35mm and Sunset

In the winter time, the wildlife refuge often does prescribed burns to keep the dead vegetation from building up and becoming a fire hazard in the hot dry summers. It looks like they are about to do that at my favorite hiking spot. The part of the wildlife refuge across the road from the Doeskin ranch has recently been burned and it appeared that they were heading here next. It seems sad to see the land after a burn but the grasses recover in a hurry. So, last weekend I got a few shots of the area before all this happens and you can see that the grasses are long and will probably dry out and become a fire risk later this year.

Below is an image taken after a burn a few years ago. This area recovered quickly and had abundant wildflowers and long golden grass last year.

Below is a photo from last weekend of some trails in the same portion of the refuge as the above photo. You can see the hillsides covered with brush and grasses. It has been very windy the last couple of days so I suspect they have paused burning for a while, but this will probably all be burned soon before the protected birds arrive in a month or so.

Not sure how bright this image appears to you. It’s difficult to know how bright to edit an image. I generally set my main monitor to 50% and then edit it to look good on that monitor but then I later see the image on a different monitor and it looks too bright, and some of the colors are different. Unless you are looking at a print, you probably see a slightly different image depending on the screen that you use.

Just up the hillside from where the above photo was taken, I usually stop at this gnarly tree. I like the colors it catches from the setting sun and I have photographed it numerous times. This is almost to the top of the ridge and the trail continues up a few more steps in the distance to a big grassy plateau atop the ridge. The sun was about to set as I took this so I turned around and headed back down.

Everything I shot on this day was shot with a 35mm prime lens. A prime lens means that it only has one focal length and no zoom capability. You do lose flexibility, but generally get a brighter lens with better optical performance. More and more lately, I just go out with this prime lens on my camera. It might sound restricting but I really enjoy the simplified shooting experience and lack of equipment to futz around with. When I have the zoom on, I often find myself setting it to 35mm by default anyway. So, I guess this just makes me happy.

It was windy as the sun set and I took one last look at the long grass before it gets burned away. It was dark enough for about 1 seconds of exposure to blur the grass along the path so I didn’t need a filter. Soon the wildflowers will come and I’ll have something else to shoot.

22 thoughts on “35mm and Sunset”

  2. I found this post before the end of the day and before Tippy. I am starting the week off right. LOL!
    The brightness of the 2nd photo was fine for me. A much more hopeful looking one compared to the first one. As the first picture shows, some things are only desolate for a season. Then the sun comes out.
    I like the blur in the last photo and look forward to the wildflowers.

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  3. We have burns here also. Surprising to me is the pine forests and how the trees rarely catch fire. Some will scorch, dead burn some and smolder for days, but the land comes back quickly. Another surprise is a lack of public notice. I have actually driven right through one, tall fire on either side of a trail road. No notice found at all when they start them. 😵‍💫.

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  4. My sister earned a degree in photography while she worked in the art department and discovered, to her dismay, that computer colors and printer colors don’t match, i.e., royal blue on the monitor did not necessarily match royal blue on the printer. Drove her crazy. We also have controlled burns here in the desert; definitely better than wildfires.

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  5. Nice Jason. The Iowa DNR does burns in and around Siouxland as does various local county conservation departments from time to time. I never worry abut other people’s monitors and how an image of mine will look. If it looks fine on your monitor, then it is fine. Having said that, and having worked for various news publications over the years, I always work with the numbers seen for an image’s luminance and use the cymk info nd not the rgb info. The k in cmyk represents black, and it has a scale of 0-100. Zero is white without detail, 95 up to 100 is pure black, actually starting around 88 it is that. So you those numbers helps me understand the brightness of an image on my monitor and I use it also for making prints. Once you have made a few prints you can judge how effective what you see on the monitor and how closely it matches your print. I know by the numbers when I pull up an image on my screen that I will have to lighten it a bit when reading the whites. I always keep the white around 1-3 in what might be pure white, though where it may be specular, Inlet it go to zero. The same applies to the blacks. Deep shadows are 99 or 100. Sometimes go to 89 depending on the image. It’s not rocket science. Come one, shoot some urban B&W landscapes. 🤓😎😄

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