Cronos

 

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
                                       -- Nathanial Hawthorne

The Anastomosing of Time

The cold I caught while traveling is finally loosening its grip. The fog in my head is lifting, clearing away like morning mist off a river, and the daily walk is no longer a slough through heavy water but a return to the joy of air and light. Strength returns. The world sharpens.

And so I sit here, bathed in the glow of the screen, wrestling with a mass of digital ghosts—images captured weeks ago in the silence of Canyonlands. It is a good exercise, this looking. Analyzing the composition, checking the technique, remembering the tripod standing there like a three-legged watcher.

My mind, as it does, begins to wander. It steps into the screen.

I see the layers defined in the Permian Organ Rock formation, down in the deep throat of the canyon. I see the red bleeding out below the blinding white of the White Rim Sandstone. Those layers are not just rock; they are time frozen in a stack. This was a fluvial world once, a place of water. It is a record of rivers meandering across a flat plane, twisting and braiding in a pattern the geologists call anastomosing.

Anastomosing. It sounds like a spell, but it is just the memory of water. The sediments accumulated, grain by grain, building a clock made of stone.

I have taken you back to the Mesozoic before, walked you through the heat and the ferns. But that was a watercolor sketch—a light wash of pigment, transparent and quick. The truth? The truth requires oil. It needs deep, thick, textured paint, layer upon layer, to capture the heavy reality of what science has given us.

It is hard to hold. We understand a day. We understand the rhythm of a month. If Cronos, the old Greek god of time, smiles upon us, we might even understand a century. We can feel the shape of a hundred years.

But sixty-six million? The time since the fire fell from the sky into the Gulf of Mexico and silenced the dinosaurs? That is a ghost too big to hold.

So let us shrink it down. Let us give Cronos a tool we can understand.

Hand him a pen. A writing pen with a point as fine as a whisper—0.01 millimeters wide. A single scratch of this pen, thin as a spider’s silk, will represent one day.

Cronos puts the pen to paper. Scratch. Tuesday. Scratch. Wednesday.
He draws and draws. To mark a single year, he creates a band of ink 3.6 millimeters wide. A decade is the width of a matchbook.

Now, unroll the paper. Let it spill out of the room, past the Canyonlands, out into the world. To hold the sixty-six million years since the asteroid struck, the scroll must act like those anastomosing streams—wandering on and on and on.

The scroll would stretch for one hundred and fifty miles.

One hundred and fifty miles of ink.

Walk it. Feel the dust of the road. For the first mile, there is nothing but ash and the cold wind of the impact winter. Then, the ferns unfurl. The birds cry out with new voices. You walk ten miles, twenty, fifty. The paper stretches on, a white road under the moon.

You walk for days. You walk past the shifting of continents, the groaning of mountains rising like sleeping giants from the earth. You walk past the red layers and the white layers, past the rivers braiding in the dark.

And all this time, mile after dusty mile, there is no one to say hello. No lights in the windows. Just the wind in the grass and the hunger in the dark.

You are tired now. Your strength is fading. You are at the end of the road. One hundred and fifty miles of silence behind you.

And then, in the very last fifty yards—a mere stone’s throw from the end—a shadow stands up. A hand strikes a flint. A fire blooms.

We are here.

And all our cities, our rockets, our symphonies, our wars? The photos we take of the canyons, the colds we catch, the tripods we set up to capture the light?

Look down at the paper. Look at the very end.

It is the last seven inches.

We are nothing more than the final tremble of the pen, the last wet smudge of ink before the paper runs out and the wind blows it all away.


Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

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

revisiting Composition

 "I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then"

    –Alice

There is a peculiar form of madness that compels otherwise sensible people to strap forty pounds of glass and aluminum to their backs, trudge into the wilderness at an hour when reasonable people are still REM-sleeping, and stand freezing on a cliff just to capture a picture of a rock.

I should know; I have done it often.

