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Sunrise Over Foggy Valley

Sunrise Over Foggy Valley
Sunrise Over Foggy Valley

Sunrise Over Foggy Valley

Winter “Golden Hours” can be markedly colorcast. This is the scene as I experienced it. 99 percent of the 1.2 people per square mile living in this country were not aware of this as living up this high topographically is an exception. I only know one residence on this ridge. Everyone else was under a blanket of fog down in the valley.

Here the gold light was reflective / pervasive off the white snow. The mist / fog was thick on the valley floor hundreds of feet below. This is a Wyotana backroad over looking both Wyoming (right) and Montana (left of the sun). A few miles south of the border watching the sun rise in an atmosphere saturated with ice suspended in the air. A good place in the world to see the east horizon 100 miles out. That horizon is actually in South Dakota but the ice mist here obscures it efficiently. This time of year the sun is actually setting just north of straight east. The dividing line between Wyoming and Montana is seriously blurred in my world with most of my photos having ground and sky in both states. Morning / Evening light is mostly east and west so I’m always looking down the borderline so to speak.

Yup everything was covered by Hoar Frost and Rime Snow that morning. This is very late in the stage play that was performed without much audience buy myself. By extension of my captures your there though. I see all these

Location: High Ridge (Ridge 5) along the Montana/Wyoming border.

Title: Sunrise Over Foggy Valley

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Golden Locust Purple Flax

Golden Locust Purple Flax
Golden Locust Purple Flax

Golden Locust Purple Flax. ( From last spring about 45 days from when this posts. )

Boy I am really tired of Mud and Brown Season. Typically we will have had several spring snows after the mid-winter cold subsides. The wet spring storms usually move through. I’m not seeing those just yet. I’d like to see 4 inches each from weekly 31 degree storms from not until early May. A foot or more of snow would really help the apparent snow drought we are currently in. All the snow has melted.

The grass is still brown and matted from the snow cover. As I’m looking through images to finish, I run across this lovely image of some Lavender Flaw poppiing up through a low branch of Golden Locust tree. The locust is naturalized into the back yard gardens. It lives protected in the Bliss Dinosaur Ranch Homestead’s Compound. This area is fenced in with electric wire. That tends to keep the deer out. It’s not a deer “Proof” zone but it is deer resistant.

Such deer “proofing” work enables scenes like this otherwise, they destroy ornamentals mostly. We have in the past lost thousands of dollars or plantings to deer that were persistent to penetrate the 6 foot fence and 16 foot wide cattle gates we have. I had to go to 8 feet high and keep gates closed at night to keep them out lolol. Everybody needs some Purple in their life once a week ……

Location: The Homestead: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, (In the Windbreak) Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Golden Locust Purple Flax

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Veiled Sunset Tree Frame

Veiled Sunset Tree Frame
Veiled Sunset Tree Frame

Veiled Sunset Tree Frame

When I get a heavily blue and gold veiled sun, I’m all about getting it behind and in focus with terrestrial objects. It’s always a good thing when this particular tree lines up with astronomic objects (sun moon). The Lone Tree on a Ridge is about 1/4 miles out from a parallel ridge in this capture. The sun is a little further behind.

Photographic Musings: The clouds were very thick and obscuring with the sun mostly filtered out behind the veil. I am as always, reactive to the light with only a bit of premonition to guide me to the next spot from here. Half the game of photography is knowing when you got the shot and it’s time to move on. Otherwise you spend too much time at the site and miss other opportunities. I move pretty rapidly from interesting situation/alignments of the sun or the moon by driving along parallel ridges. I work the “Shadow” line by driving it and “seeing” what develops as I move. The cool stuff to photograph as in “I know it when I see it”. There are times I see things that are virtually impossible to capture.

This veiled sun was ‘easy”. A fully lit sun behind this tree is a common occurrence but without neutral density glass filters in front of the camera, even these Sony Super Cameras would be tough. The tree limbs would be totally washed out. I never use glass filters or even do I use a pretty much standard UV haze filter. I find they get in the way of the image more than “fixing ” what they do. A UV filter does protect your lens glass from scratches though and is probably worth it for what you would do mostly. I point cameras at the sun a lot and glass infront of the lens has been an issue in the past for me. Just saying….

