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Photo of the day bio picture

Welcome to my Blog!

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Photo of the day, Thursday November 10, 2011

After being in New Mexico for 6 fall seasons I can say that it’s pretty hard to find much red in our trees.  The usual color is yellow, and occasionally we get some orange, but you can generally rule out the bright reds of the sugar maples found in the midwest and northeast.

Occasionally however, it’s right there before your eyes.

In this case, it was just outside of my office this morning.

White in the spring, green during the year and then red in the fall.  Lots of different color from one tree.

You might even say it looks like an apple.

Photo of the day, Monday November 7, 2011

We all knew that this day was upon us, because we have had two teases since the first snow on the second weekend of the Balloon Fiesta.

I climbed it yesterday, but didn’t take out the camera, nothing really stuck my fancy.  Above 9,000 feet there was about an inch or two on the trail all the way to the tram.

The tram is closed for two weeks for maintenance, fortunately for me the one weekend it will be closed we will be in Phoenix.

After the forecasts of a dry winter, I hope this is a sign that it’s all wrong.

 

A couple of minutes later, as the clouds began to clear to the north east, the mountain shows off an entirely different face with all of its ridges and shadows.  It doesn’t appear that a whole lot of snow has fallen, at least not down low.

 

Photo of the day, Friday, November 4, 2011

I was up way too early to catch a 6am flight that landed in Phoenix at 6:20am, courtesy of the time zone switch.  As I got of the rental car bus I had to dig into my rolling briefcase to pull out my “travel camera” which has been ruined by a problem that many Panasonic Lumix cameras have, dust in the lens.

I carry it though because I’ve not yet figured out what I might replace it with, and I’m also hoping that I win a new camera in a local photo contest that I entered.

But at times, when the spots don’t show up, I go ahead and shoot.

I would have preferred a view that was less obstructed, but sometimes you have to go with what you have.  The whole scene didn’t last 5 minutes before the colors faded with the approaching daylight.

The panorama was actually shot first in the series, before the bright center light of the sun shows up in the first photo.  You can find a larger image of the panorama here.

Photos of the day, Sunday, October 9, 2011

A 4:45am wake up sent me to the computer in the other room to check the actual weather conditions at the balloon fiesta park.  Fearful of the forecast, I was most pleased that the winds were calm.  We woke our guest and were out the door just after 5:30.

Later in the park she said that this was just about the only thing on the planet worth getting up for at 5:00 in the morning.

That’s the same balloon that is floating across the snowfield of the Sandias in yesterday’s photos of the day.

When the sun hits the field and you look around at all the people with their cameras, you can begin to think that yes, this just might be the most photographed event on earth, as is claimed by the Fiesta group.

I don’t take that many photos any more, mostly of shapes I’ve not seen before so that sometime I can update my shapes library.  But I just can’t resist when the sun hits all that color.

To round off the afternoon, as I was sitting at the computer in my front room I heard a jet roar by the front of the house.  I jumped up, and yelled to everyone, Airshow – Airshow – there is an airshow today, and I forgot about it.

I grabbed the camera card out of the computer, ran into the garage for my monopod and bounded up the stairs for the roof.

Ok -so it wasn’t really a front row seat, but from our vantage point, we had a pretty cool view.

Since the airport is about 650 feet below the level of my roof, at times we were able to see the jets at eye level – or in this case, below.

As he rolled out of the turn, one can see why they are called the thunderbirds.

 

More air show photos in a post here.

 

Photos of the day Saturday, October 8, 2011

What a weekend.

I think I took more photos of more unusual things than I’ve ever done on a single weekend before.

A cold front brought tons of rain and snow for the high elevations.

The full sized image is here.  (After the image loads in the browser window, click on it for a full sized image.)

Thinking that the balloon fiesta field would be soaked and a muddy mess, we decided to wait for the Sunday morning launch.  In the meantime, a couple of balloons blew across the face of the mountain allowing me to get a couple of terrific shots of a very unusual event, ballooning against the Albuquerque snow.

 

Just after I took the photo, I hopped into my car and headed up to the summit, because I knew that there might be an hour or two of great conditions for shooting the snow and that fabulous New Mexico blue sky.

Once I arrived, I saw something I’d never encountered before, hoar frost or snow that encapsulated the leaves of the aspen.

 

And our summit tour would not be complete without a shot of the frosted trees.

 

To finish off the afternoon, we went north to Santa Fe where I’ve hiked the “aspen trail” every year now for the past four, and two of the four have seen the mountain covered in show as extra eye candy for us on the color tour.