Valley of Fire, NV.

A wild mustang at Cold Creek, NV.

Please continue on to Arlington, VA’s Julie Ciatti to see her monochromatic image.

Yesterday, my friend Sharon and I took our kids out to the dry lakebed in Jean (near Las Vegas) to explore. I like this lakebed better than the one near Nelson. That one is fun, but this one has more cracked earth and fewer rocks.

Love. Love love LOVE that place! We had a great time. The children…they thought it was a long drive for no slides and swings. But, wow! Check out that cracked earth. And those clouds. We so rarely have clouds. It was a fantastic day.

Who’s up for a photoshoot out there??

The mountains, the blue sky, the sun setting, the remoteness of the whole place. Isn’t it lovely? It’s only 30 miles south of Las Vegas…

I thought it would be best to capture its beauty with my 15mm fisheye lens. It’s the widest angle lens I own, and it was perfect for the dry lakebed.

Please head over to the awesome Kasia Gilbert in Florida to  see her ‘wide angle’ image for this week.

DOF refers to sharpness and clarity, and how much of the image is in focus. As a portrait photographer, I typically shoot with a more shallow depth of field (a low-numbered f-stop, or a large aperture – they are one and the same), which means that only part of the image is in focus. By using a large aperture, generally f2.8-f5.6, I can draw the eye to the subject of the image, while leaving the background or foreground soft and blurry.

This 52-project is about expanding our horizons, however, so this week I chose to focus on (haha) some more landscape photography. I don’t shoot a lot of nature photos, so I spent some time at Mt Charleston during a snowstorm, taking photos at varying depths of field, just to see what different apertures would produce.

This is the sort of DOF I usually shoot:

ISO 500, 115mm, f/4.5, 1/250 [I should have used a faster shutter-speed on this shot in order to capture the snow falling without it being blurry]

ISO 500, 70mm, f/3.5, 1/1000 [here my shutter speed was much faster, and you can see the snowflakes clearly suspended in the air]. You can also see the water spots on my lens from melted snow. Awesome.

On my way back down the mountain, it was considerably more Las Vegas-like (no snow).

ISO 500, 200mm, f/13, 1/250

ISO 320, 115mm, f/13, 1/250

Which types of images do you prefer? Do you usually shoot with a shallow or a deep depth of field?

Please continue on to Julie Ciatti’s post to see her DOF image!

I’m starting out the new year with a different group of ladies from around the world, as part of an even larger 52 project than I participated in last year. I’m excited to see everyone’s work, and I hope they’ll keep me motivated to grow as a photographer, and to learn new ways of shooting and processing.

I always think snow is so beautiful when it’s new. It might have something to do with the fact that I live in Las Vegas and we so rarely see the beautiful white stuff (unless we head up to Mt Charleston, like my family did last week). It’s so pretty, though, isn’t it?

Thank you for stopping by! For more updates, please be sure to like my Facebook page. =)

And if you missed these images from Mt Charleston, be sure to check them out! I am LOVING shooting in the snow.

Please head over to Julie Ciatti‘s blog to see what’s new in her neck of the woods!

The inclement weather followed me to Las Vegas and we got a couple nights of amazing thunderstorms, which are rare here. The lightning lit up the night sky above my house, producing some amazing looking clouds!

Please check out Melanie Kay Photography’s blog post about this week’s theme.

My eldest daughter was determined to make a fairy garden, though, so we bought some flowers and herbs and she got to work. I really hope the lavender survives; it smells AMAZING.

I love that this image has all of my daughter’s garden tools in it, plus the boy’s A-10.

Proof that Home Depot imports their plants from somewhere outside Las Vegas. This itty bitty slug lasted just a few minutes in the sun before shriveling up.

Lavender.

Please head over to Nancy Schumacher’s blog and see what kind of fun she is having in the sun in Thompson, ND.

Whew, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here are the winners of my ‘horizon’ challenge. I thought about heading down to the dry lake beds for a great horizon shot, but I just didn’t have the time. Instead, I (once again) got creative in my interpretation of this week’s theme. My yard is full of budding fruits and vegetables (and even some herbs!), so I see lots of fresh-from-my-backyard food on the horizon.

Grapes and figs.

Bay leaves, pink lemonade lemons (you should smell this tree right now – it’s heavenly), peaches and peas.

Let’s head on over to Nancy Schumacher’s blog to see what’s on the horizon in Thompson, ND.