chris_rutkowski's photostream  

I was up on Millicent Rogers Road shooting Cottonwoods & Storm Clouds when the light rapidly faded as a line of solid cloud quenched the sun's fire.

I saw that the line of shadow which had just swept over me would soon cross the fields by these trees. I'd seen these trees and fields many times and had long-hoped that circumstance would someday provide a photo op: if I got lucky, that time was now. I threw my gear in the back seat, jumped in, flew down to the road, grabbed a place to park, and rushed the couple of hundred yards to the likely spot.

As it turned out, I had 2 minutes to set up, compose, set the exposure (manual), then wait... just as the shadow line swept over me and across the field – what a rush! In the next 40 seconds the scene changed from a foreground bathed entirely in soft light - to the trees being enveloped in shadow - the light extinguished.

This, somewhere in the middle, was exactly what I wanted.

Technical note: Jim asked if this were IR (infrared). The answer is no. The bright foliage is fall foliage - bright yellow and orange - that in black and white, especially with the standard filters applied - red, green and yellow - want to turn white just as "normal" trees do in IR photography. Many of the photos in this series have this look - all for the same reason.

I felt someting like a "formal portrait" in much of what I shot in New Mexico; letting things stand proud and tall in the light - to tell their own story. My job was to get out of the way and let the places and things speak.

Most of the shots in the New Mexico group received very minimal processing: default settings in Adobe RAW, B&W filter applied to the image, then burn and dodge. Why? Because it just felt right.

i've thouight about putting some of these up in color too - no question color draws more attention than B&W. But not this one. Not now.

This is a schoolhouse. At least I think it's a schoolhouse. Could be, right? Or maybe a courthouse, or both. It's too far from any town I can see on the map to attach a name to it.

Got there courtesy of a long, steep, switch-backed climb up out of the Rio Grande Gorge on a boulder-strewn mostly one-lane dirt road more suitable to 4x4s than rental sedans. The only car we saw coming down at us was in fact a huge 4x4 driven by a small Hispanic woman laughing and shaking her head at us as she drove by. We got laughs! This made me ponder the wisdom of choosing this route.

In any event, this place is way out on the road to nowhere from the nowhere reached by that drive up from the gorge. As I stood there I'd swear I heard the giggles of children and the wise words of judges whispering in the wind.

Or maybe that was Judy using her iPhone