It's That Time of Year

I'm on vacation this week so I'm going to be in the field as much as possible, taking advantage of this wonderful season of transition out here, then it is fall in the lowlands and you can see winter marching down the mountain, day by day.

As you all know, I haven't made the jump to a DSLR yet, I'm not convinced there is one out there under two grand that is tough enough to survive long out here with the sand and the wind and the rain and the hail and everything else we're blessed with in abundance. All the photos on this blog were taken with a point and shoot, most of them with a very cheap point and shoot.

With that said, I've become pretty good at wringing the most out of whatever crappy camera I'm taking pictures with at the moment but this time of year is always a challenge - auto settings will consistently deliver poor pictures when faced with snow and grass and blue sky. Taking advantage of any manual capabilities the camera has or locking in the settings based on the sky or snow isn't much better, it is just too broad a range and the foreground comes out too dark.

I took both these pictures this afternoon, moments apart, on a hike to Ugadaga Bay - I love the setting, but neither picture lives up to the beauty of the day. The top photo shows all the rainbow of colors in the tundra grasses but washes out the sky completely, and the bottom photo is too dark . . . what I saw was in between, and it was beautiful. You can see portions of the trail were a bit damp!