What are those crazy looking clouds?  These clouds are called Cumulo Mammatus clouds – and they generally accompany the strongest thunderstorms that produce tornadoes.  They are relatively rare – the last ones I saw were three years ago at my brother’s wedding.   Most of my friends in Minneapolis saw these clouds go overhead after a powerful evening thunderstorm last week that spawned tornados and multiple inches of rain around Minnesota.  None of that hit my neighborhood.. but my parents got some water in their basement when it rained 4-6″ in an hour.

Now, a note to self:

Self, when nasty thunderstorms roll through at dinnertime – grab a camera and get in position ‘cuz it’s gonna be epic.

I KNEW this was going to happen – but couldn’t get out since my mother was visiting.   I had to live with a snapshot of my house from the street… but it still turned out cool due to the intense reds of the sunset reflected off the clouds.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 17mm  1/20 sec @ f/8, ISO 1600

Today’s shot is one that I took on the Big Island of Hawaii back in December of 2009.  I had just completed making the “One Last Evening in Paradise” image (featured earlier this year) and was waiting for Jon Cornforth to finish his shoot.  While I was waiting, I framed up some rocks in the foreground to make an HDR of the setting sun.  I bracketed nine shots and made the above image.

The major problem with this picture is that it was a mile and a half from our car over very rough lava.   As you can see from the sun, there isn’t much light left in the day.  A good chunk of the hike was made well after the sun went down and at one point we relied on the light from our iPhones to pick our way over the rocks.  It was a pretty treacherous hike – but we had a few cairns of white rocks to guide our way back to the trail to the car.  Afterwards, we rewarded ourselves with a traditional Hawaiian porkchop dinner at an old hotel near Kona.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 30mm.  ISO 200, f/22.

It’s a rainy day in Minneapolis today – waves of heavy rain broken up by humid sunshine.  It’s a great day for ducks, not such a great day for photographers.  Subconsciously, I kept thinking of a day last month where I spent virtually the entire day avoiding rain while trying to do some landscape photography.  I was in Zion National Park – and it was a great day for ducks.

Today’s photo was taken on that day in Zion.  About a minute after this image was made, it started to hail and I bolted for the car.  The radar showed some very heavy weather coming in, so I decided to call it a day.   Since it was already midday and the driving rain, hail, and 50+ mph gusts weren’t going to allow me to shoot, I started my 40-minute trek back to my hotel.  Of course, the weather broke right as the sun was going down and I watched a magnificent sunset from my hotel.  Note to self: ride out the weather.

I’m going to sidetrack for a second to discuss my personal photography ethics.  Everyone has a different take on this, and all are fine.. but these are mine.   I’m a photographic artist.. not a documentarian or journalist.  This gives me a lot of latitude in post-processing to make the image how I want it to look.  I can summarize it in one short statement coined by Fredrick Van Johnson (from This Week in Photography) – the pixels are there to be abused.  This means that I’ll change cropping, color, composition, use HDR, selectively color, and so forth.  I’m totally okay with removing something from a picture – but I don’t add things in.

My giveback is that I am very open about sharing what I did to an image.  If I say I used HDR.. I used HDR.  If I say it’s straight from the camera unedited – it’s unedited.  It’s only fair and somebody may learn something from it.

Why the diatribe about editing ethics?  There’s a good reason.  Today’s image has some abused pixels.  I wanted a guinea pig image to test Photoshop CS5′s brand new Content-Aware Fill.  It allows you to select an intrusive object, and it makes the object go away.  Full disclosure – I used content-aware fill to remove three twigs and a rock.  From my initial tests – there are images where it works great and others where it doesn’t work at all.  This was nearly a perfect test case – all edits were done in seconds.  I’ve also used it to remove people in the background of a wedding shot – and that worked great as well.  It’s pretty cool – and I can’t wait to use it more.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 24-105 f/4L @60mm  ISO 50, f/22, 4 sec.

Late Night Maintenance on the Cumbres and Toltec

This picture is of the inside the maintenance shop for the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway in Chama, NM.  The 488 had just returned from its daily run bringing tourists over Cumbres pass and was about to be serviced in the Chama shop.  It had departed that morning from Antonito, CO bringing a half-dozen cars 64 miles through the mountains.  Since the 488 would be returning to Antonito in the morning, it was to be kept hot after the service is done so that a fire wouldn’t have to be recreated.

In this picture, they were just about to move it inside of the shop to start the nightly lubrication needed to keep the old engines in good working order.  A companion picture – my “Jiffy Lube” shot was posted earlier.  It can be found here:  I’d Like Your 29.99 Oil Change Special, Please

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 40mm.  ISO 100, f/9, 3 shots bracketed +/- 2 stops and merged to an HDR with LR/Enfuse.

