Design the Thing

 The enterprise begins not with a shutter’s click but with the rustle of a map, long before the truck’s engine turns over. There is a geology to preparation, a stratigraphy of intent. The initial survey might be a formal reconnaissance on foot, smelling the air and noting the angle of the late-afternoon sun, or it can be a purely cartographic exploration, tracing contour lines with a fingertip across a USGS quadrangle. From this data, a design emerges. The design of the thing—the collection of images you intend to bring back—assumes a weight, a physical gravity, in direct proportion to the cost of acquisition. And the cost, out here, is measured less in dollars than in sweat, in vertical feet, in the number of suns that will rise and set before you return to a paved road. The more remote the objective, the more unforgiving the calculus of preparation becomes.

Raw rough photo out the front window of the truck in the back-country of Western Utah.

What follows is an exercise in the absolute defeat of entropy, and its primary weapon is the list. Not one list, but a constellation of them, because chaos on-site is a given. In the disorienting quiet of a pre-dawn setup, with the cold seeping through your knees, you will not have the luxury of speculative searching. You will need to know, with Newtonian certainty, the location of the 3mm Allen key for the tripod head. Thus, the lists are broken down by function, by discrete missions within the larger expedition. A sheet for Time-lapse: intervalometer, dummy battery, power cable, ND filter set. A sheet for Sound: shotgun mic, dead cat, field recorder, XLR cables. Landscape. Video. And then, Infrastructure—the gear that supports the gear: batteries, chargers, power station, headlamps, gaffer tape.

A second manifest cross-references the first. It answers the question, “What box is it in?” The Pelican 1510. The blue dry bag. The small F-Stop ICU. Organization is a system of nested dependencies, a matryoshka doll of containment. Loose items are items that have achieved a state of nonexistence; they will never be seen again. To prevent this, you create a bag of bags and a box of boxes. A small zippered pouch for filters goes into a padded lens case, which in turn goes into a specific slot in the main camera pack. A box of boxes and bags becomes a known universe, each object in its predictable orbit. For indispensable items—the satellite messenger, the primary camera body—the rule is twofold: they have one and only one home, or their various locations are noted on a master list with the precision of a land deed. The complexity of the shoot dictates the rigidity of the system. Add the variable of a three-mile hike in the dark, and the system becomes scripture.

A venture on foot is a different species entirely from a trip based out of the truck. From the truck, you can afford profligacy. You can haul more weight than you need, make multiple trips from the tailgate to the tripod, indulging in the luxury of forgotten items. A ten-mile hike in, however, is an exercise in brutal distillation. The equipment list is honed to the point of savage elegance. The technique itself simplifies. You are not merely packing gear; you are curating a specific outcome. You detail the requirements for the final product—the photograph, the video clip—and from that, you design backward, allowing no more mass into the pack than is essential to the task.

Before the final closing of bags and the latching of hard cases, there is the last ritual, a final catechism recited at the tailgate. Refer to the checklist. Are the batteries charged? All of them? And where, precisely, are they? A glance at the sky, a check of the forecast on the satellite uplink. The wind is shifting. Where are the fingerless gloves? Where is the insulated vest, the one packed not for comfort but for contingency? Then, and only then, do the zippers sing their final note, the locks click shut.

There are, of course, the standing protocols, the personal systems refined over years. In the cab of the truck, always, is a sling bag. In it, a Nikon Z8 with the 24-120mm S lens—a combination of staggering versatility. With it, a carbon-fiber monopod and a lightweight tripod. This is the kit of opportunity, ready for the ephemeral wash of light on a distant mesa or the sharp, sudden violence of a hawk diving on a prairie dog. The rest of the camera equipment rides in the bed, inside a padded cube that is itself nestled inside a large cooler, packed with reusable freeze packs. Heat is the enemy of sensors and batteries, and out here, heat is a certainty. Redundancy is another. A duplicate set of all necessary keys lives in a secondary bag, far from the first.

More freeze packs are in the cab, where the sling bag sits, keeping the ready-kit and its spare batteries from cooking in the high-desert sun. The cab is also the communications hub: CB, GMRS, UHF/VHF radios, and the battery banks to run them. For a short trip, power is a portable affair—an EcoFlow River 3, perhaps its Plus sibling with the auxiliary battery. A longer stay, farther from the hard road, means adding two 100-watt solar panels to the manifest, and maybe the two hulking Delta 3 batteries, a private power grid for the wilderness. The battery equation is a function of time and distance. How many days? How many miles from the nearest outlet?

And because most of these outings are solo, the final inventory is not of equipment, but of survival. Water. A spare container of water. And a filter to make more. A sunshade for the truck. And the first-aid kit. These things are not on a list. They are part of the truck itself, as permanent and non-negotiable as the tires.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

 buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

That Smell

Ooh, that smell
Can't you smell that smell?
Ooh, that smell
The smell of death surrounds you

             -- Lynyrd Skynyrd

The thing about watching rock is that it rarely does anything. At least, not on your timetable. You set up a tripod, you wait for the angle of the sun to perform its subtle surgery on a jut of Entrada Sandstone, and you find yourself with an abundance of time. The Entrada, out here in Rabbit Valley, is a Late Jurassic artifact—massive, cross-bedded, a wind-deposited eolian unit, pale white to light-brown, now sculpted by erosion into shapes that make for good photographs. This particular afternoon, I was monitoring the shadows creeping across a cliff face, a landscape photographer's job description, which, when distilled, is mostly just waiting. And, inevitably, thinking.

The solitude is an open invitation for the mind to wander, to chew on something less immediate than f/11 at a hundred-and-sixty. Above the Entrada, you can see the overlying Morrison Formation, which is where the true paleontological currency is found. The bones. Which brought me, as it often does when contemplating deep time, to Dinosaur National Monument. Up in Northern Colorado, time has tilted the earth on its side, and you can stand in a pavilion staring at a vertical wall of accumulated calamity: thousands of bones, stacked, intermingled, a traffic jam of extinct vertebrates. They were washed into a lake, fossilized, and now they wait for a slow, methodical excavation.

