Cody Redmon - Photoblog

Following up with another image from my recent trip over the 10,974-foot Beartooth Pass, this view of Twin Lakes is among the region’s most iconic.  I took the shot while balancing on a small ledge 900 feet above the ground in front of me with wind gusts blasting at close to 50mph.  If you’ve ever seen a bird hovering motionlessly above a ridgeline, riding the updraft created by the landscape below…now imagine that ridgeline at nearly 11,000 feet and tell me that doesn’t add a little spice to your day!

Though not nearly as dynamic as my last post, I thought a panorama would be a good follow-up.  Taken a few days ago along the Montana/Wyoming border in the amazing Beartooth Mountains, this lakeside view is comprised of five separate images.  Unfortunately, I forgot to remove my polarizing filter and it resulted in a darkening of the sky to the right of Beartooth Butte.  Gotta remember that in the future…

A slit in the clouds reveals the blade of light which has pierced it…  About as close to ‘straight from the camera’ as I could do, I performed only a noise reduction to combat the high ISO remnants.  The darkness of the foreground was accented during conversion to sRGB, but there was none of the manual burning that I so often employ.  This scene came following a rather unlucky turn of events on a most unfortunate photo drive, but it reminded me that the beauty of the land is ongoing and another scene will always show its face.

The Gravelly Mountains continue to produce amazing photos.  Despite some difficult shooting conditions on my last trip, the images still came out wonderful.  Maybe not quite as many good shots as during previous trips, but it’s hard to walk away from a place so beautiful without a few decent frames…

Backed right up into the foothills of the Crazy Mountains, I found this location by accident and my timing couldn’t have been better.  With its crop just bailed and not yet stacked, the glowing field at foreground-right really caught my attention for how it stands in contrast to the land surrounding it.

Continuing with another image from Canyon Ferry, this is an example of one of my favorite minimalist subjects…the lone tree.  A perfect scene to continue this study, the flat light in the foreground makes for a stark, yet not fully silhouetted subject against a fairly dramatic sky in the back.  I hope I get to visit this location again soon, it’s such a tranquil hangout…

This post is really Archive Dive IV, but I decided to go with the title I gave the image when it was first taken.  Significant in that it was the first digital image I ever took that said to me, “Digital can reflect tradition”, this photo set off a firestorm of photographic passion for me five years ago and remains to this day one of my favorite scenes.  Unfortunately, it was taken using a 3.2 megapixel camera and cannot be printed very large.