But if you are going to commit to this delightful absurdity, you might as well come back with something that doesn’t look like an accidental pocket-dial photo. To do that, one must master two things: the artistic arrangement of the world (Composition) and the bewilderingly complex button-mashing required to capture it (Workflow).

Here is how to manage the chaos, or at least organize it.

Part I: Arranging the Furniture (Composition)

The world is a messy place. Particularly mine it seems. Nature drops trees wherever it feels like it and leaves mountains lying around in heaps. Your job is to impose order on this chaos.

The Tri-Planar Arrangement

Most bad landscape photos suffer from being terribly flat. To fix this, you need to think of your photo like a sandwich or a theatrical stage. You need layers.

• The Foreground: This is the "Hello, come in" mat. It’s a rock, a shrub, or a patch of interesting dirt right in front of your boots. It anchors the viewer so they don’t feel like they’re falling out of the frame.

• The Midground: The filling. The bit that connects the close stuff to the far stuff.

• The Background: The hero. The jagged peak or the exploding sunset. Without the other two, this is just a postcard. With them, it’s a place.

Leading Lines

Human eyes are sluggish. They need to be told where to go. A "leading line" is just a polite visual usher. It’s a river, a fence, or a ridge that says, "Right this way, please, towards the mountain." Without it, the viewer’s eye just bounces around the frame like a pinball until it gets bored and leaves.

The Rule of Thirds

Imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe board drawn over your viewfinder. The rule states, with almost religious dogmatism, that you must never put the horizon in the middle. It is considered the height of poor taste. Put the horizon on the top line or the bottom line. Put the tree on the vertical line. If you put the subject dead center, it looks like a mugshot.

Visual Weight

Objects have "weight." A dark, massive boulder on the right side of your photo will tip the whole image over unless you balance it with something on the left—perhaps a lighter, smaller tree. It is a visual seesaw. You are trying to keep the picture from falling off the wall.

Part II: The Technical Gymnastics (Field Workflow)

Now that you have framed a lovely scene, you will discover that your camera is technologically incapable of capturing it. The sky is too bright, the shadows are too dark, and the lens can’t focus on everything at once.

To compensate, we must cheat.

1. The Panorama (Making it Bigger)

You want to capture the vastness of the Grand Canyon, but your lens only sees a slice. You must shoot a panorama.

• The Trick: Turn the camera vertical (portrait orientation). This seems counterintuitive, but it gives you more sky and ground to work with.

• The Headache: You must rotate the camera, not around your body, but around the lens’s "nodal point." If you don’t do this, objects in the foreground will shift relative to the background (parallax), and the software later will have a nervous breakdown trying to stitch it together.

• The Workflow: Level the tripod. (Seriously, level it). Snap, rotate, snap, rotate. Overlap by half. Do not sneeze.

2. Focus Stacking (Defying Physics)

You want that flower three inches from the lens to be sharp, but you also want the mountain ten miles away to be sharp. Physics says "No." Physics dictates that you can only have one plane of focus.

• The Solution: Take a picture focused on the flower. Then focus a little further back. Click. Further back. Click. Repeat until you are focusing on the horizon.

• The Result: You now have ten photos, each blurry in a different way, which you will mash together later to create one photo that defies optical reality.

3. Exposure Bracketing (The Goldilocks Method)

The sun is screaming bright; the canyon floor is pitch black. Your sensor cannot handle both.

• The Solution: Take three photos. One underexposed (dark, to save the sky). One normal. One overexposed (bright, to see into the shadows).

• The Workflow: Set your camera to "Auto Exposure Bracket." It goes click-click-click. Later, you will merge them into a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image, which sounds technical but really just means "an image where you can actually see things."2

4. Pixel Shifting (The Overachiever)

Some fancy cameras will vibrate their sensor by a single micron between shots to capture better color data.

• The Warning: This requires the camera to be as still as a corpse. If the wind blows a leaf, or if a squirrel runs past, you will get digital "ghosting," which looks like a glitch in the Matrix. Use only on days when the earth itself seems to have stopped spinning.

