Hi... I'm new here. Thought I'd post this one and see what others think. I took at Badlands National Park, this wildflower was growing right near the edge of a drop off looking down into the badlands.

-- Cara R. Litberg (ELitberg@aol.com), August 17, 2003

Answers

Print coloring looks a little odd; your sky is pink. Also, can you explain why you tilted the frame? The very crooked horizon line in the background really throws me off and forces me to keep tilting my head to keep a proper perspective.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), August 19, 2003.

Eeek... I hadn't even noticed the tilt until you pointed it out. My guess is that my concentration was on framing the flower, and I didn't pay attention to the fact that the rest of the frame would tilt.

For the sky color, we have some others (in different rolls in different places) that came out the same, with good colored skys in the same roll. I think it was a mix of time of day, heat, and haze. It was extremely hot on the day we were in Badlands, 100+ degrees, and this was taken late morning or early afternoon. All the pictures from the Badlands came out with a washed out sky. I've wondered if a polorizer would have helped. We have haze filters on all of our lenses.

-- Cara R. Litberg (ELitberg@aol.com), August 20, 2003.

Polarizer might have helped some, but probably not a lot. Doesn't look like the lighting situation was ideal in the first place. When you have haze like that, sometimes it's best to not worry about taking good shots. Although I did manage to get some decent shots last summer using the haze in the Grand Canyon -- I shot at sunrise and used the haze as a layering effect that I thought worked pretty well, considering the impossibility of shooting anything else good that day.

One other note -- since the sky is basically featureless, it might have worked a lot better if you had composed the shot to include as little sky as possible. Just a thought.

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), September 03, 2003.