This, taken yesterday, is from our anonymous reader who lives in a beautiful part of Idaho.
His explanation of the photo:
This is an HDR photograph — high dynamic range, a composite of three photos at different exposures. It would have been impossible otherwise. The full-resolution version of the original image is drop-dead stunning.
Click to enlarge (hint: if you enlarge it a lot, you’ll see the bald eagle nest in the treetops about 10% of the way in from the left border of the photo).
He sent a leaping deer (also taken yesterday) as lagniappe:
That looks so much like the valley in the Eastern Sierra Nevada where Husband and I have a getaway cabin. In our area the mountains are a bit higher and steeper, but the river, the lush grass, the interesting clouds… gosh, I wish I could be there now.
As to deer leaping… up there our local deer don’t leap, they settle down among the landscaping and snooze. I guess we’re considered safe, or something.
Thank you for the new (to me) word. I can’t help feeling there must be an existing English word that means the same thing, but I can’t think what it is.
Cumshaw? Also gratuity.
Beautiful photo. Was it taken near Silver Creek/Picabo?
Beautiful
I can haz see the eagle nest? I haz can see the eagle nest!
Very nice pics I have a friend on facebook who is always putting his pictures on . not as good as these though.
Stunning!
Some years ago I read an article about a special kind of film camera which took pictures which were in focus everywhere. There was one of these photos enlarged and covering a wall. It was of a mountain range. Using a low power hand lens one could see a red dot on the distant mountain. Using higher power, the red dot was an in focus male cardinal, with all feathers in place. I have no recollection of what the camera was called, the explaination of how it worked, or where I read the article.
Does this ring a bell for anyone?
Perhaps an 8×10 or even 16×20 view camera? Apart from the high resolution effected by the negative size such cameras can tilt the large lens back and forth or sideways to get every part of the picture in sharp focus.
Are you sure? It sounds implausible to me. If the picture included a mountain range and the cardinal was in the same plane as the mountain range then the distance from the camera to the cardinal must have been substantial – say a kilometre or more (if it was really a range of mountains in the picture a kilometre is very conservative). At that distance the apparent height of a cardinal would be perhaps a couple of hundredths of a micron. It would require a massive magnification to even see it was there let alone resolve individual feathers. Even allowing for the picture to be correctly in focus I think that film grain (or digital resolution) as well as atmospheric distortion would make it highly improbable that you could resolve a clear image of the bird.
I would be happy to stand corrected but it seems likely to me that either your memory is wrong or the pictures were faked.
Nope: All cameras (including digital) can only focus an image per normal optics. Nowadays, you can stich photos in software to provide greater depth of field.
Depth of field (DOF) is the range of distances from the lens which will be percevied as sharp by most people. (“Sharp”, of course, is a continuum, not a digital thing, and varies with the observer, viewing distance, physical size of image, image contrast, etc.)
The DOF varies with, mainly: Distance from the lens in general (distance to the focal point (FP) – maximum sharpness point) and the size of the aperture (f-stop). Smaller f-stop, means greater DOF (and less light coming in to the film/sensor.*) Also focal length of the lens is important too. (Wide angle lenses appear to have greater DOF, though this is mainly an illusion because with a wide angle lens, more of less everything is at infinity FP.)
Inside the camera, the further the lens is away from the film/sensor, the closer the external FP is to the lens.
View cameras can acheive some very extreme DOF by tilting the film relative to the lens: The foreground is imaged on the film further from the lens (internally) than the background. This, combined with small aperture can provide the illusion of “all in focus”. (Or even provide a technically correct hyper-focal image where all of it meets the photographer’s need or definition of sharp.)
There’s more DOF behind the FP than in front, usually appears about 60%-75% of the DOF is behind the FP.
(* This is muddied by diffraction effects that can lessen sharpness at very small apertures: large f-stop numbers, above say f/22(different for each lens) Less light to the sensor also means a slower shutter speed, which can be a problem in wind or with other motion when you are trying to acheive an “all-sharp” image. Of course, the softness of motion with long shutter speed can also be used creatively as a counterpoint other, crisply sharp parts of the image.)
A beautiful picture, but is it normal that the hills are so barren?
Yes, that is typical of the semi-arid middle western region of the United States. Irrigation provides a lot of the green in the valleys, the hills are often not irrigated and dry but with an abundance of desert shrubs and grasses. The higher elevations and mountains can be more lush with pine tree and aspen forests.
Thank you for the explanation. I am not familiar with the natural flora of that part of the world and the contrast between the lowland and the hills was strange.
If the picture was taken where I think it was, you only have to go about twenty miles north (and a thousand feet higher), up the valley visible in the distance in the picture, to be in the forest.
The key part being higher.
It’s a weightless deer!
Nice shot in a beautiful area. I’ve driven thorugh that area several times. “Basin and Range” country.