Milk Ranch Road

Posted on by kritterspaw

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Last I blogged, I spoke about the Mogollon Rim and it’s many faces.  We continue to explore it’s personalities and strive to find new places to capture it’s essence.  This week’s trip took us to Milk Ranch Rd, which is kinda on-the-rim-off-the-rim.  You still get those great views, but not the great winds (if you’ve been to Mogollon Rim you know what I mean, it’s always windy).

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We found a great spot and stayed overnight to get sunset and sunrise shots.    The sun casts shadows across the canyons creating dark lines, making it ever challenging to capture.  But I’m up for the continued challenge.

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Unfortunately, on this particularly trip I forgot my tripod.  Pretty humorous that was an issue for me, as I have never been a tripod shooter.  It always seemed such a pain.  Now that I have embraced it, I can’t live without it.  I can set up the tripod and take those low light photographs (sunrise, sunset, stars) while maximizing my aperture to let lots of light in but still keeping my ISO low to avoid noise.  Star photos were a bit dicey though taken on a sweatshirt.  The glow of our fire cast a orange hue on the pine trees above.

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Campground Glow

Posted on by kritterspaw

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We went camping the other day, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a bit embarrassed by how FEW photos I took.  The advantage to night camping (particularly at my age) is I can get night shots – stars, milky way, etc.  But I took only a handful of photos… and didn’t stray far from the fire.

This time of year, there is still some snow on the ground, and the overnight temps can be chilly.  So I didn’t even get out the tripod.  I handheld my camera and took a couple pix of my favorite model – my faithful and patient love-of-my-life husband, John.

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It stuns me the quality of photo one can get in our digital cameras these days.  With ISO’s that can go up to 200,000, one can make a pitch dark photo look like daylight.  In the old days of film, you could buy high ISO film, but you paid for it in graininess and noise in your photos.  Forget about using your zoom or stopping down your aperture, it was just grainy.

The photo above was taken at an aperture of f/9.0 at 4000 ISO.  Amazing right?

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Above was taken at f/4.0, 10,000 ISO.  By shooting with a large aperture I could not only draw in as much light as possible, my depth of field is shallow, and I grab the cast glow from the fire.  It’s just amazing to see what modern digital cameras are capable of.

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