To follow the rock and lava theme posted lately, this was taken at Red Rock Canyon State Park, near Randsburg, Calif. It looks to me like lava boulders tumbled down an eroded layer of a soft sedimentary layer. Details: P645 w/ 35mm/f11.

-- Warren Kato (wkato@aol.com), October 09, 2000

Answers

Really nice shot. The right hand rocks are a neat contrast. I don't think the left side is really needed but I don't see a way of cropping to focus on the right-hand rocks to try and strengthen the composition.

-- Micheal F. Kelly (radiant@gci.net), October 09, 2000.

I like it a lot Warren, very good eye.

Do you have a version with less (none at all preferably) compression artifacts ?

What about a higher limit on image sizes ?

Doesn't bandwidth double every two years or so, what about a 100k limit ?

Cheers, Jan.

-- Jan van Bodegraven (jan@macrophoto.com), October 09, 2000.

Good composition. I like the strong diagonals of the lava boulders. Can't decide if the rocks at lower left need to stay or go.

The light looks very harsh here; when did you shoot it, and with what film? It could be a product of the white earth, or possibly the scan, but the lighting looks pretty unforgiving. A lower sun may have produced cooler shadows as well as provided better lighting.

Looks like you used a little overkill on the polarizer, from the almost blue-black sky in the upper right. Have done the same thing myself in high-elevation desert; it turns out a lot darker on film than you think.

I'm all for upping the limit to 100k, or even a 75k compromise. It would save a lot of images like this one; for a 6x4.5, there's a lot of lost detail here. Herr Atkins, how about it?

-- Christian Deichert (torgophile@aol.com), October 09, 2000.

Very nice. I grew up in Ridgecrest (20-30 miles north of Red Rock Canyon), and this pic brought back some nice memories. Neat place, isn't it? I only have one real criticism--there is too much going on in this picture for my taste. There are lots of ways to crop the image that are more pleasing to me--but I'm a simple guy, and I like simple pictures.

-- Mark Erickson (mark@westerickson.net), October 10, 2000.

Thanks for the helpful comments. Here is a different (vertical) composition of the same rocks. 256K so beware.

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=90957&size=lg

Shot on Provia F and scanned on an $85 Acerscan 620PT at 600 dpi.

-- Warren Kato (wkato@aol.com), October 12, 2000.