… cool wind in my hair.. warm smell of colitas.. rising up through the air…

No, this isn’t California.. and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to stay at whatever the closest hotel is to this spot, though there is a pretty nice campground at the Valley of Fire.

The obvious question would be:

“If you are in a place like the Valley of Fire that is famous for the bright reddish orange rocks, why would you do a black and white picture?”

There a a couple of good reasons.  First, the subject of the picture is the road – not the rocks.  Second, this picture was taken at midday when there light was very contrasty and there was a fair amount of dust/haze in the air.  High Contrast + Black and White = worth a shot!

This highway is near the famous Elephant Rock.  In fact, I’m pretty sure Elephant Rock is about 10 paces to my right as I’m taking this picture.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a good picture of Elephant Rock because I didn’t realize that it is apparently okay to scramble onto the rocks for a better picture.  I was erring on the side of caution and stayed down on the road.

Don’t miss a fun side trip to a unique area the next time you are in Vegas – Valley of Fire is only 45 minutes away!

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L @ 70mm  ISO 100, f/6.3, 1/160 sec.

I’m going really big today with a 6-shot panoramic from the Valley of Fire near Las Vegas.  The above image is seriously reduced – but clicking on it will allow you to view it in larger glory.  It is still scaled down – SmugMug stopped me at 48,000,000 pixels!

This was taken after dusk with long exposures.  In a few places, you can see star trails if you zoom in.  It shows about 150 degrees of view from my vantage point on the desert floor.  This place is so beautiful and unique that single images don’t do it justice.  The red color is real – but it is more red than usual since the picture was taken after dark.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 40mm  ISO 200, f/11, 2.5 sec.   Stitching done with Photoshop CS4.

This my friends is Number Eighty One.  She’s a Wissota B-Modified dirt track stock car – and she’s the pride of Jared Boumeester of Waseca, MN.  Jared just finished building this Skyrocket-framed beast and yesterday was her maiden voyage at the Deer Creek Speedway in southeastern Minnesota.  I was in Waseca yesterday to have my taxes prepared and I stopped by to take a few glamour shots of #81.

I decided to have some fun with these pictures and went for something really grungy and radical looking.  It’s a dirt-track racer, after all!  The processing is over-the-top, and some people are going to instinctively hate it.  Others are going to love it.   This image was made by taking 9 different exposures and merging them as an HDR with Photomatix Pro.   Once I merged them, I tonemapped them into the wild scene you see above.  This technique is like cilantro – little bits of it are good, but you’d never want to eat a whole bowl of it.   I’d never use it on a nature shot – but unfortunately others do.  Because of that, this technique gets an ill-deserved bad rap.

Because I stepped out of the box and went for it – I’ve got a vibrant image that I love.  It fits the subject matter perfectly, and the car just looks fast sitting there.   There’s your lesson for today – don’t be afraid to ditch the comfortable and do something that isn’t your style.. you may get some wild fun results!

Wanna hear her roar?  Check out Jared revving her up yesterday on this iPhone video: http://yfrog.us/6bpj9z

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17mm TS-E f/4L.  ISO 200, f/6.3, exposures bracketed from 1/6400 to 1/25 sec.

This shot was taken early in the morning just below the Court of the Patriarchs at Zion National Park.  Most people when photographing this mountain range do it from the comfort of their car.  This is a nice view if you want the same picture as every tourist.  I found nicer views a hundred or so yards into the woods near the Virgin River.

Once the light hit the mountain range, I hiked down to the river hoping to get a nice strong reflection off the water of the mountains and I was not disappointed.  Zion is a very tough place to photograph if you try to get anything but the standard shots – the tight canyons make for extreme differences in dynamic range.

Here is one of the crazy rock formations that makes up the Valley of Fire.  The Valley of Fire is an amazing place – and it’s only an hour or so out of Sin City.  After spending a few days attending the WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Professionals International) conference, I scheduled a few days of landscape photography in the desert.  My first stop on my way to Zion National Park was here at Valley of Fire.  I arrived unfortunately right at the Golden Hour – so I had to get to work quickly.  I only got to stay for about an hour before it got dark and I made the most of it.  I really could have spent several more hours – but I’ll get a chance to shoot more on Sunday on my way back to the Las Vegas airport.

Here’s another image from the beautiful frosty morning that I spent at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum a couple of weeks ago.  I love bringing this barn into my images – it’s as if they positioned it on the hill above the meadow to make a perfect background to lead your eye into the image.  Yes, it’s not a mountain range – but it’s what we have to live with here in Minnesnowta.

This is actually a pretty severe crop into what was originally a horizontal picture.  I had too sweeping of a vista in the original shot, and the subject got lost.  I like this one much better – it’s a much simpler composition.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 70-200 f/4L @ 140mm  ISO 200, f/13, 1/250 sec.