Playing Hookie

I found myself back in Pocatello last week for another round of family challenges. It all came down as expected and will no doubt add to an already full plate for me, but that is how it goes with families. While looking at a map of Idaho I realized that Yellowstone National Park is only 200 miles north of Pocatello. Here in the West we don't think much about jumping in the car and driving 200 miles although with the price of gas that is changing. I had rented a small car that got some fairly decent gas mileage so on Monday after I dealt with my responsibilities I took off for Yellowstone, to play hookie for the afternoon. The sun in Idaho does not set until about 9:30 and there is light in the sky for at least an additional hour and a half so I had plenty of time even with the long drive. It was nice to be able to pull off and take pictures without feeling like I was inconveniencing someone else.



It is an incredible area - or at least the geyser area in the western portions of the park is amazing. It is a huge park and in a day trip I did not have enough time to see more than a small portion of the park. When I go back - perhaps to bring my brother home I may have more opportunity to see more of this beautiful spot and spend more time. I took over 150 photographs and uploaded over 40 to my flickr site. It is the sort of dramatic landscape that draws me and if I were close enough to spend some real time in its highways and byways I could make a career out of it - as many photographers have done.



If you would like to see more of the photos from Yellowstone or some of my other work go to my flickr site at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/radiann

Infrared photography

Lately I have been seeing Infrared shots in the photo places where I hang out. They intrigue me. There is something about the glow of green foliage and the dark sky contrasted with puffy white clouds that I find visually captivating. I am thinking about having one of my cameras retrofitted for IR photography. However the process will cost about 400 dollars - or almost as much as I paid for the camera body. Its a conundrum. There is a method to do this type of work through a filter but it is time consuming and one of the photographers that I particularly admire says his success rate is 1000 to 1. For me, employed more than full time, that is an investment in time that I don't think I can make.
So then I looked into post processing to mimic the infrared look. Not as successful as the real deal but close.
This is a test shot that I worked with, chosen more for the fact that it contains foliage, water and hard scape than for the quality of the photograph. I will be working on some with sky and clouds next and will post my efforts.

June 15th
Here is a post script on the IR front. I found a filter for my point and shoot that may help me to decide what I might want to do to explore this new genre. $45 is a much more reasonable investment right now than $400 dollars.