Week 36 - 2015 in Photographs

Day 246

I thought for a while it was going to be a black and white week. First three are. It was largely due to the smoke from the west coast fires being blown in to the state. No it did not turn all the colors off, but it took the blue out of the skies. Landscape photos with white skies just are not good. Black and white seemed to solve that issue. And framing the shot or cropping it to minimize or eliminate skies. It was days of smoky skies.

Day 247

Fortunately I have become a lot more comfortable with black and white post processing. And even without noisy, or cloud filled skies, I managed.

Day 248

Day 249 was an attempt to work with color on the same grey day as the photos above. A filter I love using on old cars managed to get some blue in the sky.

Day 249

And the skies at dawn are not that blue to begin with. But dawn was when they were most likely to have some blue in them because the smoke laid down and became haze in the valleys. Day 250 was taken on the Road to Raton to drop off paintings at the International Bank Exhibit. I always allow enough travel time to stop and take pictures when going somewhere.

Day 250

Then there is the approach of using the gray skies to your advantage. They do take distracting details out of the background like the mountains barely visible in this truck photo. I obscured them even more with a vignette treatment. I very much like this handling of an old International truck I have photographed before at the Eagle Nest Museum. It did require getting down on the ground for the angle. Aah, the sacrifice us photographers make.

Day 251

If the blue goes out of the sky it goes out of the reflections of the sky as well but not as much. In my years of doing pond reflections I have found the sky reflected in the water is almost always more blue than the sky itself so I seldom take photographs with the sky and the water in them. The haze did seem to fog the reflection so I worked with that and minimized the saturation of this photograph. It brought out the ripples made by a fish breaking the surface. This was how I worked up to black and white originally. It gives the photo an aged look I quite like.

Day 252

The smoke is now gone so bright colors will be more featured in the coming week of photographs. Check daily posts out at Binford-Bell Studio.