The snowed covered, western face of the Sandias looked rugged and chiseled in the early morning light after the storm. A lone basket in a spent field looked kind of sad abandoned and snow covered.
Category: Sandias
NM Winter Wonderland
Snow, snowmen, and wintery landscapes at sunset.
The Lion and the Lamb
As we begin this Advent season, I can report relative peace in the house — Guildenstern was lying (okay sitting) on the couch with a lamb.
Winter’s Upon Us
Winter is upon us with cold temperatures, snow flurries, cloudy skies and gray light. The Sandias have been covered with clouds most of the day, and even with the thermostat set at 70 F (21 C), it felt cold in the house all day without the sun shinning through the windows.
Ghetto Scanning
I processed a batch of 4X5 negatives I took of the Sandias and a railroad bridge with my 4X5 view camera over the past few weeks. Since I don’t have a scanner that is made to scan 4X5 negatives, I did “ghetto scanning” of the negatives by making a film holder out of a sheet of card stock, placing the holder and a negative on my old Epson 1260 scanner, placing a sheet of paper over the holder and negative, and holding a lamp with a 25 watt light bulb over the paper the negative is under as a back light while scanning the negative. The scanner is set for reflective scanning, so it doesn’t quite focus on the negative with a backlight, but the process sort of works, giving the resulting images a vintage look.
Since I’m still learning how to process 4X5 film using a daylight processing tank, when I first pulled the negatives out of the tank after the final rinse, they were purple in the middle. Oops! I hadn’t fixed them quite long enough, and I needed to agitate the tank more during the fixing process. So the negatives went back into the tank for another round of fix with more aggressive agitation. After another round of hypo-clearing agent and another rinse, all the purple was gone, but the double round of fixing left the negatives a bit uneven.
Then there’s the issue that the lamp I’m using for the “ghetto scanning” doesn’t fully cover the negatives, so I get bright edges on the images in the resulting scans. I did a little “burning” around the edges in Photoshop to even things out, which worked a pretty well on some images, and didn’t make much difference on others.
Sunday’s Sunset
I made sure I went out to the river and got the sunset on Sunday. Now that we are back on standard time, it will be dark before I leave the office during the week.
Fall Sunset
Another evening of the beautiful light at sunset along the Rio Grande.
Hay Girl
I don’t think this lovely scarecrow is very scary, but she does cut a good hay figure. Fall is in the air — I saw a couple of sandhill cranes fly over this morning, so I went out to the river before sunset and a small flock flew by. The problem is the river is running really high and fast, so the places they normally roost are underwater. The Martinez House got its color coat, and the cottonwoods are turning yellow.
Rio on the Rise
We got another 7/8 inch of rain overnight, but there has been heavier rains up north that are causing the Rio Grande to rise. The first photo taken at 6:00 pm on Friday the 13th, shows the river up about 6 feet above where it normally runs this time of year. The following two photos are close to the same view of the Sandias and Rio Grande, but the first one was taken about 5:50 pm on Friday the 13th and the second one was taken in December 2011. I would have like to have had a photo of the river and Sandias from June 2013 when the river was really low, but the bosque was closed, so I wasn’t able to get the river to do photos.
Currently, the river has to rise another 5 feet before it will get into the bosque, and then it would have to rise about 25 to 30 feet before it would go over the levees. I don’t think we have had enough rain for the river to flood our area. I’ll be surprised if it rises enough to get into the bosque, but I’ll check in the morning a see where it is.
Rain Clouds
We’ve had a little over an inch and a half of rain over the past two days giving us a total of 7.60 inches of rain for the year. The clouds between the rains were quite interesting.
Off Center & Not Even 