Florissant Fossil Beds 2

Here are some more pictures from the fossil beds. Some of these are pretty cool. In the first there's a dead root that was breaking apart some of petrified wood.

The way the lichens were growing on the petrified wood looked interesting.

In these two images was some of the surrounding forest.

I think the people on the trail help to give a reference point for the trail.

More of the fascinating color and textures.

Another one of the trail.

More of the amazing lichens, and such, growing out of a petrified tree stumps.

Have a great day and try to enjoy your life a bit.

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

We did get up to Cripple Creek today. I should have a few days of photos to post here on the blog. So far, I have some really good images to share.

Before getting to Cripple Creek we stopped at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. So, those images will be first. Neither of us had ever been to this monument before.
Here is Susan in front of some of the petrified stumps. Nicely enough the park rangers provided a wheelchair for us to us. More recently Susan was walking down the stairs, fell, and fractured her ankle. She also tore quite a few ligaments, and muscles. Walking is not easy for her as a result.

At the museum there was a fossil fish that caught my eye so I captured a couple of images of it. The textures of the bones is amazing.

This is one of the stumps. Apparently the original tree had died and three starters grew up around the stump. These tree stumps are estimated to be about 34 million years old. Believe it or not they are Redwood trunks. The textures are just amazing. I might turn this image into a black and white.

Here's a close up of one of the trunks. The coloring and textures are amazing. When you're doing a black and white you want a lot of texture since the texture takes the place of the color.

Some of the pathways on Ponderosa Loop trail which is where I took Susan.

On several of the petrified tree trunks they wrapped them with cable. I guess in an effort to keep them together.

Here it looks like the petrified tree split on the tree ring lines.

That's it for now. I still have a lot more to post so be watching for the next. Have a great day and try to enjoy your life a bit. That's what I'm attempting to do.

Eleven Mile Part 3

Here are the final ten images I'm posting on the blog from my last Eleven Mile State Park shoot. There are a lot of what I feel are good shots. It's really hard to pick out what I think is the best of the best. One of those I think is that bench image seven pics down.
I hope you enjoy the images, and here they are.

On Thursday we'll be heading up to Cripple for over night. I'll make sure I get some images that I can share here on the blog, and on Viewbug. I'm hoping the Aspens will be quite into the color change. If you capture the light right the leaves seem to glow. I managed to capture some of that in this last shot which made me quite happy.
One of the things I decided to do this year was try to images out that would maybe offset some of the political negativity. There's a lot of it out there. That I think I've succeeded at. I've also managed to start hiking a bit again. As far as I can tell I hiked a little over three miles of the trails at Eleven Mile State Park. According to the map there's about six miles of trails altogether and they're all in one small portion of the park. I hiking about half of the trail system.
One nice thing that's come about is I have a tendency to decompress a bit when I'm on one of these shoots I've been going on. It allows me to clear my mind completely as I focus on the compositions that I'm making. By now, I could care less if I were to make a living at doing nature photography.

So I can get the distances a bit more accurately I think I'll have to add a walkmeter to my Droid phone.

I hope you will have a wonderful day, and that you'll enjoy your life a bit.

Eleven Mile part two

I did get a lot of photographs on this shoot. There will be one more post tomorrow with some more images. It really was a very good day for photography and I got a lot of good images. A few, I think, are exceptional.
On the second one down you'll notice a bunch of spider silk spread over the rocks. Apparently it's spider nursery central. You can't really see them well in the image but there was lots spider nests in amongst the silk spread over the rocks. It was amazing to me to see that.
The sixth one down the lighting was amazing. The sun was at the right angle to light up those clouds which seemed to line up to that island. It would be a hard shot to mess up. Timing is everything sometimes in photography. You wait a few minutes and the lighting has changed.

Without further ado here are some more of the images.

The day is coming I probably won't be able to do all of the hiking like I'm doing now. At the least I'll have gobs of images to help me reminisce about the times I'm experiencing now. For too long I was in a hurry and honestly I can say I didn't enjoy life all that much. Now I do.
Have a great day and try to enjoy your life a bit.