Part III: The Ritual of Organization

By the end of the shoot, you will have 400 photos. 10 are panoramas, 50 are focus stacks, and the rest are mistakes. How do you tell them apart?

The "Hand" Bookend

This is the most sophisticated tool in my arsenal: my own hand.

Before I start a complicated sequence (like a 10-shot focus stack), I hold my hand in front of the lens and take a picture. I do the sequence. Then I take a picture of my hand again.

When I get home and look at the tiny thumbnails on my computer, I see: Hand -> Bunch of Photos -> Hand. I know immediately that everything between the hands belongs together. It looks ridiculous in the field, but it saves hours of squinting at monitors later.

The Digital Pile

When you get the files onto your computer, do not leave them in a folder called "New Folder (4)." You will die of old age trying to find them.

• Rename immediately: 2025-11-24_Location_Subject.

• The Stack: In your software (Lightroom, etc.), take those ten focus-stacked images and "Group" or "Stack" them immediately. Hide the clutter. If you don't, your library will look like a digital landfill.

The Golden Rule of Processing

Merge first, edit later. Combine your brackets or your stacks into a single master file before you start playing with the colors. If you try to color-grade ten different source files before merging them, you are essentially trying to butter the bread before you’ve baked it.

Of course, having just burdened you with enough technical rigidities to stifle a tax accountant, I feel obligated to share the most confounding paradox of the whole endeavor: the very best course of action is often to disregard every word of it.

There comes a moment in the field, usually when the light is doing something preposterous and fleeting—when checking your histogram feels about as relevant as checking your credit score. At that point, you must simply fling the rulebook off the nearest precipice and try to capture not just the photons bouncing off a rock, but the actual sensation of being there.

And being there is rarely just about the visual splendor. A truly honest landscape photograph is a container for a complex cocktail of human conditions. It captures the profound drowsiness of having woken up at an hour when the only other conscious beings are bakers and serial killers. It records the gnawing, hollow realization that you left your granola bar in the car, which is now a vertical mile below you. It documents the low-level irritation of a wind that seems personally vindictive, finding the one gap in your layers that you swore was sealed.

But then, a strange thing happens. As you stand there—shivering, hungry, and wondering why you didn't take up a sensible hobby like stamp collecting—a quiet mania descends. You enter a state of satisfying, rhythmic concentration. You stop feeling the cold. You stop thinking about the bagel you aren’t eating. You become singular in your purpose, fiddling with dials and aligning glass with a focus that borders on the religious.

You are working to communicate with your muse, which is a lofty way of saying you are trying to wrestle a small rectangular slice of a magnificent universe into a box that makes sense. And when the shutter clicks, and you know you’ve got it—when the chaos of the world aligns into a rectangle of perfect order—you feel a wash of internal contentment that is almost warm enough to replace the coffee you don't have.

You have captured beauty, yes, but you have also captured your own stubborn presence within it. And that, really, is the only reason we go out there at all.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

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

'

On Tripods

 

“The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

The Great Aluminum Burden: A Complete Guide to the Tripod

There is a very specific sort of madness involved in landscape photography. It involves voluntarily strapping a three-legged skeleton to your back—an object that seems designed primarily to catch on every low-hanging branch in the Northern Hemisphere, and hiking up a hill until your lungs are making noises like a broken accordion.

You do this because you have been told, with great authority, that you need a tripod. And, annoyingly, the experts are right.

It begins with a fundamental flaw in your biology. You might think you are standing still. You aren't. You are a biological sack of pulses, twitches, and caffeine-induced tremors. To a camera sensor trying to capture a high-definition world, you are about as stable as a nervous chihuahua on a washing machine. The tripod is the only thing that provides the sort of granite-like stability required to make a leaf look like a leaf rather than a vague green fuzz.

But beyond simple sharpness, the tripod is a time machine. Here is the full catalog of reasons you must endure the weight.

