Thursday, February 09, 2017

Vantage Point...of a German Shepherd


In High School I did photo shoots of  my "punked out" friends in spiked hair, sunglasses and trench coats and developed the black and white photos in my step dad's dark room. In Art School I "masked out" half the exposed paper to put my roommate in a cereal box. I graduated in 1990, the year Adobe released Photoshop.
Eventually I learned photo editing software, updated my camera and updated it again when technology changed and I could afford it, but I never forgot my photography professor's description of a " Pinhole Camera"...a black painted box, with film inside and ....one single  pinhole for a lens and the implication was clear, it's not the camera that takes great photos.
Since Art School, I've never taken his challenge to shoot camera obscura photography, but I do believe there's a time to use my big bodied, big lens Nikon D3300 and there is a time to take out my phone camera, currently a LG V20.
Like when a photo-op presents itself crammed into a gondola with eight skiers who really wanted one more run down the slopes above Telluride, Colorado  and didn't mind or notice there was our rather large German Shepherd/ Lab dog residing on the floor, named Piper.
Luckily Piper didn't mind playing sardines with a bunch of skiers,
To use my Nikon to capture this moment, I'd had to of  stood up on the bench of the gondola conforming my body to the domed top or literally be outside swaying on the top of it.
Small, unobtrusive cameras captures moments of time far better for the reason people tend to not notice them and you can use them in cramped spaces. Small cameras that have the ability to capture vivid, light filled  moments like a bigger DSLR (digital single lens reflex camera) now that would be something.
A new company... Light.co  is claiming such a thing, introducing their Light L16 compact camera to the market and it is the exact opposite of the pin hole camera with...

"...a multiple lens systems to shoot photos at the same time,
then computationally fuses them into a DSLR-quality image."

Images of the Light L16 camera images are filled with amazing light and color, but it is the promise of what multi lenses will do with the "depth of field" that is most intriguing for me, each lens taking in essence a photo at a certain depth so they are all crisp and clear and then layering them together. 
Light.co's Pinterest board Here features photographers who share a picture from their favorite location, which can be a challenge now days with most digital photographers scanning through 1000's not 100's of choices,
Picking one photo was a tough one for me, living in the Four Corners where I've shot images both in the snowy  mountains of Colorado and red rock deserts of Utah over the same weekend. But the hastag #vantagepoint really stuck with me and I have no better example of a vantage point than capturing my very large black dog looking right in the camera with brown eyes asking me...."Do I really have to put up with this?"
I still wonder what would have happen if she decided not to?



Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Snow in the Mountains....


Below Ophir Pass at just under 10,000 feet above sea level is the little town of Ophir, Colorado, an old mining town that still has life for those wanting to live off the beaten path, literally just below where the plows stop plowing....

photo cred. @zetrocer, cause I didn't want to climb out of the truck...
(though he has not opened his twitter feed to the public...hum?)

                  

There is a "top of the world" feel on all sides of the town....


But the "village" below is lively and active, not the sort of mountain town for "tenderfoot's vacation homes...



There are a lot of young families living in Ophir. A lot of kids and a lot of dogs...



And a lot of snow equipment....


To protect  the only way out of town in the middle of winter because...


it is below this...


an avalanche shut with it's own warning sign, already buried in snow...


Even without an avalanche there is a lot of snow and some place no one will get to until the Spring thaw. 

Ophir's post office is on the other side of  the danger zone... 


nearer to Highway 145 that heads up and over another pass to....


to Telluride...


where most days there is "plein air" painting happening right in the middle of downtown...



And the "Ski Tree" still resides in Elks Park...


But it is always the surroundings, high mountains covered in snow that end the glorious show.. when the ski turns pink and the sun starts to go down.


Cause there ain't nothing like the fading light in the high country in the middle of winter.