But what I was chewing on, watching the light change from brass to gold on the silent sandstone, was the lake itself. Not the finished, fossilized wall, but the raw, messy event. What did that place smell like?

There is no way to know. Only to make educated, and frankly, hilarious, guesses. My mind conjured a small, slow-moving water pit, frequently fed by a flooding river. Upriver, a number of large, recently deceased organisms—say, a hadrosaur, perhaps a small apatosaur—had been swept along, rolling like submerged logs, until they settled in the quiet depths of this lake. The rotting. The sinking. The gases. The slow, aqueous decomposition of a ten-ton body. You see the thousands of bones piled at the Monument, and you’re looking at what was once an odoriferous, magnificent mess.

This train of thought, however, inevitably expands. What did the whole world smell like after the Chicxulub asteroid came crashing in at the end of the Cretaceous? The dust cloud, the global winter, the widespread wildfires, and then, the sheer, unimaginable tonnage of suddenly dead dinosaur.

We don't know the population sizes. We can only suppose by analogy. And analogy, when dealing with biomass on that scale, is a fool's errand. We men, for all our supposed enlightenment, are efficient at elimination. We've certainly impacted total biomass. The historical account of passenger pigeons darkening the sky in the 1700s—flocks of them, so numerous they blocked the sun—and then their utter extinction after the colonists brought over the 10-gauge shotgun. We have their bones. We have the scattered records. But we don’t know the biomass of that species in its prime. We don't know the exact number of individuals it took to fill the sky. We are left with an unknowable absence.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Observation of self

 Chasing Ghosts in the Stone: A Journey to Earth's Great Dying

The Cartography of Cataclysm

To the geologist, the land is a library, its stone shelves holding volumes of immense age. He has spent a lifetime reading them, but now, with a large-format camera and a tripod strapped to his pack, he has come west on a different sort of expedition. He is not here to map mineral claims or survey for dams, but to take portraits of ghosts. His subjects are the great cataclysms of the Mesozoic Era, planetary convulsions that are not abstract dates in a textbook but physical boundaries, sutures of stone stitched into the earth. They are the tangible edges of lost worlds, visible to anyone who knows how and where to look.

His itinerary is a cartography of doom. He seeks two specific scars on the face of the continent. The first is the line drawn circa 252 million years ago between the Permian and Triassic periods, the tombstone of the Paleozoic Era, an event so profound it is known simply as "The Great Dying." The second, a lesser but still pivotal crisis, marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic, some 201 million years in the past, the moment that cleared the global stage for the reign of dinosaurs. His pilgrimage begins at the first and most significant of these, a place where the scale of the cataclysm is matched only by the grandeur of the landscape that records it.

The Great Dying: Reading the Pages of the Permian-Triassic Extinction

Of all the planet's violent chapter endings, the Permian-Triassic extinction was the most severe. The single largest annihilation in the history of life, it carved the fundamental divide between the Paleozoic, the era of ancient life, and the Mesozoic, the era of middle life. The geologist’s challenge, and the photographer’s frustration, is that an event of such magnitude is often marked not by a dramatic, charcoal-black line of ash, but by its opposite: a profound absence. The boundary is an unconformity, a gap in the story, a moment of planetary crisis so deep that for millions of years, in many places, almost nothing was written down at all. To photograph this void is to capture the shape of silence.

A Gulf in Time at the Grand Canyon

He stands on the South Rim, waiting as the evening light lowers, knowing that only the sharpest, lowest angles of the sun can carve definition into the story he wants to capture. The air is cool and thin. His lens is aimed not down into the chasm, but across its top. The flat, cream-colored caprock on which he and a million tourists stand is the Kaibab Formation, a limestone laid down in a shallow Permian sea. This is the final page of the Paleozoic, the last word of an old world. His gaze drifts past the rim, toward the vast plateaus stretching north and east, where the reddish, layered slopes of the Moenkopi Formation mark the first chapter of the Triassic. Between the top of the Kaibab under his feet and the bottom of the Moenkopi over there is a gulf not of space, but of time. Geologists have a quiet word for this kind of temporal gulf: a disconformity. The layers above and below lie parallel, giving the illusion of a continuous story, but the alignment is a lie. A chapter is missing, its binding cracked, leaving the end of Genesis pressed against the start of Exodus. Using a long focal length to compress the immense distance, he waits for the shadows to deepen in the intervening valleys, turning the unseen gap into a tangible, dark line in his composition.

A Smear of Red in the Colorado Front Range

Days later, he finds himself in a landscape less stark but more perplexing, navigating the hogbacks of the Colorado Front Range near Denver. Here, the boundary is not a clean, majestic gap but a subtle, frustrating blur. He walks through a gentle valley that time and weather have eroded between two harder ridges. To his west rises the Fountain Formation, a sandstone coarse as crushed brick, marking the Permian. To his east, the indistinct red beds of the Triassic Lykins Formation. The Great Dying is here, somewhere in the soft dirt and scrub oak under his boots. It is not a line but a zone. The photographic challenge is immense, especially in the flat midday light that washes out the subtle shifts in color. He gets low to the ground, trying to use the texture of the soil to hint at the change in the underlying rock, but the event refuses to sit still and announce itself. How do you create a portrait of a smear of red mudstone, a boundary that bleeds from one world into the next?

He had now seen the shape of the Great Dying; one a void, the other a blur. His journey now pulled him forward fifty million years, to a boundary not of absence, but of violent replacement.

The Second Silence: Witnessing the Triassic-Jurassic Divide

While it did not possess the sheer obliterating force of the Permian event, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction was a crisis of global consequence. It was the filter through which life had to pass, and what emerged on the other side would define the planet for the next 150 million years. The geologist’s quest now is to find the physical evidence of this second silence—the environmental shift that crippled the dominant Triassic ecosystems and created the ecological vacuum that the dinosaurs would so spectacularly fill.

