All this hot weather has me reminiscing about a couple months ago. This photo was from behind one of the waterfalls in Red Rock Canyon. It was late into springtime, and the flow was diminished from earlier in the year, but refreshing nonetheless.
The Comet Neowise has been making its way through the nighttime skies recently, and last week I made several short trips away from city lights to view this rare sight. On my first night out, I didn’t know what to expect, so I only packed a couple fast lenses. I achieved some nice results, and went out the next night trying to get this shot with a very long and very slow lens. That was a disaster, and just reaffirmed that it’s not a nighttime lens. I went back the following night to the same spot with a much faster medium telephoto lens. I made the switch to a mirrorless camera not very long ago, and this was my first attempt at nighttime photography since. I didn’t find it easy to frame the image using the mirrorless, so I ended up taking handheld shots with my old camera and 50mm f/1.2 lens as a spotting device to find the part of the ridge I wanted as a foreground. Then I set the tripod in place for the telephoto shots.
The desert seems so magical in springtime because in most years, there is an abundance of water flowing through the creek beds. The normal lack of rain through late spring and the inevitable rise in temperatures deliver a one-two punch that just makes it tough to want to get back out there. I couldn’t choose one photo from this hike in April, so this week I have two.
With all this time to catch up on things, I finally went through my collection of 35mm slides and disposed of most of them. While the favorites have been scanned and/or printed many years ago, most were in slide boxes and pages. These were mainly duplicates and outtakes from assignments, being held onto just in case. There was a time when referrals would come up from someone who knew I had covered certain events or places, but those days of out-of-the-blue stock sales are long gone. There were a few hidden gems amongst the thousands which hadn’t seen the light of day for decades. Below are two of those from Yosemite and Bryce Canyon.
Back in springtime, we had some days that were absolutely beautiful for hiking. No, not the sunny ones. The ones with clouds and rain threatening, even if hardly producing. Those were also great days for photographs, especially in b&w.
Steve Bruno Photo 
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