1. The Business of Time and Flow (Long Exposure)

Consider the waterfall. You know those photos where the water looks like a cascade of angelic hair, or the ocean looks like dry ice? That requires keeping the shutter open for several seconds. If you try to hold a camera in your hands for two full seconds, you will not get angelic hair. You will get a blurry, impressionistic mess that looks like you dropped the camera in a swamp. The tripod holds the thing perfectly rigid, allowing the water to move while the rocks stay put.

2. Chasing the Cosmos (Astrophotography)

Cameras are surprisingly needy when the sun goes down. To see in the dark, they must leave their eye open for 15 or 30 seconds to gather the faint light of dead suns. If you attempt this handheld, the stars will not look like diamonds; they will look like the frantic scribbles of a toddler. To capture the Milky Way, you need the iron legs to hold the camera still while the earth rotates beneath it.

3. The Tiny World (Macro)

If you decide to photograph something very small—a beetle, say, or the dew on a spiderweb—you will discover a cruel law of physics: depth of field. When you are that close, the area in focus is razor-thin, perhaps a millimeter deep. If you are hand-holding the camera and you breathe, or even think about breathing, you will sway forward three millimeters and the focus is gone. The tripod locks you in place, turning the impossible geometry of the insect world into something manageable.

4. The Wide View (Panoramas)

Sometimes the world is too big for your lens. You want to take five photos across the horizon and stitch them together. If you do this handheld, you will inevitably bob up and down like a cork in the ocean. When you get home, your photos won't line up—the mountains will look jagged and the horizon will tilt like a sinking ship. A leveled tripod allows you to sweep across the scene with the precision of a surveying instrument.

5. The Dark Arts of Fidgeting (Advanced Techniques)

Then there are the techniques that border on computer wizardry. These are the moments when the tripod transitions from "helpful accessory" to "absolute mandatory requirement," because you are attempting to trick physics.

• The "Slicing the Bread" Trick (Focus Stacking):
  There is a frustrating reality in photography where you cannot get everything in focus at once. If you shoot a landscape with a flower right in front of your lens, you can have a sharp flower and a blurry mountain, or a sharp mountain and a blurry flower. To fix this, you must "stack."
  This involves taking a sequence of ten, twenty, or even fifty photos of the exact same scene, but moving the focus point a fraction of a millimeter deeper into the image each time. Later, you feed these into a computer which stitches the sharp bits together. It is like slicing a loaf of bread and reassembling it to make a better loaf. If you try this handheld, you will sway. When the software tries to align your fifty photos, it will realize that in frame one the flower was in the center, and in frame ten it was drifting toward the corner. The result is a digital hallucination. The tripod ensures the camera remains frozen in space while the lens does the work.

• The Goldilocks Maneuver (Exposure Bracketing):
  The human eye is a marvelous thing; it can look at a sunset and see the brilliant orange sun and the dark green grass simultaneously. Cameras, bless them, are rather stupid. They panic. They either give you a beautiful sun and pitch-black grass, or lovely grass and a sky that looks like a nuclear explosion.
  To fix this, you have to bracket. You take one photo that is underexposed (dark, to catch the sky), one that is overexposed (bright, to catch the shadows), and one that is just right. Then you mash them together. If you attempt this without a tripod, the trees in the "dark" photo will not line up with the trees in the "bright" photo. When you merge them, the edges of the leaves will have a strange, vibrating ghostly aura, looking as if the landscape has been drinking heavily.

• Atomic-Level Fidgeting (Pixel Shifting):
  This is a relatively new form of sorcery found in high-end cameras. In this mode, the camera takes a picture, then physically moves its own sensor by the width of a single pixel—a distance so small it is practically theoretical—and takes another, repeating this four or sixteen times. It does this to capture an obscene amount of color data and resolution.
  We are talking about movements measured in microns. If a fly sneezes three counties away, it might be enough vibration to ruin the shot. If you are holding the camera, your pulse alone will register as a magnitude 7 earthquake. You need a tripod so heavy and stable that it feels like a piece of civil engineering.

