Spring Mountain Ranch State Park

Spring Mountain Ranch is about 15 miles out of Las Vegas. A great place for pictures and a picnic. The oasis in the desert was first owned by the Wilson Family and later purchased by a German movie star, Vera Krupp. The property was then bought by Howard Hughes and then made into a state park. The park features 6 natural springs and two lakes. Guides at the park take you on a detailed history of the ranch. Here are a couple of my favorite images from the ranch and surrounding area. Click images to enlarge.

Red Rock Canyon

Red Rock Canyon is approximately 13 miles west of Las Vegas. It is one of my favorite places to go for pictures. This trip we got an extra surprise as the weather was 63 and sunny when we got there. Shortly after entering the park the temperature dropped 25 degrees and the winds gusted up to 50 mph. and it then started snowing. We found ourselves in the middle of a desert snow storm. A bit odd for April in this area. As you can see above there was snow on our rental car. I got plenty of interesting images. The stormy skies provided lots of drama to some colorful images. These are some of my favorites from the trip. You can also click on this link http://www.pbase.com/g_muth/nevada to view our entire trip gallery which will also include images from Spring Mountain Ranch, Mt. Charleston, and the Valley of Fire. Click on images to enlarge.

Las Vegas

We just returned from a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada. What a spectacular time we had. There is something to interest everyone in Vegas. We walked through 22 casinos and probably have 22 more to view. We went to four National Parks, one nature preserve, and one community park. We saw free shows at downtown Las Vegas, Sam's town, Belagio's, Mirage, Venetian, Flamingo, MGM, and Paris Paris. I have posted a few images above of the volcano erupting in front of the Mirage, the Fremont Street Experience light show in the sky, the balloon in front of Paris Paris, and the dancing waters of Belagio's. I will be posting more pictures soon from Red Rock Canyon, Mt. Charleston and the Valley of Fire. Click on images to enlarge.

New Show

New

Today we have started making mini slide shows for our clients. Wendy is creating some beautiful presentations and we think it will give our studio added appeal. Check out the video above and see for yourself.

Holy Macro

I am still working on macro techniques. This image of a fly with its tongue out was quite involved in the making but the end result was worth it. I used Nikon D3 with 24-70mm 2.8 lens racked out to 70mm and focus set to infinity. I added a 36 mm and 12 mm extension tubes and used the raynox 250 on the end of the barrel. This combination gave me a pretty good image but I still needed to crop to get the image I wanted. The full frame sensor of the D3 can withstand considerable cropping before the image starts breaking down. I used one flash off camera attached to a homemade bracket with an old Gary Fong lightshere for diffusion. I had strong window light from behind the fly to give it dimension. The fly is distracted with honey to keep him in the same spot until I could get some shots off. Click on image to enlarge. Oh yes, one last thing. I used a focus stacking image program, CombineZM to stack 3 images to get more depth of field.