Dominguez!

I was happy to hear from the office of Colorado Congressman John Salazar requesting the use of one of my images for his April E-Newsletter. Congressman Salazar was a major proponent of the recently passed Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009 and was at President Obama's side when the bill was signed into law. This bill included the creation of the Dominguez Canyons Wilderness and Congressman Salazar included one of my images from Big Dominguez Canyon in his April E-Newsletter.

I'm excited about the image use, but the creation of more wilderness lands pleases me even more.

A couple links:

• Congressman Salazar's Website
• More info on the Omnibus Public Lands Act of 2009.

Lightroom 2 Book

I've been working my way through Nat Coalson's Lightroom 2: Streamlining your Digital Photography Process. I was quite familiar with Lightroom prior to purchasing the book, but I knew that Nat was a real expert and that I'd likely learn some new tricks and techniques. And how!

My rather large photo library is very organized. But tips from the book helped me better integrate 1000s of digitized 35mm, 645, and 4x5 transparencies with all my new digital images. Now my entire digital library is right at my fingertips - searchable and filter-able via Lightroom.

Another cool tip that I just learned is the use of the O key with the crop tool to change the overlay. There are a number of different overlays, all based on well known principles of design - the rule of thirds, golden ratio, diagonal lines, triangles, golden mean, and a grid. These can be very helpful in creating pleasing (cropped) compositions.

I'm only into Chapter 7, so I'll post more of these great tips as I happen upon them.

I highly recommend this book.

More Morning Snow

Here's another from yesterday morning - same spot, slightly different composition. Fellow nature photographers seemed to like the horizontal better. I like both, for different reasons.

This version is nicely balanced and you can "see" the whole tree in the foreground. But I like the tight crop and foreground of the vertical version too.

Morning Snow

Colorado has seen a series of recent spring snow storms. This morning I had Chautauqua Park and the Boulder Flatirons all to myself...



Canon 5D Mark II w/ 24-105mm f/4 L IS