Fort Photo's photostream  

Happy Floral Friday All! Here's a cosmos from near the end of last summer that was catching the sun just right.

A road following Snowmass Creek in the Colorado Rockies seems to lead the eye right into winter.

Image Notes: Handheld HDR based off of 7 frames, processed in the newest version of SNS HDR (known for its natural output and the new masking features rule!).

This view from Fossil Point Overlook, also known as Thelma and Louise Point, offers impressive views of a nicely iced Colorado River as it flows into Canyonlands National Park, Utah. This was the first time I've seen ice flows in the river like this, it was really neat!

It was right here where the iconic ending of the movie Thelma and Louise was filmed, though most folks go looking for it at Deadhorse State Park (a view of the area from above, but this is where the car drove off the cliff into the "Grand Canyon"). It's a bit off the beaten track, so we usually have had this overlook to ourselves when we visit. It was my birthday when we visited on this day and again we had the place to ourselves with my wife doing yoga on the rocks and me taking far too many photos. ;-)))

Image Notes: Triple-processed RAW: once for sky, once for shadows and once for mid-tones. I used Tony Kuyper's luminosity masks techniques for assisting in blending the results together. Canyons make for some of the most challenging post-processing for sure!

***Please View Large on Black to Best See the Stars (press "L" for lightbox, or click here)***

When light pollution is low the Milky Way really shines! This was taken near Encampment, Wyoming in a favorite dark skies location of mine.

TGIF All!

The Quandrantids Meteor Shower peaked this week on Jan. 4th. I wasn't able to go out of the city so I set up in my backyard, which happily has one of its best night sky views pointed right at the meteor shower radiant.

Thanks to the strong light pollution of the city I only saw three bright ones and a few dim ones, though I did see one brilliant green meteor. So, where are all the meteors in this image? There actually is one very dim green one that I'm going to guess is the brilliant one but it barely registered above the city light pollution (good luck finding it, it's near the branches on the left side of the center tree. Not quite exactly what I was hoping for, but at least I now have a cool night sky image from our backyard!

Image Notes: This is a stack of 269 25 second exposures at 17mm, f/3.2, ISO 1250. I altered WB to 3450 K to limit the effects of light pollution and did further color correction in post. The foreground came from shots exclusively shot for such and was blended to the frame after the star trails image was stacked. Finally for stacked star trail smoothing I tried out Star Tracer for my first time. It's still a bit of heavy lifting to mask out the foreground and set all the star points, but it really does work a treat on smoothing out the Morse Code that can come from stacking at times. Check out a trial of the program here.