligraphy. The red plants forming the Kanji that says something undecipherable. A message from Mother Nature herself. Maybe it says something like “Beauty resides here, look and be in awe” or perhaps “Red is the color of love and life and good fortune. Be at one with it.”  or possibly “Return Hotel Bicycles to rack on Red street, or Tremble and Be Ashamed.” We’ll never know as this particular phrase has never been translated. I’m going with the first one, I think, the beauty resides here, one. That works the best for me.

Thunder In The Valley

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This is Monument valley. The same Monument valley John Wayne road thru in Stagecoach and many other films. Usually when you see pictures of the valley it’s under bright sun and clear skies, with the buttes in stark relief against the sky, hardly a cloud to be seen, the timeless desert shot from countless calendars. But that’s not always the case as can be seen in the image above.

Monument valley averages around 7″ of rain a year and as we drove towards the entrance in this storm it looked like it was getting all 7″ at once. If you ‘re from the Midwest or the northern tier of the our country you are used to seeing rain storms that last all day or longer sometimes. That’s usually not how our western storms go. With few exceptions our storms race in with an unconstrained fury and drop all of its moisture in a hurry. Our storms don’t fool around. The energy builds up over the mountains, the clouds grow into the very upper reaches of the sky then all hell  breaks loose. Rain, hail, sometimes even snow if you’re real lucky, and wind to blow your lawn chairs into New Mexico.

This storm has just about completed its job as you can see by the sun trying to break through the clouds, yet it is still raining hard enough on the highway that the windshield wipers are having trouble handling it. When a storm like this happens you just wait it out. The ground is going to be saturated and you want to stay way clear of any arroyos or small ditches, even low depressions in the highway as all that water has to go somewhere and it all doesn’t soak into the ground. It moves through the area with enough force to wash away cars and trucks as it they were rubber ducks and it happens real fast.

The roads in the valley are unpaved and made up of a combination of clay, decomposed sandstone, some gravel and that combination, when water is added to it, turns into an adhesive mixture that will coat your tires and fill up your wheel wells until you cannot turn your steering wheel. Besides having the adhesive strength of gorilla glue it turns into a cement-like substance that nearly has to be jack hammered out when it sets up. The general rule of thumb is, don’t drive on those roads until they’ve had a chance to dry out some.

This shot was taken during April in the mid-afternoon and the next morning you could drive the roads with no problems, in fact in some areas you could raise dust as you drove. That is if you didn’t make the mistake of parking in some low area where water runs through. If you did you’re probably in Lake Powell right now. Things happen quickly out here and you need to pay strict attention to your surroundings, but that’s just part of the drama of the West. Some folks thrive on it.

Shadows Of Echoes

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It isn’t often that you can visit a place like Spruce Tree house at Mesa Verde National Park and have a large portion of it to yourself. You must go on a tour and they can be quite large and of course everyone is very excited and full of questions. The rangers guiding the tour do a good job of keeping the kids from climbing the walls or falling into the kivas. People are yelling to the others in their party to come look at this while they are looking at that. The experts within each group tell each other incorrect facts in a very authorative way. And of course because the structure is built inside an acoustically perfect cavern the noise is incredible. The slightest sound is amplified back to you as if your iPod was set on 10.

But every once in a while the gods take pity on you and you are accorded special privileges, like being in a tour with only three other people, and those other people were either very soft-spoken or mute. Consequentially it was quiet, so quiet that even footsteps made with rubber soled tennis could be heard. If you moved past the partial walls looking into the open rooms and floors that are no longer there, and thought about how it must have been to live here, you can imagine their movements and if you listen hard enough it’s almost as if you can hear those sounds, so faint it’s like you’re hearing the shadows of those echoes. The soft sounds of sandals against the rock floors and the rasping sound of a woven basket rubbing against the ladder as it is carried up to be stored away. They’re very faint sounds. In fact you may not be hearing them at all, but then again if your imagination is strong enough, you may.

There are legends and memories, and strange and wonderful sounds locked away in these stones and sometimes they come out. And if you get lucky and have your imagination set at full strength you can hear them. It doesn’t take much, just stand still and listen. You’ll hear them. Maybe.

The Meeting

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Way back in the early days, like when people listened to FM and you bought cd’s of your favorite singers, and gas was like Two bucks a gallon (and we were plenty P.O.’d about that I can tell you, those oil guys were making way too much money jacking the price up like that,) The Director was just getting started in the business of switching from a film camera to a digital one. I know plenty of you are saying “Yeah, so, big deal.” Well, it was a big deal if you were a photographer.

The big deal was now you could take as many pictures as you wanted, hundreds, even more and not give a fig about the cost. “Ffffft”,  you would say and snap away. Pictures were free, and the money was easy. Prior to that you bought expensive rolls of film that let you take only 36 pictures at a time which you then sent out to be developed at a high rate of cost, and when you got them back there was like one or two that you could actually do something with. Digital was like Nirvana. Even if the quality of the image wasn’t as good as a good film picture, I refer you back to the statement, “Pictures were free, and the money was easy.”

So what did you do with this new found photographic freedom? You went to places like Rocky Mountain National Park and held meetings with the locals. You needed to set up schedules, availability of the subjects, get releases signed, moderate disagreements between those that didn’t get along and generally handle business. You were going to be shooting a lot of pictures and it was important to nail the details down.

Sometimes this was tricky business to do. In the photo above which we dug out of our archives to show you exactly what we were working with here, you can see representatives of two groups that usually didn’t trust each other. One reason was the coyote would sometimes sneak in amongst the herd and try to gnaw on a newborn calf, and sometimes the elk would try and stomp the coyote into a flattened shape on the meadow’s floor. This rift had been going on for some time and made things difficult for the wildlife photographer to get good photos. So a series of meetings were held to try and set up a truce that would allow for the photographer to get his pictures taken without the added drama of internecine warfare.

Unfortunately that meeting didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped as there had been an intrusion into the herd the night before and although the coyote denied it, there were paw prints and bite marks on one of the fawns which of course brought the herd enforcers into play, young spikes with something to prove, and before you could say “Hey, Don’t say that.”, ugly things were said. And as we feared before we could come to a consensus at this meeting, the spike made good on his threat to stomp the coyote, even if he wasn’t the same one that was the perpetrator and the meeting was called off. This was one of the few failures we have had as we were never allowed to shoot both species together again.

Time passed, cameras got better, film was forgotten, and agreements and understandings were developed with the locals. As a photographer you were able to get brand new digital images that you were never able to get with film and life got a lot easier for everyone. Except for those two groups whose names we won’t mention but whose initials are Coyote and Elk, we still haven’t got that worked out.

The image above was taken with a vintage Nikon D70 camera and a huge telephoto, a 70-300mm with no image stabilization, at 6 megapixels on a CCD sensor back in 2004. You will have to go way back in Google’s archive to find out what those ancient specifications mean. Now you have things like ginormocams, zoomilators, pixel confronters, and anti-alias predictor filters. I could go on and on. It’s a heady time to be a photographer. All you need is money and you can take as many free photos as you want. Hundreds even. What a world.