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands. Lone Tree Sky Show

Title: Veiled Sunset Tree Frame

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Totem Pole in the Sky

Totem Pole in the Sky
Totem Pole in the Sky

Totem Pole in the Sky . (ART, Did I mention this was art. Made by mirroring a real sky onto itself.)

The Spirits in the sky here in Wyotana linger and only show about 1/2 of themselves . So I help… 😜👻👀

From Top to Bottom: (A totem is the sum of it’s parts)

An Owl overlooks the scene on top.

Riding on a Swallow for speed,

standing on the Raven’s spirit for wisdom

The Raven relies on the Bat

to see things that other cannot perceive.

The Bat resides over the Cat

The Cheshire(is) cat as a base. Cats are widely regarded by many cultures past and present as fully capable of magic. Some consider it good magic, others not so much. All agree it’s magic…

All rely on the cat as the base of the totem of sky spirits in this capture. Of course there is the big snake face the whole image makes 😝

I find that I can see/visualize these results as I’m photographing skies. It’s not that I see shapes in clouds or anything. Certainly I do lolol. Habitually so… But I can fold the image back on itself inside of my head. I see these live as I examine the thousands of images that go past my computer desktop each week. I pretty much know as I’m taking the image that I’m “using this one for ART”.

So this image stood out to me It only took a bit over 100 clicks/clones to make this. It’s pretty photorealistic except for a few things. It is VERY close to the way I visualized it out in the field through the lens. It is art did I mention?👅 I did squeeze the image a tad as well. The left 1/2 of the image is a full 3×2 scale photo. Mirrored back on itself.

Location :Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands (Wyotana)

Title: Totem Pole in the Sky . 18 inches square aspect.

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Winter Prairie Sunset

Winter Prairie Sunset
Winter Prairie Sunset

Winter Prairie Sunset

Simple perspectives are my stock and trade. I have tried to make an art out of using the things that nature provides for me to photograph. There are so many little area of zen popping up everywhere I glance. The problem of course is there are so many and so little time so I just concentrate on the obvious stuff. Trying not to stand on my head or bend in a direction my design specifications don’t conform to. Fortunately this process involves a lot of walking on uneven ground carrying some camera weight up top. It keeps me in shape but more important it keeps me connected to the earth. Walking about is how I hunt dinosaurs in this country. Watching the earth is what I do.

Being very earth centric, I’ve spent my whole life considering geologic processes. Most are unaware of them and “blissfully” so. As a student of paleoenvironmental analysis, I see below this landscape and imagine the world that laid the sediment that eventually became those boulders. Clues in the rocks tell me books of information by their presence/characteristics. Geologists see past the beautiful sunset (enjoy those too). We imagine what processes leading to that rocks formation. I have a 3 D map in my head of the orientation of the rock layers under my feet. A useful thing to keep handy at times ….

It is somewhat complex to figure out what processes worked the sands these rocks are made of. That Hell Creek/Lance formation sand was deposited 66 +million years ago according to MANY scientists…. That’s 48.3 billion sunsets/sunrises. Actually numbers like that easily flow into my understanding of things when I imagine the inside structure of the earth, processes that occur now occurred then as well. You might say the perspective I have goes a bit under the surface of what I “look at”. Time is a 4th dimension to me. I don’t just look for fossils here, I look at the rocks to see if they are likely to have fossil in them first…..

Speaking of time, enjoy the snowy sunset and the Close/ Far Perspective.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands.

Title: Winter Prairie Sunset

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Alpenglow and a Windmill at -20 degrees F

Alpenglow and a Windmill at -20 degrees F
Alpenglow and a Windmill at -20 degrees F

Golden Alpenglow behind the Windmill… It was 20 below zero at th3e time…. I took this last winter down in a very remote part of northern Campbell County. This windmill has views of the Devils Tower and Missouri Buttes but those are to the right of this angle. That is ice not flowing water.

Location: Wyoming/Montana borderlands.

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Reflections of a Windmill at Dawn #23

Reflections of a Windmill at Dawn #23
Reflections of a Windmill at Dawn #23

This farm pond 3.5 miles out into the backcountry of my remote ranch is never easy to get to in the daylight. Two track ranch roads depending on how wet the ground is are always fun to negotiate :). I put 3500 miles on my ATV up here last year for example. All backcountry photography related with a tad of ranching thrown in.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands.