Low clouds in the Sacramentos

New Mexico is justly famed for its good weather, but in our little pocket (the "Tularosa Basin") we have perhaps the best weather in the state. At times when the entire state is, unusual as it is, beset by bad weather, we see the statewide weather summary maps on TV with red here, and yellow there, and purple almost everyplace else. Then, right where we are, is a little island of "white" - our "donut hole", where there is nothing bad happening.

We get perhaps 12 inches of rain a year hear, and it mostly conveniently falls at night (reminding one of the Arthurian dictums about weather in "Camelot"). In a typical year it perhaps snows twice, with maybe 1/2 inch deposited, usually gone by mid afternoon.

The sky is most often fully clear, but occasionally there are puffy white clouds to be seen.

But snow is very common up in the nearby Sacramento mountains. And from time to time, the clouds descend almost to our elevation.

This shot looks eastward to the Sacramentos from just in front of our home.


We were actually getting a little rain from this overall situation.

By way of reference, the ground elevation from which the shot was taken is 4573 ft MSL. The home seen just above the large water tank is the last one on our street (which begins to "switchback" just beyond that tank) is at 5250 MSL.

Best regards,

Doug

As you are all well aware, I am more of a "camera engineer" than a photographer, and I am a bit of a naïf when it comes to cropping, tonal scale adjustment, and the like. I know that many of you are very skilled in these matters, and I admire and to some extent envy your work.

Here I ask for you to give me some tutelage, based on the very shot I showed above. This is the shot, ex camera other than having been reduced to 800 px in width and with some attendant sharpening:


Any guidance as to how I might best take advantage of this shot would be most appreciated.

The camera original is available here should anyone wish to take it up:

http://dougkerr.net/images/Alamogordo/Q05869.jpg

Thanks.

Best regards,

Doug

Doug,

Yes, those clouds are a sight!

If you wish, send me the unaltered file and I will have a go!

Asher

Hi, Asher,

Asher Kelman said:

Doug,

Yes, those clouds are a sight!

If you wish, send me the unaltered file and I will have a go!

Click to expand...

Excellent. There is a link to it in the previous post. But here it is again:

http://dougkerr.net/images/Alamogordo/Q05869.jpg

Thanks.

Best regards,

Doug

I'm certainly no expert, but hope you don't mind my giving it a try, Doug. Noticed the ISO 400 so ran a little noise reduction. 8-bit file limited adjustments a little, but not enough to be limiting. Cropped, adjusted for lens distortion, selectively brightened, added a very slight center brightening, and gave the clouds a subtle increase in contrast. Folks often go overboard with that one.

Hi, Tom,

Tom Robbins said:

I'm certainly no expert, but hope you don't mind my giving it a try, Doug.

Click to expand...

No, that's fine - that's what I was looking for.

Noticed the ISO 400 so ran a little noise reduction. 8-bit file limited adjustments a little, but not enough to be limiting. Cropped, adjusted for lens distortion . . .

Click to expand...

I'm surprised it needed that - the camera is supposed to correct for that on the way to the JPEG output. But maybe it doesn't do such a good job.

selectively brightened, added a very slight center brightening, and gave the clouds a subtle increase in contrast. Folks often go overboard with that one.

Doug's Image​

Click to expand...

It looks very nice. Thanks so much.

Best regards,

Doug

Hi, Tom,

As, yes, I see now that (for example) the brickwork to the left of the garage door on the home just seen at the right of the original frame is decidedly not "vertical" in the "original" image.

I'm not sure just what that is from, but certainly making it vertical in your version is very desirable!

Now I need to figger out what caused that!

************

Aha! The camera was pitched up at an angle of 9.1°. So this was liklely a "perspective" issue!

Thanks again.

Best regards,

Doug

HeyDoug, being a long time user of tilt shift lenses, I habitually have a bubble level attached to the hot shoe of my Canon 5DMKIII. It has become a habit when shooting landscapes. Of course, leveling the camera body and then adjusting shift vertically for horizon position requires the use of a tripod, so quick grab shots have pretty much fallen out of my m.o.

The spiky plant toward the lower right corner (almost out of the frame in my cropped version) looks like a succulent, maybe a yucca plant. The area appears to be a valley of some sort, possibly a basin. I'll bet there are photographic treasures to be found at elevation away from town, so it must be a fun place to explore, especially during the cooler months.

Hi Doug.

I'm a great fan of yours, as you know, and a great fan of David Adams, so I thought I might combine the two.


