Category: Santa Fe photographer

HummingBirds and Motorcycles Santa Fe

Yesterday I decided it was time to take a bike (motorcycle-vroom) ride over to The Randall Davis Audubon Center in Santa Fe. This is one of my favorite rides and destinations. The winding road, by name of Canyon Road, which leads to it, always makes me feel like I’m in Southern Spain or Provence. It has that kind of “look and feel”. And, just as an aside, Santa Fe does have a relatively large number of French nationals living here—close to three thousand. I often wonder if their impression is the same.

You gotta love the juxtaposition of motorcycle and hummingbird, right?

Back to the story. ( I don’t just meander on my motorcycle.) I made a couple of stops along the way and then headed up there. I’ve been trying to hone my technique for photographing hummingbirds. They love New Mexico and we have many varieties. Who doesn’t feel the allure of, and the fascination with, these seasonal visitors?

But “Why?” you ask, would I want to photograph those guys in black and white? Doesn’t that seem like a travesty of some kind? Here’s why: I hoped to show some of their delicacy, their grace and their amazing aerobatics. Most of the time they’re just a blur! I thought, that by deleting color, I could better communicate those characteristics. Plus, my “pull” is to black and white photography. So there. That was the challenge.

More than that, I wanted to convey their tinyness, almost invisibleness, in the environment. You could mistake them for a bug zinging by!

These guys are not easy to photograph!

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Botanical Southwest Images

Smoke has been a real issue around here for over a week. We have fires in New Mexico, just north of my home. But we are mainly getting smoke brought in by the prevailing Westerly winds out of California. Just about the time that clears up, the winds shift and we get smoke from the fires in Colorado and locally.

At times the mountains are completely obscured by smoke. Unusual. New Mexico is known for its pristine-sharp skies.

The one photo up there attempts to show just how much the view has been obscured from the back of my home which usually provides a glorious, sharp, panorama of the mountains—The Sangre de Cristos to be precise. Macro and close-up photography is moving along. I really don’t know where the dividing line between “macro” and “close-up” is exactly. If there’s a “rule”, I am unaware of it, and probably wouldn’t care anyway!

Don’t know why, just felt like publishing more photos than usual. Such is the artistic temperament I guess.

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Santa Fe Harp and Child

Macro photography is something new to me. It’s very difficult. First of all, you have no depth of field and any movement of the camera results in a blur. Tripod use is a must. But, despite the fussiness, I love it, so I’ll be adding that to the other photographic interests of mine. “Street Photography” simply must remain high on my priorities’ list. Santa Fe is full of interesting people, but I guess that’s true everywhere.

What makes New Mexico so special is the light. The place is luminous.

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White Sands New Mexico, Bandelier NM

Some of these are from Bandelier National Park, others are from White Sands. The one of the cat is out my front door. The lone skier is from a hike I took with my dog. For places like White Sands, it really helps to have a camera that has some weather sealing. It was blowing so hard that it hurt our skin. For sure the sand and dust would have gotten into the camera. The Moon would have been more hospitable.

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Telluride Jazz Festival, Peru

Here I’ve decided to mix several genres. So, we have street pix combined with what I refer to as “Abstract” and, as a hedge, sometimes refer to as “Almost Abstract”. The photo of “The Kids’ Tent” is from the Jazz Festival in Telluride, Colorado. As far as Jazz is concerned, I can take it or leave it. For some of my friends, that statement is tantamount to heresy!

And something else has happened since this epidemic got going—and this town has always been friendly—but now it’s even more so. I find people being extra polite and extra helpful. It’s funny, we have to stand in line to get into a grocery store because management wants to limit how many people are in there at a time. I think they’re right to do that, and everyone cooperates. So we stand in line, six feet apart. But surprisingly, we start chatting with each other, still maintaining distance. Below is a sequence showing you what’s going on in the Plaza in Downtown Santa Fe. Drag the vertical line to get the full effect.…..(I think you might have figured that out on your own. Right?)

Wasn’t it nice of the city of Santa Fe to have provided us with this not-so-little reminder? But, seriously, I’m OK with it.

Santa Fe New Mexico Street Scenes

Of course in my lifetime I’ve owned many cameras. It can become an obsession. The current discussion is between mirrorless versus “traditional” DSLR. Everybody has their opinion. For street shots such as these, I like the smaller camera (which means mirrorless) with an equally unobtrusive lens on it. Nobody even knows that I’m carrying it. I’m just so stealthy that way! All of these were taken in Santa Fe, NM.

Santa Fe, New Mexico In The Time of COVID

Everyone was disappointed to have the 4th of July celebrations cancelled in the Santa Fe Plaza. There’s the much awaited pancake breakfast and folkart show. The band is always very good too and everyone is always in a great mood. The mood was different today. Once again, eerily quiet. And I still cannot get used to seeing everyone wearing a mask.