A Big Bend Panorama

There are air quality issues at Big Bend . . . many of the days I was there . . . the haze obscured the vistas.  I had assumed the air pollution was coming from Mexico, but research indicates that coal fired plants in both Texas and Mexico contribute. Prevailing summer winds bring pollutants from the Gulf Coast and Mexico into the Big Bend area.  

However, it also gave some opportunities for some dramatic photos.  I was fascinated by how the backlit mountains were silhouetted with the smog defining the ridges.  I took a sequence of shots, hoping that I would have something to work with. 

Here is the original.

Post processing is major part of a photographer's toolbox.  In this case I cropped in photoshop to remove most of the sky and some of the foreground to create a more panoramic look.  

Then I used NIK Software Color Efex Pro's Detail Extractor to bring out more of the details in those amazing volcanic features.  

Here is another view of the same scene, this time shot with a sequence of shots and stitched. While this one shows more the vast and beautiful panorama here, full sized it is 10 inches tall and 75 inches wide . . . somehow I don't think I will ever print it . . .

I wish that there was more being done to reduce the pollution . . . Big Bend is far from the populations centers of Texas . . . out of sight, out of mind . . . 

More Texas Wildflowers

Monday, we headed east and south to the La Bahia road. US 290 always has wonderful wildflowers. These were shot just west of Burton.

I was looking for attractive mixes of wildflowers and found a place where the bluebonnets and the paintbrush were intermingled. I started with the wide shots, getting the full riot of colors.



Then I worked my compositions closer, with more simplicity.



Concluding with a single bloom.



As I worked on these last night, I found myself going the DA route to get what I wanted. A radial gradient filter to darken the edges around the paintbrush and make it stand out from its background. Artistic filters that both simplified and sharpened.

Then I decided I wanted to see how this would look using polar coordinates to create a circle.