From Painted Mud to a Sea of Sand

In the sculpted canyons near Zion, the story is written in a dramatic, three-act structure, stacked one atop the other. The geologist stands where the first act ends. At his feet are the uppermost layers of the Chinle Formation, a painter’s palette of rock—purple, grey, and crimson mudstones deposited by ancient rivers that meandered across lush Triassic floodplains. This was a world of water.

He tilts his head back, his gaze climbing the cliff face. Immediately above the variegated Chinle are the thinner, more subdued beds of the Moenave Formation. This is the fine print, the second act that records the crisis itself. He scrambles up a talus slope to get closer, running a hand over the rock. It feels friable, a mix of siltstone and fine-grained sandstone. Here, in the subtle shifts of texture, he can read the environmental chaos—the story of faltering rivers, of seasons of drought and flood that choked the vibrant world below. This less-famous unit is the crucial text, preserving the pivotal transition.

Then he looks up again, past the Moenave, to the third and final act, and the scale of it forces him to take a step back. Soaring hundreds of feet into the Utah sky is the monolithic, cross-bedded face of the Navajo Sandstone. It is the rock of the Early Jurassic, a colossal sea of sand, an erg that once stretched across this entire region. The story is a clear and devastating narrative: a wet world died in the chaotic fine print of the Moenave, and in its place rose one of the largest deserts the planet has ever known. This is not just a change in rock type; it is a portrait of planetary trauma, an environmental coup frozen in stone.

Portraits of Time

The long drive home is a time for reflection. The images captured on his digital chips are more than geological curiosities. They are portraits of ghosts, and he has learned that ghosts have different personalities. The Earth, it seems, does not record its traumas with a single signature, but with a whole language of silence, change, and rebirth.

At the Grand Canyon, he photographed a ghost of absence—a clean, profound void where millions of years of life simply ceased to be recorded. In the Colorado foothills, he pursued a ghost of transition, a fugitive smear in the rock that chronicled the same event as a slow, indistinct bleeding from one world into the next. And on the Colorado Plateau, he witnessed a cinematic transformation, where the boundary was a sharp, environmental narrative: a vibrant world of painted mud and rivers, extinguished and then buried under an empire of sand.

To stand on these boundaries is to gain a humbling and necessary perspective. It is to feel the true weight of the planet's history under your feet and to understand that our own world is but a single, delicate page in a library of stone whose volumes are measured in ages, and whose most dramatic stories are told in silence.

buzzshawphoto.com

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

The Exposure Triangle

 We can’t really get down to the business of the field—the 'traverse' through the sagebrush, the waiting for the 'light to carve out the texture' of a canyon wall—without first talking about the basics, can we? It’s like trying to understand the 'geology of a region' without knowing your 'igneous' from your 'sedimentary'. You need the fundamentals, the quiet, solid framework upon which all the 'really interesting' work is built.

The Stillness of Light: An Essential Overview

In the end, all that separates a photographer from the light itself is a small mechanical box, and our ability to control what that box does. Things have changed, of course. Film is mostly a beautiful memory for many, replaced by the 'digital sensor', that sensitive electronic eye. But the underlying process? It’s as constant as the current in a river. We’re still just controlling 'how much light' reaches the medium.

I first learned this process by running those strips of film through my camera—a discipline that taught me the 'weight' of every decision. That essential control is known in the trade as the 'Exposure Triangle'. It's the central mechanism, the 'governor' of illumination.

Now, before we plunge into the specifics of my own workflow—the 'logistical challenges' and the 'quartermaster's ledger' entries that fill my notebooks—we need to pause and make sure we’re all operating with the same baseline understanding. This little 'side trip into the Exposure Triangle isn't a distraction; it's the map key. It’s the gentle reminder that what we do with the camera's settings—what seem like mere numbers and clicks—are really just our means of telling the 'landscape how to present itself'.

This quick overview should serve as a friendly, steady reference point. It’s here to make my future field discussions easier to follow, to let you know exactly 'why' I've chosen a certain setting when I'm discussing a particular image. And for me? Well, organizing information to teach others always 'refines my own understanding' a good review of the process is always a 'quiet goodness.

Let’s step into the light together, shall we? 📸

What aspect of the Exposure Triangle—'aperture', 'shutter speed', or 'ISO'—would you like to start with?

Wrangling Photons: A Field Guide to the Exposure Triangle

It’s a familiar feeling for any photographer. You’re scrolling through a dozen shots of the same waterfall, and most are… fine. The first is a mess—too dark, too bright, clearly incorrect. The second is technically okay; the highlights are where they should be, the shadows behave themselves, and by all accounts, it is a correctly exposed image. But the third one… the third one sings.

This third image, what we’ll call the "creatively correct" one, has something more. It possesses a greater sharpness that carries your eye throughout the entire frame, and the motion of passing vehicles has a blur that is not just blurry, but pleasingly so. These three images demonstrate the gulf between a machine’s correct decision and an artist’s intentional one. The goal isn't just to capture a scene, but to make deliberate choices that elevate it. This guide is about demystifying the fundamental language of photography so that you can gain mastery over your camera and start making those creatively correct choices yourself.

The Language of Light: Understanding Exposure

To understand photography is to understand its most basic component: light. The central concept that governs this is called "exposure," and learning it is the first step in learning to "speak camera." In fact, a finished photograph itself is often called an "exposure."

In a photographic context, Exposure is simply the amount of light that passes through your lens and your camera's shutter, ultimately registering on a photosensitive medium—be it a digital sensor or a frame of film.

Three core mechanisms, our main characters in this photographic story, control this flow of light: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO. These three factors are at play in every single image you take, whether you are aware of them or not. To move from taking correct pictures to creating creatively correct ones, you need to get to know this trio intimately.

