January 24, 2011
Lupine in Manning Provincial Park

And now, for something completely different …

After leaving Bosque, we spent 13 nights in mid-January at Elephant Butte Lake State Park in New Mexico. It's a nice quiet park in south-central New Mexico and a good place to get caught up with office work with the RV plugged into electricity. I processed lots of images from mid 2009 when we were in Canada on our way to Alaska.

We really loved Manning Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada. On our way west in late May 2009, we stopped in the park for our first time, and liked it so much we stayed longer on our way east in mid June 2009. It's just across the border from the US and parts of it are adjacent to North Cascades National Park in Washington. One evening, we spent some time with the lupine along the road to Cascade Overlook. This image is one of my favorite lupine images. What I like most about it is that the various rows of blooms were nicely stepped so I didn't have to cut them off when framing the image.

I used my cable release to take the image because there was a slight breeze and I had to time the shot for when the flower wasn't moving. Usually, I just use the 2-second self-timer when taking landscape images unless the timing of the exposure is critical like for flowers when there's a slight breeze or for crashing waves. I always use mirror lockup for landscape and macro images.