Woodland Park HS Photo Club

I had the priviledge of presenting a segment on "Improving Your Composition" at the Woodland Park High School Photography Club last February. I always enjoy the chance to share my passion for nature photography with others. Photos by Josh Tracy.

Garden of the Gods - Part 2

Here's one more shot of gateway Rocks with storm clouds brewing behind.

Garden of the Gods - Saturday, April 15th

Garden of the Gods Park is located just at the western edge of Colorado Springs and is a favorite shooting location among local and visiting photographers. Here's a good reason why shooting in rainy weather can pan out with unexpected results. I left home very early and it was sprinkling pretty hard. As I drove down Ute Pass towards the Springs, it turned torrential. I was hoping to catch a nice sunrise, but I really started to wonder as I drove along. By the time I arrived at the visitor center parking lot, it had stopped raining, so I waited (patience is a virtue for nature photographers, they say!). Soon, the rocks started to glow faintly. Then the sun peaked through a narrow opening in the clouds and just lit up the rocks! Everything else was left in shadow.

I decided to create a panoramic by taking a sequence of five overlapping images and stitching them together using a low-cost piece of software called Panorama Maker 3.0. This program does a wonderful job in figuring out just where to assemble the separate images. After a final crop, I used Photoshop to back off the saturation in order to match what I remember seeing, opened up the shadows slightly with the Shadow/Highlight control and gave it a little sharpening using Unsharp Mask.

Here's the result. Nice 'eh?

Rent your lenses!

Here's a nifty idea. Why buy an expensive lens costing several hundred (or thousands) of dollars that may only be used a few times, when you can rent one for one, or more, weeks for a fraction of the cost? Rent Glass (www.rentglass.com) currently has several Canon lenses (Nikon coming soon) at very moderate rental prices. No big telephotos, though. Check 'em out...