Meet the Trio: The Three Levers of Light

Each member of our exposure trio has a primary job in controlling the amount of light that enters the camera. But just as importantly, each one comes with a unique "side effect"—a secondary characteristic that you, the photographer, can use to inject creative flair into your images. Let's meet them one by one.

 Aperture: The Pupil of the Lens

At its heart, the concept of Aperture is simple: it’s the size of your lens's entrance pupil. Just like the pupil in your eye, the more it’s dilated, the more light it lets in.

This is where things get a little weird. Aperture is measured in values called F-stops, with numbers like F/1.4, F/4, or F/22. Here’s the one quirky rule you’ll need to remember: the smaller the F-number, the bigger the opening. It feels backwards, but once it clicks, you'll never forget it.

For the technically curious, an F-stop is a ratio: the focal length of your lens divided by the stop in use. As one of my mentors wisely notes, this is "not necessary information by any means," but it helps explain why a smaller number means a bigger hole.

Aperture's Creative Side Effect: Depth of Field

This is where you, the photographer, get to play god with focus. Aperture's most powerful artistic tool is its control over Depth of Field (DOF), which is the range of things that will be in focus in your image.

• Shallow Depth of Field: A large aperture (like F/2.8) creates a very shallow plane of focus. This is how portrait photographers get that razor-thin focus on their subject against a "milky out of focus background." It isolates the subject, making them pop.

• Great Depth of Field: A small aperture (like F/11 or F/22) keeps nearly everything in the frame sharp, from the flowers at your feet to the mountains on the horizon. This is the go-to choice for landscape photographers who want clarity throughout the scene.

Shutter Speed: The Blink of an Eye

Shutter Speed is exactly what it sounds like: the length of time the camera's shutter remains open, allowing light to hit the sensor. It’s measured in seconds or, more commonly, fractions of a second (e.g., 1/250s or 1/30s).

Shutter Speed's Creative Side Effect: Motion Capture

Shutter speed dictates how motion is recorded in your photograph, giving you the power to either freeze a moment in time or embrace the blur of movement.

• Freezing Motion: A fast shutter speed, like 1/250th of a second, is quick enough to capture a moment with crystalline clarity. In a photo of a waterfall, it would make the water appear frozen in time.

• Blurring Motion: A slow shutter speed, like 1/30th of a second, allows moving objects to streak across the frame. That same waterfall would now look soft and "streaky." Very long shutter speeds are how photographers capture the iconic light trails from vehicle headlights at night.

ISO: The Sensitivity Dial

ISO refers to the sensitivity of the film or digital sensor to light. The concept comes from the film world, where a film stock's sensitivity was part of its name—like Colorplus 200 or Portra 800. The higher the number, the more sensitive the film is to light. Digital cameras have the incredible advantage of being able to change their ISO at any time. On a digital camera, a higher ISO is essentially an electrical amplification of the light signal, also known as "gain."

ISO's Trade-off: Grain and Digital Noise

This sensitivity comes at a cost. Increasing the ISO introduces more grain (on film) or digital noise (on digital cameras). Now, film grain can sometimes be a pleasing stylistic choice, adding texture and mood. Digital noise, on the other hand, is "not particularly pleasing." For the cleanest, highest-quality image possible, the ideal is to always shoot at your camera's Base ISO, which is usually the lowest number available (like 100 or 125).

Now that we've met our trio in theory, let's head to a waterfall and see them in action. This is where the real learning begins.

The Balancing Act: The Exposure Triangle in Action

Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO are so interconnected that photographers refer to them as the Exposure Triangle. The name is a perfect metaphor: if you change one of the three points, you must adjust one or both of the others to compensate if you want to maintain the same level of brightness in your image.

Let’s walk through a real-world example to see this balancing act in the field.

The Goal: A Correct (But Uninspired) Shot

Imagine we’ve found a beautiful landscape and, knowing nothing, we put our camera on Auto. We take a picture, and it looks decent. The camera gives us settings of F/4, 1/250s, and ISO 125. The exposure is correct, but because this is a landscape, our creative goal is to get more of the scene in focus—we want a greater depth of field.

The First Move: Chasing Sharpness

To achieve this, we switch to Manual mode and change the Aperture from a middling F/4 to a much smaller F/11. We take the shot. The result? Something is "terribly wrong." The image is now far too dark. We successfully increased our depth of field, but in doing so, we "took away a bunch of light."

The Language of Balance

How much light did we take away? Photographers measure light in Stops. One stop is a doubling or halving of the amount of light. The jump from F/4 to F/11 is a decrease of three stops of light. We need to add those three stops back.

The First Trade-Off: Compensating with ISO

Our first thought might be to increase the ISO. To make up for three stops of lost light, we'd need to increase the ISO from 125 to 200 (one stop), then to 400 (two stops), and finally to 800 (three stops). We take the photo, and the exposure is correct again! But when we look closely, the image shot at ISO 800 has significantly more grain than our clean original. This isn’t the quality we’re after.

The Final Solution: Compensating with Shutter Speed

Unhappy with the noise, we decide to return to our clean Base ISO of 125. This leaves only one lever to pull: Shutter Speed. We need to lengthen our shutter speed by three stops to let in more light. Starting from 1/250th of a second:

• One stop slower is 1/125s.

• Two stops slower is 1/60s.

• Three stops slower is 1/30s.

We set the shutter to 1/30th of a second and take the picture. Success! The image is now correctly exposed, sharp from front to back (thanks to our F/11 aperture), and clean (thanks to our Base ISO). But it has a new quality: the water in the scene, which was frozen at 1/250s, now has a soft, streaky motion blur.

Notice what we did here: we started with a correct auto-exposure and, through a series of intentional trade-offs, arrived at this creatively correct image—one that is not only well-exposed but also sharp and dynamic in a way the camera could never have achieved on its own.

This step-by-step process wasn't just a technical exercise; it was a creative one, which brings us to the heart of intentional photography.