There's a real personal touch here. The number on the letter box, the cactus in the rockery, the edge of the garage, puts me right at your home.

The placement of the car puts me in a time frame more than the houses.

The way the houses dwindle off into the landscape is a social and cultural attachment to the landscape.

There's a sense of protectiveness from the mountains. The clouds look more welcomed than threatening.


I've aways said as an engineer you make a great engineer: as a photographer you still make a great engineer.

That doesn't stop me from enjoying this great image

I hope you get rain.

xxx
Tom


Q05869-1 by tomdinning0099, on Flickr

Hi, Tom,

Tom Robbins said:

HeyDoug, being a long time user of tilt shift lenses, I habitually have a bubble level attached to the hot shoe of my Canon 5DMKIII. It has become a habit when shooting landscapes. Of course, leveling the camera body and then adjusting shift vertically for horizon position requires the use of a tripod, so quick grab shots have pretty much fallen out of my m.o.

Click to expand...

In fact, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000 that was used for this shot has an array of accelerators in it and it can display on the screen or in the viewfinder, in the vein of an aircraft attitude indicator ("artificial horizon") instrument, the pitch and roll attitude of the camera. But I rarely take advantage of it.

This was indeed a grab shot. I had gone to the garage to bring into the house our "taller" stepladder in order to do some work on a ceiling heat/cooling "vent" on our living room ceiling (it has a "cathedral" ceiling, thus the need for the taller ladder).

This involved first taking away the "shorter" stepladder that is kept in front of the "taller" one and standing it up, for the moment, outside, against the front of the garage. As I went out of the garage to do that, I saw the cloud bank, so I went into my office to get the camera, then back outside to get the shot.

The spiky plant toward the lower right corner (almost out of the frame in my cropped version) looks like a succulent, maybe a yucca plant.

Click to expand...

It is indeed.

The area appears to be a valley of some sort, possibly a basin.

Click to expand...

You are right on the money. This is the "Tularosa Basin", nestled between (on the east) the Sacramento Mountains and on the west the San Andres, Organ, and Oscura Mountains. Geologically is a graben basin, and is endorheic, meaning that no water flows out of it (which is in fact, as a practical matter, the significance of its being characterized as a basin rather than a valley). The name "Tularosa" (also the name of a charming small town about 15 miles north of Alamogordo) is taken from the Spanish name for a species of red reed which at one time was found in the area.

The basin is 35% larger than the state of Connecticut. It embraces. among other things, the White Sands Dune Field.

I'll bet there are photographic treasures to be found at elevation away from town, so it must be a fun place to explore, especially during the cooler months.

Click to expand...

There are indeed many treasures, and I have not taken advantage of them nearly as much as I should have.

Part of my excuse for that is that my mobility is slightly compromised by the impact of spinal stenosis, but I have attained an equilibrium with this limitation and hope to "get out" more and photograph this extraordinary region.

Thanks so much for your comments and observations.

Best regards,

Doug

Hi, Tom,

Tom dinning said:

Hi Doug.

I'm a great fan of yours, as you know, and a great fan of David Adams, so I thought I might combine the two.

There's a real personal touch here. The number on the letter box, the cactus in the rockery, the edge of the garage, puts me right at your home.

The placement of the car puts me in a time frame more than the houses.

The way the houses dwindle off into the landscape is a social and cultural attachment to the landscape.

Click to expand...

Thank you for all that.

There's a sense of protectiveness from the mountains. The clouds look more welcomed than threatening.

Click to expand...

Oh, quite so. We feel very comforted here. When we moved here, we went out of our way to find a home near the western flank of some eastern-leaning mountains. That way we would be comforted by our proximity to the mountains but not suffer the greater rainfall that typically occurs on the eastern flank.

I've aways said as an engineer you make a great engineer: as a photographer you still make a great engineer.

Click to expand...

Indeed, and thanks (I think).

That doesn't stop me from enjoying this great image

Click to expand...

Thank you so much.

I hope you get rain.

Click to expand...

Thank you. We in fact got a little the day that shot was taken. My instrument shows a total for this year of about 7.7 inches. This is rather lower than the traditional average by this time, presumably a consequence of "global warming".

But next year, with a fully Republican federal government, we will no longer have "global warming" (XLV * has told us there is no such thing), and we should perhaps look forward to more rain.


Thanks for your artful rework of the shot.

Best regards,

Doug