The Prairie

[RSL]

Love it, Mike. Looks like part of Garden of the Gods.

[sdwilsonsct]

November, southern Saskatchewan.

[wolfnowl]

Reminds me of 'Swift Current Park', Scott.  That was a local joke so I wouldn't expect anyone to get it, but when I was working in Swift Current, SK in 1982 there was one tree at the edge of a farmer's field north of town.  It was the only tree around for miles, known by locals as 'Swift Current Park'.  When I was there the government was paying the farmers to plant windrows of trees to reduce wind-blown topsoil erosion; when I drove through SK twenty years later I was amazed at the transformation.

Russ, as my grandmother would have said, most of Nebraska is flatter than piss on a plate - so when you get to the southern end of the state and this old volcano is staring down at you it seems rather incongruous!

Mike.

[Harald L]

@Scott (#21) : This is just awesome good. +1

[Rob C]

Rob:  This is getting a bit OT, but last November our local photo group did a B&W film shoot.  It was a lot of fun, partly explaining to people that you actually have to hold the little eyepiece up to your eye (no LCD), and partly explaining that you have to wind the film after each shot.  But people made some interesting images.

Harlem, technically a desert is defined by the amount of rainfall, and a prairie is, as Russ mentioned, a temperate grassland, but rather than getting too worked up about where the border is, just accept that it's a lovely rainbow!

This is 'sort of' prairie: It was quite a surprise to find this in southern Nebraska.


Triptych by wolfnowl, on Flickr

Mike.

Hi, Mike -

That triptych really works for me - not many of those things do.

Rob C

[Rob C]

You know I don't agree, Rob, but just so you can compare, here it is again, converted in Sliver Efex as Tri-X, with enhanced grain. I overdid it, but if you use Silver Efex carefully and conservatively you can get any silver effect you want and simulate all sorts of B&W emulsions.

Doesn't work for me, Russ. The 'grain' looks like no grain I ever saw in reality and the tonality of the building still doesn't look filmic to me. It's hard to explain, but it's as if every tone shown has been applied separately, with no blending of them together. It's like a continuation of the problems you get with sun behind thin cloud (with digi capture) where it just is or is not recorded - no long shoulder of curve where one tone blends seamlessly with another.

In the original file shown, instead of that effect there's an opposite 'look' where it feels velvety and unreally tactile at the same time. I find much the same with my own stuff from the digital cameras, so I guess it's just par for the course. I think it's a pity because it ruins otherwise great subjects.

Rob C

[amolitor]

Russ, do you recognize that the first picture here is very much the same picture as your Gone photograph? There are too many points of similarity to be an accident -- you love this picture, and have made it at least twice!

[sdwilsonsct]

Reminds me of 'Swift Current Park'

This is about an hour west of Speedy Creek, Mike. On an all-day, all-snow drive from Canmore to Regina after a happy three days in the Rockies.

Nice tryptych. Are your badlands really associated with a volcano?

Thanks, Harlem22. It's nice to get a little rhythm into the flat prairie.

[wolfnowl]

Hi Scott.  Came across this by accident on the way from SD to WY.  Don't even know its official name (I presume it has one), but it looks to me like the plug of a very old volcano.  Might not be.  There are old volcanos further southwest in WY, and there is a fossil-filled ash field in southwest NB, but of this one I really don't know.

Mike.

P.S. Thanks for the comment, Rob!

[RSL]

Russ, do you recognize that the first picture here is very much the same picture as your Gone photograph? There are too many points of similarity to be an accident -- you love this picture, and have made it at least twice!

Hi Andrew, There certainly are similarities. I shot an lot of abandoned prairie houses back in the sixties, and another bunch of them in 2006. They're mostly gone now.

[RSL]

Here's another one I love, though it gives me the creeps every time I look at it. It's on the prairie, but right at the edge of the foothills. I was about eighty miles south of home shooting winter shots of abandoned ranch houses when this storm came rolling over the mountains. Getting home took several hours.