From Technical to Intentional: The Art of the "Creatively Correct"

Mastering the exposure triangle isn’t about memorizing numbers; it’s about learning to make deliberate, intentional choices. It’s about looking at a scene and deciding which creative side effect—depth of field, motion capture, or image cleanliness—is most important for the story you want to tell.

Before you press the shutter, ask yourself these questions:

• How much Depth of Field do I want in this image? This is an Aperture question. Do you want to isolate a subject or capture a sweeping, sharp landscape?

• Is there Motion I need to be aware of, and how do I want it to register? This is a Shutter Speed question. Do you want to freeze the action or show its flow?

• What is the cleanest ISO I can use? This is an ISO question. Can you shoot at your Base ISO, or does the situation force you to accept some noise?

A camera on auto mode is capable of making a correct decision. It can balance the triangle to get a decent exposure. But it is not smart enough to make the best decision. It does not have creative problem-solving abilities. You do.

Your Training Wheels for Manual Mode

Jumping straight into full Manual mode can feel intimidating. Luckily, as we find a new scene to practice on, we can try out Priority Modes. Think of them like training wheels on a bicycle. They exist in the middle of the spectrum, between full automatic and full manual, providing stability by managing one variable for you so you can focus on learning to balance the other.

• Aperture Priority (A or Av): In this mode, you choose the aperture you want, giving you direct control over depth of field. The camera will then automatically select the shutter speed needed for a correct exposure. This is perfect for portraits or landscapes where depth of field is your primary creative concern.

• Shutter Priority (S or Tv): Here, you choose the shutter speed, giving you control over motion capture. The camera then selects the appropriate aperture. This is ideal for sports or action photography where freezing or blurring motion is your main goal.

These modes are fantastic learning tools. By setting one variable yourself and observing how the camera compensates with the other, you begin to build an intuitive understanding of how the triangle works. As the source of this wisdom once said, "It's just like riding a bike with the training wheels on for a little bit. And it's fun because you get the same results with less work."

Finding Your Style

The journey from a technically correct snapshot to an intentional, creatively correct photograph is one of the most rewarding in photography. It's a path that begins with understanding these fundamentals. Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO are not just settings; they are the levers of artistic expression, the "foundations of photography." By learning to balance their technical demands with your own vision, you unlock a new level of control and creativity.

"Combine technical understanding with creativity and you will never have to worry about finding your style. It will find you."

Thanks for stopping by and having a read.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

Recon

 

The Preliminary Traverse: A Geographer's Notebook

The first look at a place is not an act of creation; it is reconnaissance with intent. It is less a formal survey than a quiet, almost diffident introduction—a walkabout undertaken to absorb the land’s temperament. Before the heavy, deliberate machinery of a camera is unshouldered, before a tripod is leveled and locked, the geographer of light must conduct a preliminary traverse. The purpose of this initial, unhurried journey is not to make a photograph. It is to have a conversation with the place itself.

This traverse is often an incidental affair, a day trip perhaps with the family in tow. The pressure to produce is absent, leaving the professional eye free to work in the background of a leisurely excursion. The final image is sown here, in this absorption. One might take a few field notes with a cell phone camera, but these snapshots are not for the portfolio. They are visual data—a means to study the transient architecture of light. A noon sun might flatten a river valley, turning it into a stark, unreadable map, while the late afternoon light carves texture into the hillside, revealing contours previously invisible. The cell phone, then, is merely an unassuming tool for sketching out the possibilities that a more deliberate return trip might capture. From the physical act of walking the land, the work shifts to the intellectual task of recording these fleeting observations.

Every site possesses its own passion: a unique combination of the visual, the aromas, and the sounds. The scent of damp earth, the particularity of the wind’s voice through the sagebrush—these are data points. Captured audio, when combined with the simple visuals, helps define the place. Returning home and listening to those audio notes—the subtle counterpoint to the digital imagery—enhances the planning, refining the initial reconnaissance into a project with defined goals, design, and execution. Each subsequent visit is a further refinement; every hour provides new moments for consideration. And the presence of others, their awareness of the photographer's watchfulness, can surprisingly enhance the seeing, their fresh perspective helping to define the conversation with the landscape.

The Cartographer's Notebook: A Mapping of Potential

The most essential instrument for this kind of work is not a lens, but a notebook. It is here that the ephemeral—a promising slant of light, a logistical challenge—is made permanent. This cartographer’s ledger is not a mere account book of facts; it is the primary tool for mapping the creative and practical terrain of a future expedition. It transforms a day's pleasant ramble into a workable strategy.

One begins by inscribing what is seen: a lone piñon pine on a western ridge, a derelict barn. Then, one begins to test how these might be rendered. The notebook might read: “Primary subject: lone piñon pine. Afternoon light catches the trunk, turning bark deep ochre. Try a low-angle shot from the southeast to frame it against the empty sky; shadow falls long towards the wash.” This is the moment to document how a subject's character shifts with a change in perspective. Latitude, longitude, and altitude are logged not merely for orientation, but to predict the precise movement of sun and moon, transforming a hopeful guess about light into a precise appointment. Altitude, furthermore, allows for a reasonable guess at temperatures after dark or before dawn—a crucial bit of data for an alpine start.

This entire practice is rooted in a discipline of complete situational awareness. The directive to "keep your head on a swivel" is a professional's call to resist the tunnel vision that settles upon a single subject. The alert eye scans for other elements—an unexpected detail, a surprising juxtaposition—just beyond the immediate point of focus. These discoveries, too, must be inscribed in the notebook, logged as opportunities to be explored upon return.

Alongside creative possibilities, the notebook must hold the mundane but critical data that makes a professional endeavor possible. Logistical facts are the framework for the creative work: travel vitals—the date, time, and vehicle mileage—are recorded; the time spent on site is noted. If the "site is appropriate for time-lapse, bring a chair.” A simple note about bug spray can save a future trip. This data is critical for planning the return and, on a financial level, for substantiating expenses. These notes, written at the site, are a conversation with the photographer of the future—a sage voice in a comfortable living room speaking to the one in the field: “This is what I will need,” they say. “This is what I want to bring home.”

