Painted hills Oregon

Hello readers, pardon my absence last week but I have been on a motorcycle road trip and I have come back with photos and stories.  I have a group of friends who love going on road trips with enduro motorcycles which are made for highway and off road driving.   We all happen to be riding BMW's with cases loaded with our camping gear as we love to rough it.  Our final furthest away destination was the painted hills in Oregon where the desert landscape explodes in colours.  I would love to tell you about the town of Mitchel that is cut off from the rest of the world with some pretty interesting characters living in it, or I could tell the story of how my partner harassed a rattle snake but for now I am just going to discuss photographing the hills.  
I have never been a fan of getting up early in the morning, but more than once I have let myself down by showing up to photograph a landscape during the evening magic hour, only to find the the geographical feature back lit.   That means it could only have been bathed in low angled sunlight at 6 am.  Doh!!!!  The closest campground we could find was a really ghettoe plot of grass in the middle of the little town of Mitchel about 12 miles away from the hills.  So I crawled out of my tent at the hour of 5:15 am,  got on my motorcycle to get to the hills for the morning glory.  And it was worth it!  The only trick to getting these colours pop and the features accentuated is just being there at the hours when the light is a warm colour temperature and at a low angle.  Another advantage to getting up early is that you can sometimes do a little harmless trespassing to get the best shot!  

Trespass angle below


This one is 4 frames that I stitched together in the Photoshop panorama function.   I shot the 4 frames hand held and the software lines them up.  I love technology!  


Later, when my posse was awake, we all posed with our trusty steeds in front of the hills with the evening light ( I am wearing the green shorts). I accentuated the details and saturation in Photoshop to make us look like rock stars. As you can see, the light was also good in the evening.  











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ian McShane

Image
One of my favourite villains of all time is Ian McShane.  He was the super villain on “Agent Cody Banks” that I photographed the stills on back in 2002.  I would later become an even bigger fan of his watching him play the town bad guy in ‘Deadwood”.  He has has that wonderful British charm that translates well into his nasty characters.  His charisma and sense of humour on set always made the crew smile despite the abnormally long hours we worked on this particular feature.   He has a very characteristic expression with the raised right eyebrow and slight snarl on his lips.  I wanted to capture this exact expression nice and close with him looking right at the lens.  When filming on set you are photographing while the actors are performing so you must set it up later if you want to get a shot of them looking at you.  We were filming in this very futuristic bad guy lair which was an ideal spot to get the perfect portrait.  Ian was happy to accommodate my wishes and I got the desi
Read more

Camel Silhouette

Image
I took this photograph while on a week long walk through the desert of the Western Sahara in Morocco.  This vast landscape appeared to be virtually void of features which heightened my sense of the subtle changes in light and form.  The week long walk was not always through beautiful sand dunes; often it was flat and gravely with the odd tree.  After a day of walking with our small party of Moroccans and a French Canadian, I felt the chatter in my head slip away into a deep walking meditation.   I was surprised at my power of observation in the following days and how tuned in I was to everything around me.  The camels were just as much  a part of our party with their different personalities as all of the human beings in our group. The walking meditation connected to me to the earth and he living creatures around me in a ways I have never felt before nor felt since.   It is a challenge to translate this feeling in an photographic image but my intention was to created images that c
Read more

Kids in a Mexican Parking Lot

Image
Mazatlan, Mexico is the place where my partner grew up and a wonderful sunny, beachy place to have relatives to visit!  After struggling to communicate with an extended family in my terrible Spanish,  I grabbed my camera and went out into the night to engage in a visual language that I could understand.  I was searching for areas that had interesting night light that I could photograph time exposures of.  Rolando, my partner and guide took me to beautiful places overlooking the city showing the many night lights of Mazatlan.  Later, we got a little more up close and personal and just walked along the streets.  Then I saw them.  Three kids just hanging out in an empty parking lot.  It did not appear as though they were playing or waiting, they were just there; showcased by the colourful mix of orange sodium lights and fluorescent.  I felt the need to capture this image but I had to talk the the kids first.  They needed to stay still for a time exposure plus, it would be a bonus to place
Read more