December 22, 2010
Ice Patterns at Heron Lake State Park

We spent a week at Heron Lake State Park in northern New Mexico at the beginning of December. It was a nice place to hang out for a while because the campground has electricity. Our RV has solar-electric panels that provide plenty of electricity in the summer when the sun is up a long time and gets high in the sky. With the shorter winter days where the sun doesn't rise very high, the solar-electric panels don't quite produce enough electricity and we either have to run our generator or plug in at a campground. Plugging in also means that we can run some electric space heaters so we don't have to run our furnace as much which saves propane.

Because we had plenty of electricity at Heron Lake State Park, I was able to process lots of images. I use an Eizo ColorEdge CG210 display for processing images instead of the screen on my 17-inch MacBook Pro, and that takes additional electricity. I was also processing images from quite a while back, and they were stored on an external hard drive (two 3.5-inch drives in a RAID(0) configuration to be precise), and that also uses electricity. With the unlimited electricity from shore power, I was free to process as long as I wanted.

On three afternoons, we photographed some Mule Deer in the park. There were two good-sized bucks trying to gather a harem, and we were able to get some decent images. One afternoon, we went down to the Rio Chama to photograph the ice along the river. My favorite images were of the intricate patterns in the ice. I was particularly drawn to the circular bubble and oblong forms in the image above. I processed the RAW file through Capture One and adjusted the white balance to remove the blue cast imparted by the Auto White Balance setting — I can't stand bluish images of snow and ice!