EVEN BEFORE THAT! - 24 MAY 2012 Monument Valley at Sunset - Monument Valley Tribal Park, AZ, File #1230023 Link To Original Image Here's another image from my little trip. It was taken my first sunset on the road. It's another example of making lemon aid out of lemons if you think you need clouds to add punch to your image. In this case, the foreground element makes the image with just a little color on the buttes. This was really a work in progress. The image I really wanted was shot not five minutes prior but I lost it because not everything was in focus. "Not in focus", you're saying to yourself. "How can you not have everything in focus?" Well, it's easy and with this camera it's really easy to not have everything in focus. First, I'm using my new to me--i.e. less than 24 hours old at the time of this shot--Nikon D800. It has amazing pixel resolution with a whopping 36 MP in it's 35mm full-framed sensor. That's a lot of pixels meaning if you pixel peep--i.e. look at pixels out of context to the whole image--at 100% resolution you have to be very particular about the focus. Not to worry, I have my other new thing specially purchased because I was getting the D800. I have a new 24mm Tilt-Shift lens. What's a tilt-shift lens? It's a lens designed to articulate to allow you to increase or narrow the depth of field meaning if you're stuck to a particular f-stop/aperture setting you can expand or contract the depth of field by "tilting" the lens to get foreground and background in focus. Well, it's a new tool and I'm getting used to using it and unfortunately, most of this shooting session was a bust with the background buttes just out of focus because I over tilted the lens. It looked in focus out in the field when reviewing the images on my camera. But, at home in my computer, not so in focus. Fortunately, I adjusted things just as the light left the buttes to take this image. All I did was raise the tilt just a little which brought the Mittens into focus. This all sounds really complicated. I guess it is. Not to worry, I'll write an article about this whole thing down the road. Cheers Tom

Sunset