About the Photos
Above: Picture of a ‘Blood Moon’ (partial lunar eclipse) taken just above Mt. Clark.
The photos in this website’s galleries are all 1920×1280 pixel .jpgs saved at 80% detail.
So, these web pictures suck. It is a speed in Internet loading thing. Sorry. If you like these pictures, the originals will blow your mind.
These pictures were taken with a full frame DSLR camera at 8688×5792 pixels, more than four times the resolution that can be practically displayed on this current phart.art website.
These are .jpgs developed from .raw image files taken directly from the camera.
These photos are not composited or otherwise ‘photoshopped’. Many of the mountain and sky photos at sunrise and sunset (e.g., Rose Rules, Mountain Zen) look like a sky from one picture and some mountains from another composited into a single image. Nope. These are real images. Tahoe beware! Truckee Meadows is often unbelievably beautiful.
However, to my photographic frustration, these scenes typically last minutes and often just seconds. I miss a lot of great pictures just trying to get my camera set up in time! Who knew landscape photography was an action sport?
Also, I do not crank up the color in these photos. Instead, I use a ‘trick’ I learned over the years: I underexpose my shots by 1 to 1.67 stops. To my eye underexposures give much better color saturation to the original picture. Especially in our high desert’s unforgivingly intense light.
These photos are absolutely meant to be viewed in a darkened room! If I cranked the brightness up enough to see these pictures in a bright room (let alone the outdoors), it would ‘blow out’ all the lightest and darkest details. The beauty of the Meadows lies in her hidden, intimate details.
The photos on this website are from recent Truckee Meadows scenes. All were shot in natural light. Most were taken in 2022.
I have not yet had time to catch up with my photos of the 2023 Spring bloom tsunami.
There are some spectacular scenes in past years I need to search for as well. The point is, I plan to add, change, and delete Galleries over time to show the best of 150k photos in my expanding Library. So come back occasionally.