December 27, 2010
Badlands of Plaza Blanca and Canon TS-E 24mm f3.5 L II

The clouds started to look interesting one afternoon while we were camped at Abiquiu Lake in northern New Mexico. We drove to Plaza Blanca, a badlands area with white sandstone and the location where Georgia O'Keeffe painted her From the White Place. The white sandstone cliffs by themselves weren't photographically interesting to me, but by including some brown and black rocks in the foreground and some interesting clouds in the background, I was able to make an image that works for me.

I used my Canon TS-E 24mm f3.5 L II tilt/shift lens which is my favorite landscape lens. I used the shift motion to "look down" without tilting the camera down and I used the tilt motion to align the plane of focus along the rocks in the foreground and the top of the cliffs in the background. I took two exposures to retain detail in the bright sky and the dark foreground and then combined them by hand in Photoshop.