I’m starting to work through all of the images that we took on our trip (man there are a lot) and I wanted to share a quick one from a very unique area that we visited, The Bisti Badlands. The Bisti is located about 40 miles South of Farmington, New Mexico so it’s in the northwest corner of the state. I have wanted to visit the Bisti for a while. Pam, who grew up in Farmington, had never been there either so we made a point to set aside a morning to visit and hopefully get some good images.
We got up at 4AM, staggered to the shower to wake up, had a strong cup of coffee and then started the 45 minute or so drive to the Bisti so we could get there for sunrise. We got there just as the 1st rays of light were coming over the horizon. We got some good sunrise shots and then wandered into the badlands, not really knowing where to go (we’ll get a map next time). Once the Sun came up a bit we were able to see some details of the landscape and began to head for all the neat looking rocks in the distance.
We found all kinds of things to photograph, many of which I plan on posting in the coming week or two but this image caught my eye as I was making my initial “run” through everything in Lightroom:
An unusual eroded rock reminds me of an alien frozen in stone
They are officially called hoodoos but I think this one looked a little like an alien life-form frozen in stone. I had taken 3 bracketed shots of this so I combined them using the Enfuse for Lightroom plugin (which I reviewed a while back). I then took the image and ran it through Nik’s Color Efex Pro to see what I could do to enhance the image a bit. I used the “detail extractor” to pull out the texture of the rock.
I’ve got a lot of images to go through and I’m looking forward to trying some of the filters in the Nik Software Lineup. I’d be interested in hearing from any of you who have used their products and have come up with some settings or “recipes” that seem to work well with landscape and nature photography.
Stay tuned for more images from the Bisti Badlands……….
Mark Sinderson
