Tag Archives: landscape

Photo of the Week – July 27, 2018

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When I was up at the Niobrara Valley Preserve last week, I flew our drone a few times when the light was nice.  It’s really hard to show the scale of this landscape by taking photos from the ground, and I’m having a great time experimenting with aerial photography in order to better illustrate that scale.  Here are a few images from last week, taken right around the headquarters of NVP.  I’m also amassing still and video footage of bison, but I’ll share some of that at another time.

This photo was taken in the evening, with late day light accenting the texture of the landscape. This photo looks east (downriver) and you can see both some piles of recently-cleared eastern red cedars in the foreground and our headquarters buildings on the right side of the image.

This image was taken right above the headquarters, looking to the east as the sun was breaking above the horizon. The skiff of fog didn’t last long once the sun came up, but made for some nice highlights while it lasted.

This image looks south. It shows where the northern portion of the Nebraska Sandhills (a 12 million acre grassland landscape) terminates at the wooded breaks of the Niobrara River. The woodland shown here went through the big 2012 wildfire, but many of the trees were protected from fire by the cool, moist north-facing slopes. Those same factors help support tree species (including paper birch) that don’t otherwise seem like they have any right to be in the hot and arid west.  Many of the trees in the upper reaches of the draws are bur oaks, along with a few ponderosa pine and eastern red cedar trees that survived the big fire.

This image was taken just a few minutes after the foggy sunrise photo above, but is facing the opposite direction (upstream) and shows the day’s first light hitting the river bank.

Photo of the Week – November 23, 2016

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Prairie landscapes are often defined by broad sweeping vistas and big skies.  A wide-angle lens can be great for capturing that kind of huge open landscape.  However, I’ve gotten some of my favorite Nebraska landscape photos when I’ve exchanged my wide angle lens for a telephoto.

Sandhills

Sandhills and windmill in Cherry County, Nebraska.  My zoom lens was set at 122 mm for this shot, just long enough to get both the horizon and windmill in the photo, but still short enough to still show some landscape breadth too.

Using a long lens compresses a landscape and shows off the depth and texture of a landscape in a way that is very different from an image taken with a wide angle lens.  The above photo of the Nebraska Sandhills came after several attempts to capture the immensity of the prairie with a wide-angle lens.  My wide-angle lens showed a lot of the landscape, but it looked relatively flat and unimpressive – especially because there wasn’t anything going on in the sky.  A longer lens brought the distant hills closer and made them more prominent.  It also cut most of the sky from the image, leaving only the interesting parts of the scene.

Sandhills sunrise

In this Nebraska Sandhills photo, a 300mm lens not only compressed the hills, it also made the rising sun look large enough in the image to reflect the way it looked in real life.

Sunrises and sunsets, along with moonrises and sets, can often be disappointing in photographs because the sun/moon looks much smaller in the photograph than it does in real life.  A long lens can help make the orb look more like our eyes see it when we’re there.

Setting moon

What works for the sun also works for the moon.  On this early morning, the moon was going down behind the bluffs at Scottsbluff National Monument in western Nebraska.  (Zoom lens set at 230 mm)

The photo below is one of my all-time favorites from the Niobrara Valley Preserve, and is actually a scan of a slide from back when color slide film (Fuji Velvia!!) was the state of the art in nature photography.  Just as in the windmill/hills photo above, there wasn’t anything interesting happening in the sky, but the light was good (getting close to sunset) and the sideways light provided great texture on the distant hills.  One of the hallmarks of the Niobrara Valley Preserve is that it hosts a convergence of multiple ecosystems, and this photo shows many of them.

Niobrara Valley Preserve

The Niobrara Valley Preserve as seen from a ridgetop north of the river.  The use of a 300mm lens allowed me to include many of the different ecosystem types all in one photo, including tallgrass prairie/oak savanna in the foreground, the Niobrara river and its floodplain, deciduous woodland and ponderosa pine stands, and Sandhills prairie.

If you find yourself standing on a high ridge or hilltop and can’t seem to make the landscape look as impressive on camera as it does in real life, try using a longer lens (or using the zoom on your phone or point-and-shoot camera).  Though it seems counterintuitive, zooming in can sometimes help show off a broad landscape better than zooming out.