The Quartermaster's Ledger: Sustenance and Situation

A successful shoot is built upon a foundation of non-photographic planning. Securing logistical support—the necessities of food, fuel, and shelter—is as fundamental to the outcome as choosing the right lens. Like any expedition leader, the photographer knows that a failure in the supply lines—a missed meal, an empty gas tank—can compromise the entire enterprise. The quartermaster’s ledger, a dedicated section of the notebook, ensures that the artist is free to focus on the art.

This practical mapping involves identifying local resources. Where can one get gas? A reliable place to eat? If the project requires an overnight, where can one sleep? For those who camp, a suitable spot must be found in advance. This forethought is about efficiency and readiness. The rhythms of landscape photography often conflict with the quiet hours of a campground—arriving late after a sunset shoot or leaving before dawn for a sunrise. An ethical approach is to select a campsite near the entrance or to park and walk in quietly.

In the modern context, one final logistical checkpoint is crucial: confirming cell phone connection. It is not a convenience, but a vital check for communication and safety, a lifeline in case of an emergency. Including a GMRS or UHF/VHF radio will increase your safety in the backcountry; learning the Wilderness Protocol and having a communication plan is non-negotiable. The quartermaster's planning can even involve personal habits. The photographer with a morning “visit of the necessaries” cycle might decide not to eat the day before a sunrise shoot. A disciplined personal practice, such as a 48-hour fluid-only rule, is easily learned. Trying to find a pit toilet in a National Park is not what one wants to be doing when on-site in sub-freezing temperatures. There is plenty of time to eat a fine breakfast at a restaurant after the shoot, an opportunity that also allows for the finalization of notes and the planning for post-production. Then, home for a file backup, and a nap.

The Calculus of Return: A Final Reckoning

The final stage of planning is a synthesis of all prior reconnaissance—a moment of quiet reckoning. Before committing the significant time and resources of an actual photoshoot, one must consult the cartographer’s notebook, holding the initial field sketches and logistical data against a series of frank questions. This assessment, a final calculus, determines the project’s fate.

The core question is: “Is this worth the time? Can I get an image here I like?” This query moves beyond technical feasibility to the heart of creative satisfaction. The results sought are for expressing the essence of what brought the photographer to this place; they are not to please others but to record what defines the artist's knowledge and emotions. The safety protocol is next: “Do I need to take backup or arrange safety checks?” A sober assessment of the risks ensures preparation aligns with the realities of the location. A plan for communication is made; accidents happen. The artistic approach is considered: “What style of shooting will I commit to?” This forces a commitment to a specific vision. Equipment considerations follow: “Does the location allow my full kit or do I need to consider carry weight?” Every piece of gear is chosen with purpose, informed by the careful geography of that first, quiet traverse.

What does the geographer of light see that others miss? The geographer informs the photographer. As with most aspects of the work, the training of a field geologist determines the approach to seeing, the workflow, the vision, and the art. The landscape is the book being read; it is always the instructor. I capture images, I learn more. I record moments.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved

A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests,
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

                   -- Bob Dylan

The silence has a grain to it, a texture suggesting it is not an absence of sound but a thing in itself, accumulated over time. My camera, an instrument of the present moment, is fixed to its tripod, its lens directed toward a wall of Entrada Sandstone. In the late-afternoon light, the rock seems to absorb the sun and hold it internally, a slow, deep orange reminiscent of cooling iron. To be here, on the Colorado Plateau, is to be in a place that has winnowed its vocabulary down to a single, resonant word: aridity. The air has a desiccated edge. The landscape is an open book of geomorphology—fin, arch, hoodoo, canyon—all of it incised from what are known collectively, and with a certain plainspoken poetry, as the red beds. These are the lithified archives of an erg, a sea of sand that blew across this part of the world for millennia we can only guess at. Every visible plane and exfoliating surface is a narrative of stone and sun, of a world shaped by a thirst so profound it has become structural.

This, however, is the story on the dust jacket. The central paradox of this landscape—the geological non sequitur that brings me here—is that this paragon of dryness is also the tombstone of a drowned world. The evidence is here, but it is cryptic, written between the lines. Spliced into the thick, ruddy volumes of aeolian sandstone—the unmistakable signature of wind-deposition—are discordant passages. Thin, dark seams of gray shale, the compressed and settled muds of deep, anoxic lakes, have no business in a desert narrative. Even more incongruous: coal. Coal is the geologic ghost of a swamp, the carbon memory of a forest so fecund and waterlogged that its dead were buried faster than they could decay. Finding a coal seam in Triassic desert rock is like finding a receipt from a shipyard in a pharaoh's tomb. It points to a chapter of earth history that has been almost completely effaced, the story of a planet subjected to a rainstorm that lasted nearly two million years.

How, then, does this knowledge re-calibrate the eye? How does one frame a photograph of stone and sun while knowing that it is equally a monument to a global deluge, a climatic convulsion that reset the terms of life on Earth? A camera captures surfaces. The story is in the stratigraphy. To see the layers, you must first imagine the world as it was before the sky broke.

To comprehend the scale of the demolition, you must first walk the halls of the edifice that was destroyed. The Carnian Pluvial Episode was not a genesis event; it was a foreclosure. It brought down a planetary regime that had persisted for forty million years, an ecosystem of such apparent stability it might have seemed permanent. Its termination was not a gradual shift but a violent erasure.

Picture the planet 234 million years ago. The continents are welded into one supercontinent, Pangea, a single terrestrial mass stretching nearly from pole to pole. Its vast interior is a hyper-arid desert that would make the modern Sahara seem temperate—an expanse of rock and oxidized sand under a punishing sun. Life was a marginal enterprise, clinging to the coasts and the ephemeral river systems, while the continental heartland was left to the wind.

