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.  











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