6. Saving Your Arms (Telephoto Support)

If you are shooting wildlife or sports, you are likely holding a lens the size and weight of a thermos flask filled with lead. Holding this to your eye for three hours is not photography; it is cross-fit training. A tripod (or monopod) bears the weight, preventing your arms from turning to jelly and ensuring you are actually looking through the viewfinder when the eagle finally decides to fly.

7. The One-Legged Compromise (The Monopod)

Sometimes, however, deploying a full tripod is impossible. You might be in a crowded market where three splayed legs would trip a grandmother. Enter the Monopod.

The monopod is a fascinating admission of defeat. It is, essentially, an expensive walking stick with a screw on top. It admits that you are too weak to hold the lens, but too impatient to set up a tripod. It won't let you shoot the stars, but if you are trying to photograph a rugby player or a fleeing gazelle, it allows you to swivel and pan without dropping your gear in the mud.

8. The Carbon Fiber Question

Eventually, you will find yourself in a shop, weeping at the prices. The salesperson will point you toward Carbon Fiber.

It is a material seemingly harvested from alien spacecraft. It is the platinum standard because:

1. Weight: Aluminum has the density of a dying star. Carbon fiber weighs about as much as a hearty sandwich.

2. Vibration: Aluminum rings like a bell; carbon fiber is "dead," absorbing the shock of the wind.

3. Temperature: Aluminum sucks the heat out of your hands in winter; carbon fiber stays neutral.
   You pay a premium for this, effectively paying more money to get less weight, but your spine will thank you.

9. A Note on Hygiene (The Boring Bit)

Warning: If you take your tripod to the beach or windblown desert, it will betray you. Tripod legs are telescoping tubes filled with grease. Sand loves grease.

If you do not clean your tripod after a trip to the coast, the sand will work its way into the threads. The next time you extend a leg, it will make a sound like someone chewing on glass—scrrrunccch—and eventually seize up entirely. You must disassemble and clean it, which is tedious, but better than owning a permanently frozen stick.

The Verdict

It is heavy. It is cumbersome. It will almost certainly pinch your fingers in a blood-blistering way at least once per trip.

But physics is a cruel and unyielding mistress. She dictates that stability equals clarity. If you want your photos to possess that breathless, hyper-real crispness that makes viewers stop and stare, you cannot cheat. You must carry the burden. You must suffer the weight. You must bring the tripod.

Thanks for stopping by for a read!

buzzshawphoto.com

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

Mesozoic

 

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.   -- Joseph Conrad 

The air in the lungs has been heavy these last weeks, a traveler's weary souvenir from the metal tubes we fling across the sky. I have been moving through the world, sharing the recycled breath of a thousand strangers, packed shoulder to shoulder in those flying petri dishes where humanity ferments. The result was a fog in the head, a hibernation of the spirit. The creativity retreated, hiding in the back of the brain like a small, frightened animal waiting for the storm to pass. I was getting things done, yes, but without the spark, without the fire.

But yesterday, the fog lifted just enough. I wandered back into the digital darkroom, into the glow of Luminar Neo, to summon ghosts from the machine. I held the hard prints in my hands—paper and ink, trying to capture the fleeting soul of a morning. It is a struggle, always. To catch the sunrise, that precise instant when the sun cracks the horizon and spills gold into the canyon, is one thing; to make it live on a wall, to keep the deep shadows from swallowing the secrets of the rock, is another.

But the work continues. I am, I realize, a photojournalist of the Deep Time.

The Canyonlands are not just rock; they are a library of dust and bone, and I am walking through the stacks. The Colorado Plateau is a book written in layers of sand and silence. Lately, I have been thinking not of the strata I photograph, but of the great, long dream of the Mesozoic, that vast middle life of the world. A span of 186 million years. It is a story of fire, and flowers, and the terrible lizard kings.

Let us step back. Let us rewind the clock, spin the hands backward until they blur and fall off.


