Week Eight - 2017 in Photographs

Day 50

 This week is about mountains. Even the two pictures of trunks of trees are about mountains. About my mountains. Those which surround where I live. They are on national forest land surrounded by ranches and homes of people who love looking at those mountains. And the air is so clear and clean the view is almost always fantastic. The skies so blue and free of clouds mostly I seek out the cloudy days to record. It is sort of the visual equivalent of man bites dog of which Mark Twain wrote.

Day 51

Day 52

 And that explanation also explains the tree trunks below. I remember key lines from Mark Twain but also sentences from books on photography or art. I have that sort of brain. And this one photography book (I never remember the titles) said you did not have to have the top and bottom of a tree in a photograph. And in fact that could be limiting. So I give you must the bottoms in the next two photographs.

Day 53

Day 54

And except for the very last photograph I have decided it applies to mountains too. Do you need more than just the tops to have it be a photograph of a mountain?

Day 55

Day 56

And so I see this photograph as not so much a photograph of a mountain range as a portrait of a ranch at its base.

Week Seven - 2017 in Photographs

Day 43

 This week begins and ends with a sunrise. And then luck and location gave me the opportunity to photograph some wildlife in the area. Deer seem more prevalent then elk currently. The elk are probably still up above me because it has been a warm winter. They should be down in May to calve.

Day 44

 With the warmer weather I decided to photograph the melting snow on the mountains and the hill sides.

Day 45

 And then I decided to try a black and white version of my favorite mountain range. The textures show up better in the black and white I believe.

Day 46

Day 47

 I usually go for beauty over cute but I could not resist these three fawns from this last spring.

Day 48

Day 49

Week Six - 2017 in Photographs

Day 36

 Confession. I have no photo to post for day 43. I have had issues with getting out there with the camera. And today, since it didn't snow as promised, I may do still life photography as I clean up the flat surfaces in the studio. My attention is definitely divided. But I try to remember to take out the camera and snap something.

Day 37

 Fortunately flowers bloom around me. And the sun shines and casts shadows across the snow.

Day 38

Day 39

 And there are still the subjects I am trying to get just the right composition on. This one gets very close.

Day 40

 And then there are the "assignments" I get like taking a great photo of a house guest.

Day 41

 And then there is playing around with the photos which didn't quite work as they came off the camera. And I confess I have two uploads on the computer I have not post processed. But I did take the photos. It is like leaving a half exposed roll of film in the camera. Yes, I am that old.

Day 42

Week Five - 2017 in Photographs

Day 29

A friend of mine posted on social media that she was wandering around lost again and I totally understood what she meant by that. Me too. And that really showed up today as I searched for a Day 36 photo to post on Binford-Bell Studio. The folder for the coming week was empty. A quick perusal of my uploaded photo files shows I have fallen really behind on post processing. As much as I would like to believe my art is a stabilizing influence in my life there are times the chaos in the world destabilizes that.

And when the Thursday morning massacre occurred in my little world chaos reigned supreme. It is sad when politics make it unsafe for artists. That said let me apologize for the scattered nature of this week's offerings. And I am not really sure next week will be better. I have to reorder a lot of my life because of Thursday. I was deeply involved with the arts in my neighboring town and that will no longer be the case. Ultimately that will give me more time for art and photography. But I have to divest myself of a lot of groups I supported.

Day 30

Shakespeare said, "First thing we do is kill all the lawyers."

But if you want to make a society soulless first you suppress all the artists. Hilter took it one step further and stole all the art from every country he conquered. In our country you just take away all opportunities to display their art, cut all funding to the arts, and then denounce them as unnecessary. Hell, who needs photographers now that we have iphones? Next they take the internet. They already want to slow it down for all but corporations.

Okay, I will admit to being a bit overly dramatic about now. I have been trumped.

Day 31

Day 32

Day 33

Day 34

Day 35

Week Four - 2017 in Photographs

Day 22

For the love of trees. As a child I was the first in my class to draw trees with branches; not the trunk with a balloon of green over the top. Or even the trunk with limbs coming off at right angles. For some reason even as young as five I knew there was an intricate pattern to the branches on trees. And decades later I still love drawing trees. And photographing them. Even the conifers which never bare their branches. But there is a pattern to their needle covered limbs. And the snow can define that.

This week I focused on trees: singly or in groups but all with snow. Trees in winter do well in a black and white treatment. And they are suited for a vertical composition. I need a vertical photograph or two or three for a Music From Angel Fire competition I am entering.

Week five will no doubt have more trees and more vertical compositions.

Day 23

Day 24

Day 25

Day 26

Day 27

Day 28

Week Three - 2017 in Photographs

Day 15

 I promise more color in the third week of the year 2017. But this has been a strange January. Even the snow as been atypical. The weather services have not been able to make up their minds on forecasts. Wintry mix is over used and rain/snow mix once seen here only in October or late March as been the standard.

NOAA persists in using the word accumulation for what I always used to call a dusting. Note: Accumulation of less than 1/2 an inch is a dusting. And snow of a greater amount covered with a thick layer of ice is not a wintry mix. It is dangerous.

Day 16

 That said it has made for some interesting photo opportunities. The snow does not cover all the grasses. And with the hardened surface makes for for some nice shadows. And the clouds have been memorable.

Day 17

Day 18

 But the 30-55 mph winds with gusts up to 70 has made spending time in a green house preferable on those days.

Day 19

Day 20

 I photographed the asperitas clouds above and below one morning out and about with my camera. My father was a pilot and he taught me all about clouds. He didn't mention these. I had to look them up and discovered they were not actually identified and named until 2009. Which raises the question of where they were before that time. I discovered the Cloud Appreciation Society. There do seem to be photos of this sort of cloud captured in Tasmania in 2004. So why are they popping up over the mountains of New Mexico?

Day 21

I love them. I invite them back. I am also thrilled there are people who openly admit to appreciating clouds. I want to study them. The clouds. The members of the society are welcome to visit too.

Week Two - 2017 in Photographs

Day Eight
Cimarron River

Next week is going to be more colorful. I promise. But this is not just about my mood. The opening weeks of January are grey. Especially if there is no snow. In the past during this time I have escaped into my studio and focused on still life compositions with reds and golds. This year what I saw is what you get.

The weather was unseasonably warm so even the Cimarron River wasn't frozen. And the roads were passable and the gates open to allow me to penetrate into lands off the main roads.

Day Nine
The Palisades in Cimarron Canyon

The Palisades are probably the most photographed feature in Cimarron Canyon. I often wonder what those with just smart phones come up with. And maybe, in their eye, something better. I, on the other hand, am almost always a bit disappointed in my recording of this imposing cliff face which is never totally in sun due to the narrowness of the canyon.

Day Ten

Day Eleven
Vermejo Park Rank

 Day Eleven breaks a basic black and white photography rule. It does not have a noisy (translate that as busy) sky. There was not a cloud in the incredibly blue sky. But in full color the photograph became about the sky and not the cliff wall which was quite noisy with shadows.

Day Twelve
Vermejo Park Ranch

Day 13
Vermejo Park Ranch

Days 13 and 14 are the true colors of a dry New Mexico January. The lack of significant snows in November and December allow the grasses to remain standing. A wet summer made the grasses particularly nice and in enough abundance the deer and buffalo did not eat them to the ground. But the winds took all the leaves off the trees.

Day 14
Cimarron, New Mexico