The dominant life forms, the undisputed proprietors of the planet, were a group of archosaurs called crurotarsans—the so-called "crocodile-line" reptiles. These were not the placid, semi-aquatic ambush hunters of today. They were a bestiary of terrestrial authority. There were giants like Sarcosuchus, a predator twenty-five feet long with a skull built for brute force, and things like Postosuchus, which stood high on its legs and moved like a reptilian grizzly bear. They were the lions and the wolves of the Triassic. They hunted a curious assortment of herbivores: the dicynodonts, mammal-like reptiles with tusks and beaks, whose fossils are so widespread they became a key piece of evidence for continental drift; and the rhynchosaurs, stout reptiles with shearing beaks designed for processing the tough, low-growing flora of a dry world. As for the dinosaurs, they were a minor guild. They were small, mostly bipedal, and lived in the margins—the Triassic equivalent of field mice, scurrying under the feet of the true rulers, their existence predicated on not being noticed.

This was the pre-lapsarian world: a planet of baked earth, governed by a forgotten dynasty of super-crocs, its climate a model of arid stability. It had no inkling that its lease was about to expire.

The agent of change came not from the heavens but from the mantle. The trigger for the two-million-year rain was a rupture in the planet’s crust, a deep wound that bled magma for half a million years. Geologists call it the Wrangellian Large Igneous Province, a flood basalt eruption that tore through thousands of square miles of what is now western North America. The lava was not the primary weapon. The gases were.

The mechanism was a two-act play of planetary violence. First came a cooling. The initial blasts injected immense quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The SO₂ reacted with atmospheric water to form a veil of sulfate aerosols, reflecting solar radiation back into space. The result was a brief, sharp “volcanic winter.” The rain that fell was acidic, poisoning soils and surface waters.

Then came the heat. The sulfur shield was transient, precipitating out of the atmosphere within years. The second gas, carbon dioxide, was not. The volume of CO₂ venting directly from the mantle was significant, but it was amplified by a secondary effect. As the magma punched upward, it intruded into and effectively cooked vast, deeply buried deposits of ancient coal and hydrocarbons, liberating their carbon. It was a planetary-scale fossil-fuel event, running in reverse. For five hundred thousand years, this volcanic province steadily pumped greenhouse gases into the air, wrapping the planet in a thermal blanket it could not shed.

The planet’s thermostat was broken. The oceans heated up, and as surface temperatures rose, evaporation rates skyrocketed. The atmosphere became saturated with water vapor—itself a potent greenhouse gas—creating a runaway feedback loop. The world was now a superheated, hyper-humid system. The atmospheric engine, overcharged and pressurized, had only one way to vent. It began to rain.

To move past the geological mechanics is to try to imagine the texture of life during the Carnian Pluvial Episode. It was not a steady drizzle but a mega-monsoon that pulsed across the globe for two million years—long, torrential wet seasons alternating with brutally hot, evaporative dry seasons. The great red deserts became mires. Rivers on an Amazonian scale would incise themselves into the bedrock, only to vanish when the cycle swung back to dry.

The air would have felt heavy, hot, and so saturated it would be like breathing steam. The world was a greenhouse with a fever, the heat radiating not just from a clouded-over sun but from the sodden ground itself. During the wet periods, every surface would have been slick with moisture, filmed with algae and cyanobacteria. The prevailing smell would have been of petrichor, rot, and fermenting vegetation.

The ground itself became unreliable. The stable, wind-scoured plains of Pangea were replaced by endless mudflats and braided, sediment-choked rivers. A dry wash could become a slurry flow of rock and water in minutes. Solid footing was a luxury. In this world, survival was not about finding food but about finding a patch of ground that would hold your weight. The new climate was not merely inclement; it was a specific kind of assassin, seemingly designed to dismantle the forty-million-year-old ecosystem.

Who survives a world like that?

The Carnian Pluvial Episode was a great filter. It did not kill randomly. It selected against the incumbents and for the marginalia. The ruling crurotarsans were exquisitely adapted to a dry, stable world. In the new regime of oscillating mud and baked earth, their strengths became liabilities.

Their very size was a disadvantage. The tonnage of a Postosuchus, so effective for intimidating rivals on firm ground, became a fatal burden in the muck of the wet seasons. Their specialized food web collapsed. The new, perpetually damp climate favored taller, more fibrous conifers over the low-lying plants that herbivores like the rhynchosaurs and dicynodonts depended on. As the prey base vanished, the apex predators starved. As ectotherms, the great reptiles relied on the sun to regulate their metabolism. In a world of perpetual cloud cover and chilling damp, they would have become sluggish, vulnerable, unable to effectively hunt.

When the last of the great crocodile-line archosaurs became mired in the mud, it left a power vacuum unprecedented in the history of life on land. The niche of apex predator had not so much been vacated as erased. And from the undergrowth stepped the dinosaurs. They did not triumph through direct competition. They triumphed because they were accidentally pre-adapted to the new, miserable conditions. They had three advantages. Their bipedal posture, common among early forms, kept their bodies higher off the treacherous ground. Evidence suggests they were endothermic, or nearly so—they carried their own internal furnaces, allowing them to remain active in the damp gloom. And their respiratory system, with its uniquely efficient, bird-like flow-through design, was a biological supercharger in a hot, humid, and likely oxygen-stressed atmosphere.

The rise of the dinosaurs was not a conquest. It was an accident of inheritance. A geological catastrophe had killed the old kings and ruined their kingdom. The dinosaurs were simply the only ones left who could tolerate the new world order.

I pack away the camera. The sun is gone, and the Entrada sandstone has cooled to a deep purple. The silence returns, but it is layered now. It is no longer the silence of an empty desert but the quiet that follows a storm of unimaginable duration. I came here to photograph a landscape. I found, instead, the depositional history of a world remade by fire and flood.