The Triassic: The Waking World (252 Ma – 201 Ma)

It began in silence. The Great Dying had passed, leaving the earth a graveyard. But life is stubborn; it crawls from the wreckage. For fifty million years, the world was a single giant landmass, Pangaea, hot and dry and red. It was a world of recovery, a bruised planet licking its wounds.




Then, the sky broke. Not a spring shower, but a deluge that lasted two million years,  the Carnian Pluvial. The volcanoes of Wrangellia screamed, the heavens opened, and the red dust turned to mud. In this wet, steaming world, the actors took their places. The archosaurs, the "ruling lizards," learned to breathe the thin air with lungs like bellows. And in the shadows, small and unnoticed, around 240 million years ago, the first dinosaurs appeared. Nyasasaurus, Eoraptor, they were not kings yet; they were the understudies, waiting in the wings while the armored aetosaurs and the crocodile-like phytosaurs ruled the rivers.

But the stage was being set. The world broke apart, the volcanoes of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province roared their fire, and the old rulers were swept away in the End-Triassic extinction. The curtain rose for the main act.

The Jurassic: The Giants Walk (201 Ma – 145 Ma)

Now the world widens. Pangaea cracks like an old plate, drifting apart. The Atlantic opens its watery eye for the first time. This was the high summer of the earth, a warm, tropical greenhouse with no ice at the poles to cool the fever.

And oh, the giants! This was the time of the thunder-lizards. The sauropods: Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, had necks like suspension bridges, stripping the tops of the conifers. The earth shook under them. In the green shadows, the Allosaurus hunted, a nightmare of teeth and claw.

And something else happened, a miracle in the stone. A lizard grew feathers. Archaeopteryx took a clumsy leap from the Solnhofen limestone and found the air, a bridge between the reptile and the bird. In the dark underbrush, beneath the footfalls of titans, the mammals, our ancient ancestors, scurried small, nocturnal, waiting for their turn in the sun.

The Cretaceous: The Seas and the Flowers (145 Ma – 66 Ma)

The continents drifted further, restless wanderers. The ocean floors swelled, pushing the seas up by 250 meters above today's levels, until they spilled over the land. North America was cut in two by a great Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland ocean teeming with monsters, the mosasaurs, the plesiosaurs, dark shapes gliding in the sunless depths where the oxygen failed, and the black shale was born.

On land, a revolution of color. For eons, the world had been green and brown. Now, suddenly: flowers! The angiosperms burst forth in the Mid-Cretaceous, an "abominable mystery" of petals and pollen. Bees hummed for the first time. The air was sweet.

The mountains began to crumple and rise in the west, the Sevier, the Laramide, the ancestors of the Rockies pushing up through the crust, shedding their dust into the sea to build the layers I photograph today. The dinosaurs reached their peak complexity: the horned Triceratops, the duck-billed hadrosaurs, and the tyrant king himself, T. rex, stalking the humid forests.

The Great Silence (66 Ma)

And then, the sky fell.

Sixty-six million years ago. A rock the size of a mountain, traveling through the cold dark of space, found the Yucatán. The impact was a second sun. Firestorms swept the globe. The forests burned. The dust rose and choked the sun, and a long, cold winter fell upon the earth. The photosynthesis stopped. The food chains snapped. The great lizards, who had ruled for one hundred and eighty million years, starved in the dark. The silence returned.

But in the ashes, life stirred. The small, the scavengers, the ones who could live on scraps and seeds—the birds, the crocodiles, and yes, the mammals—crawled out from their burrows. The monsters were gone. The world was ours to inherit.

The Present

Now, outside my window, the cycle turns again. The snows are coming to the mountains, adding their white icing to the peaks. The heat and wildfire smoke are gone, and the quiet cold of November settles in. We need the winter. We need the snowpack to melt in the spring, to carve the canyons a little deeper, to write the next line in the great stone book.

I will go out soon to photograph the white mountains. The photojournalist returns to the beat, documenting the slow, beautiful grinding of time.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

buzzshawphoto.com

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