Coyote After Rain

While driving to my studio a fews days after Christmas, I noticed this handsome creature in the very wet fields next to the road. I pulled over, carefully got out my car, and retrieved my camera. My 24-105mm lens was mounted on my Canon R5 and I made a few photographs zoomed to 105mm. There was enough distance between us that she didn’t seem to mind my presence, even if very aware I was there.

That morning I had decided to keep my day simple and had left all other lenses at home. After a few photographs with the short zoom lens, I decided to go home after my Canon 800mm lens and to risk the coyote leaving in the interim.

She was still there when I returned, and over the next few minutes I managed to get quite a few photographs that felt more like portraits. I was quite happy with many of them. It felt like a rare privilege to see such a beautiful example of our local wildlife.

I thought later I should never leave home without at least the two extremes of focal lengths available. That has been my habit, but not on this day

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I continued to watch as she climbed up the hill at the back of the field, and found myself even more drawn to the images on the hillside, even if she was much farther away..

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Mars Panorama

A recent and amazing panorama from the Mars Perseverance Rover got my attention last week. I fell in love with the scene and sought a download of a high res photo file without an added blue sky. https://mars.nasa.gov/…/spanning-the-delta-of-mars…/

Recently, images from the Mars Rover Perseverance have been posted with skies colorized (interpreted) into blue skies and a consequent overall bluish cast. This is apparently to make the images more accessible to a public accustomed to Earth colored skies. I find this strange and very unfulfliing.

According to JPL: The color bands of the image have been processed to improve visual contrast and accentuate color differences. The sky would not actually look blue to a human explorer on the Red Planet.”

So I downloaded the file link provided and proceeded to do my best to re-color the skies (whole file) to the Martian orange we might see if we were standing on the planet looking at the scene. I also attempted to rejoin sections of the panorama that were not lining up and filled the bottom missing imge info with a blank orange.

A screen capture of the original NASA bluish sky post.

JPL is featuring this blue sky version as a home to the Perseverance Mission page.

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I couldn’t resist a quick pano print.