The red rocks are not just symbols of an ancient desert. They are the pages of a book, and the thin, dark lines of shale are not errata; they are the hinge of the plot. To photograph this place is to try to frame a story of collapse and contingency—the sheer, dumb luck that put the dinosaurs on a throne they would occupy for 150 million years, and in so doing, cleared a path that would eventually lead to us. Dominance, the rocks suggest, is an artifact of conditions. Strength is situational. The history of life is written not by the powerful, but by the survivors who inherit a world washed clean.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.

Snowball

in and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there

                                              -- Roundabout, Yes

My intent with these writings is to discuss my photography and the resulting workflow. Included in this is my perspective on the subjects I shoot. My primary hunting targets are landscapes, so I’ll be touching on all the issues involved. Weather, planning, composition, hardware, and most importantly, working with light. Being a geologist, I also apply this knowledge in not only choosing where and what to shoot, but also in shaping my viewpoint of my subjects based on my understanding of the physical sciences. I have and will be discussing here the geology that shows up in my images. I hope to build a baseline understanding in my audience of what I am seeing and shooting. What is out there, what it means, and what its history is.

This writing is about what is known as Snowball Earth. This is a period where the Earth was frozen, glaciers scoured the exposed rock in the terrain, and provided the nutrients for the Cambrian explosion.

The Contradiction in Stone

To look for evidence of Snowball Earth is to hunt for contradictions. You find yourself standing in the shimmering heat of Namibia or the scorched emptiness of Death Valley, tripod over your shoulder, looking for the signature of ice. Not the recent ice of the Pleistocene—the stuff of woolly mammoths—but ice of an antiquity so profound it beggars belief. You are looking for a specific type of rock, a chaotic jumble of boulders, pebbles, and sand called a tillite. It is the unmistakable debris left behind when a glacier, nature’s most powerful bulldozer, finally retreats. And you are finding it in places that, some 700 million years ago, were sitting squarely in the tropics. Ice, at sea level, on the equator.

The geologic record does not lie, but it can present a story so outlandish that for decades geologists tried to explain it away. The story it tells is of a planet gone catastrophically wrong. The theory, in its starkest form, suggests that on at least two occasions during a deep-time chapter called the Cryogenian Period, the Earth’s climate system didn’t just falter; it broke. The planet froze over, from the poles to the equator, encasing itself in a shell of ice perhaps a kilometer thick. The oceans became a planetary skating rink. From space, Earth would have been a brilliant, almost featureless white marble.

A Runaway Thermostat

A planet’s climate is a balancing act, a thermostat of sorts. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat, while the chemical weathering of rocks on the surface draws that carbon dioxide out. It’s a delicate, self-correcting feedback loop that has, for the most part, kept Earth in the liquid-water-friendly "Goldilocks zone." But in the Cryogenian, something gave the thermostat a hard shove.

The leading culprit was the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia. This immense landmass was situated mostly along the equator. As it ripped apart, it created new coastlines, dramatically increasing rainfall. Rain, made slightly acidic by atmospheric CO2​, is remarkably good at dissolving silicate rocks. This weathering process pulled enormous quantities of CO2​ from the atmosphere, locking it away in ocean sediments. The thermostat was turned down. And down. And down.

As temperatures fell, ice sheets began to grow from the poles. This is where the second act of the disaster begins: the ice-albedo feedback. Ice is white; it is highly reflective (high albedo). The more of the planet’s surface that is covered in ice, the more sunlight is reflected back into space. Less absorbed sunlight means more cooling, which means more ice, which means more reflection. It is a vicious, positive feedback loop. Once the ice sheets crept down to about 30 degrees latitude, the process became unstoppable. The planet, in a geological instant, snapped frozen.

The Great Thaw and Its Signature

A world encased in ice seems like a permanent condition. With the rocks covered, the chemical weathering that normally removes CO2​ would have ground to a halt. But the planet’s inner heat engine kept churning. Volcanoes, heedless of the frigid surface, continued to puncture the ice, venting gases from the mantle. For millions of years, they puffed CO2​ into the thin, frozen atmosphere. With no planetary sink to absorb it, the CO2​ concentration steadily climbed to levels hundreds of times higher than today.

Eventually, a tipping point was reached. A super-greenhouse effect took hold, and the ice began to melt. And just as the freezing was a runaway process, so was the thaw. The world flipped from a planetary freezer to a sweltering hothouse.

This is the second contradiction the landscape photographer-geologist looks for. Sitting directly on top of the glacial tillites, with no transition, you often find a thick, peculiar layer of limestone. Geologists call them "cap carbonates." Their existence is baffling unless seen through the Snowball lens. They speak of a sudden shift from a glacial environment to a warm, shallow sea saturated with the dissolved carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To frame a shot of that sharp, distinct boundary—the chaotic glacial mess below and the smooth, layered carbonate above—is to capture the most dramatic climate swing in Earth’s history.

A Fertilized World

The glaciers of Snowball Earth did more than scour the land. As they ground across the continents, they pulverized mountains into rock flour, a potent cocktail of minerals. The great thaw then unleashed this bounty. Acid rain, falling on the freshly scraped continents, washed a torrent of nutrients—especially phosphorus, a key building block for life—into the starved oceans.

The planet, having been put through a deep freeze and a pressure wash, was now a fertilized garden. The stage was set. In the geologic period that immediately follows, the Ediacaran, we see the first fossils of large, multicellular organisms. And shortly after that comes the Cambrian Explosion, a frenzy of evolutionary innovation where nearly all modern animal body plans appeared in a geologic blink. The deep freeze was the crucible in which our distant ancestors were forged.

So when I set up my tripod before an ancient rock face, I am looking at more than just composition and light. I am looking at a narrative. A slab of rock in the desert can tell a story of equatorial glaciers. A limestone layer can speak of a planet that nearly died and, in doing so, paved the way for a world teeming with us.

Thanks for stopping by and having a read.

 

All images posted on the buzzshawphoto.blogspot.com 2025 are copyrighted. All rights reserved.