Great photos and I love to see different colors getting along!!

a bigger piece of color.

Once you get out of Texas and half way through New Mexico it will all be beautiful. Texas is a great place to live but I don't envy you spending two days driving out of the state in a Jeep and then after the fun is over two more days driving back across Texas to get home. My advice is wait another month until the Aspens, Cottonwood and Red Oak turn, now there's some color!

Not an easy question for me to answer but one that I have asked myself. What are you taking a picture of, the canyon, the little tree thing or how the two relate? If it’s the tree is there enough of it in the picture to be a worthwhile subject for a whole picture and all of the rest is just background? If it’s the canyon why is that little sprig in the photo? I think it’s OK for it to be there if there’s a reason for it and based on that reason you will decide how to treat it. You may want to say “I’m up here on the edge with this tree looking at the canyon ridge a LONG ways away”. So if both are subjects or part of you story then both should be in focus, if the canyon is background then I wouldn’t focus it. If it’s the canyon we want to see and not the tree then I’d get the tree out of the picture. So that’s my opinion and it’s worth exactly what you paid for it.

I love the last one. There are so many wonderful colors that make up the "white" areas.

Rather than change your thinking I'd just tweek it a bit. The XKE is truly one of the most beautiful cars ever, especially if one gets the bumpers and other US trim off. Rather than a '74 V12 I would consider the most desirable model to be the '67 with covered headlights, first gear syncro and 4.2 straight six. That's classic stuff and plenty fast with Webers. If you are a lottery winner there is curently a hand built car, I think it's called an XKR, that is everything about this 50 year old car brought up to todays tecnology but the beauty of the original put on display. It sells for 500,000 British Pounds. I know you woud enjoy it on a sunny day, it has no top.

I owned a couple of Pininfarina designs, a Fiat 124 Spider and a Peugeot 504. Now the Peugeot may be a surprise and the sedan wasn't much of a beauty however I thought it looked good as a tricked out French Mafia car returning Popeye Doyle to the police in the "French Connection".

This link http://world-viewer.com/peugeot-504-cabriolet.html
will let you see the Peugeot at it's Pininfarina best.

I had a roommate that owned a red Giulietta Spider like yours. His was a 1300 with a down draft carburetor, probably a Solex, but it was his Alfa.

After my friend died of cancer at about 23 the car was restored and driven by his younger sister for many years.



Back to the original topic of Pininfarina and his beautiful cars, these flowing lines were sexy in the '60s and into the '70s when women had flowing more full figured curves before the ultra lean origami lines of Bertone and the skin and bones model became popular. What's popular changes and cars and female form change to match the demand but beauty endures as has the '61 Alfa Giulietta Spider.

Clever! I like.

I think the James Bond Alpine confusion comes from Maxwell Smart driving a red Sunbeam Tiger which was a type IV Alpine with a Ford 260 and matching gearbox. An interesting product especially if you like understear or pushing as the NASCAR people call it.

WHAT !!??!! Thankfully I've missed that and will continue to. What insurance company?

I would add to this, set your saturation to high and the color to vivid. In your composition consider the reflection, sometimes it's more interesting than the sky. This will not be a popular suggestion but while learning you may want to take one or two using the Sunset Scene Mode and see what the manufacturer thought would work. They know about all of these camera setting tricks and some more.

About two months ago I started a thread discussing the value of SCENE settings. I posted a sunset photo with zero post processing taken using the sunset SCENE setting on my Olympus e-510 and the consensus of comments was that it was well done. However comments didn’t seem to show that respondents saw much value in SCENE settings, although there are many to choose from. The general attitude seemed to be “I don’t know what is being done by the camera in SCENE settings but I can do better myself in MANUAL”.

So today as we get ready to take fireworks pictures I ask, what are you doing in MANUAL other than choosing an exposure with A, S and ISO? Today Olympus let the cat out of their bag and lets Olympus owners know what their cameras do in Fireworks SCENE. So if you want to shoot in P, A, S or M and tweek their tweeks here is what Olympus thinks will help a Fireworks photo:

• Shutter speed is set to four seconds, which helps capture the streaming trails of the fireworks.
• Sets the ISO to 100 and the f-stop to f11.
• Sets the White Balance to 5300K
• Sets the exposure compensation to -1.0 EV. This is a full 1-stop underexposure to keep the firework highlights from burning out.
• Sets the color to Vivid, the Saturation to High and the Contrast to Hard, all of these changes help enhance color.
• Sets the Sharpness to Soft, which uses minimal sharpening in anticipation of post-processing.

You may also consider Night Scene + Portrait while playing with sparklers. What ever you do I hope you have a safe 4th and celebrate our God given freedom.

As the beauty of sunset signals the end of a day what we see as the destruction of a forest fire is part of the cycle of life in the forest. We had some very destructive fires in Texas last year and some that brought smoke to my first Big Bend trip. On the up side the fires produced some amazing photos and incidences of heroism however many who reap the benefit of living near the wild paid a high price for living there. I saw a sign on a cabin home in Colorado that said "If you're lucky enough to live in the mountains you're lucky enough". I hope his luck holds out.

If you're photos were as simple as you say then you were certainly lucky. Please tell us what camera and a little about the settings.

And a WOW from me too.

I don't know the time of day or direction you are facing but this would have surely worked better at a different time. I understand that we have limited times of light down in the valleys,

You may "deal" with the heat but in Central Texas I revel in the warmth and rarely am cold. I understand that you're really not happy where you are because you're not in Texas and then one more problem comes along, like a warm day, and you start complaining. Well may God bless yall for livin' some place else, it's gettin' crowded enough.