Week 29 - 365 day challenge in photography

The week in photography began slowly. You are probably tired of hearing about it but life has been busy. I relied on photos I had previously taken to meet the daily challenge. There are always those photos you take but do not get back around to doing justice too. The one below falls into that category. In the month of August I am going to devote more time to learning some new post processing techniques like filling and layering and object removal, etc.

And I want to dedicate more camera time to shadows. I was quite happy with how the one below came out. But my skills at shadows are not nearly as developed as my mastery of reflections. Yes, I do think practice has made me quite good at reflections.

Day 197

Day 198

The rains brought out the flowers and the butterflies so I got to devote some lens time to working on my macro skills. I do not technically have a macro lens so my flowers are either taken with my long zoom which does quite well as a macro or my wide angle with ample cropping. The long lens means I can stay at a distance and not scare the butterflies.

Day 199

Day 200

Thunderstorms re-entered my area of focus. Because of rising thermals some of these clouds became enormous. The valley floor to approximate tops of mountains is about 3000 feet so you do the math of tops of mountains to tops of clouds.

Day 201

 More macro practice. My sister, and fellow photographer, Deborah Binford Baker, is the master of the macro. I feel blessed to have an ever widening circle of photographer friends. I gain a lot of inspiration and knowledge from being out with them on exhibitions. See Binfords' Back Country Photography for more of my sister's work.

I got out of the neighborhood the end of this week! My friend, Terry, came in from Virginia and we hit the road. Literally. This will be the third year she has come out to New Mexico and we have taken in the photographic opportunities. For an introduction to the work of Terry Atkin Rowe see tArt - Photography and Art.

Always fun to be out with another photographer. It seems to increase my own creativity. You are standing side by side pointing your cameras often at the same object and I just feel driven to somehow do it differently. See it differently. Week 30 and 31 should be an explosion of creative images.

I must confess, however, in the instance of the photo below it was happy accident. I had my camera on my wrist harness and reached up to adjust the stampede strap on my hat so it would not be blown off and accidentally depressed the shutter button a few times.

Day 202- Walking the high bridge

The grinning truck, however, was deliberate. Admittedly when I was standing in front of this grill it was reminding me of something from a Stephen King novel. The Ford pickup is a basis of a homemade camper that served as a home for one of the notables in Taos. She is now less than mobile and her former home is a piece of lawn art at the B & B where my friend stayed, the Old Taos Guesthouse. Was invited to breakfast before my friend left for Santa Fe.

Day 203

Note: The above blog has been amended from that originally posted. In my early days of blogging I was informed that beyond a correction of a typo such things were just not done. But I confess to having the week entirely wrong and had posted one photo in both Week 28 and Week 29 blogs. That just would not do because it left this delightful old truck dangling between weeks in never, never land.

Mea Culpa.