February 1, 2012
Cloudy Badlands in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico

We've returned to the San Juan Basin in New Mexico. The Bisti Wilderness is a well-known portion of the basin, and we're exploring a different portion this time that has interesting badlands as well. Yesterday afternoon it was quite cloudy as we explored this particular area for the first time, and I just couldn't help taking some shots that included the generally blah sky. I did so because the cloud layer had enough variation in brightness that I could work with it in Photoshop. This image was created from two captures, one for the foreground and one for the sky. I greatly enhanced the contrast of the capture for the sky during RAW conversion, then further enhanced the image using my B&W layer technique. While the image doesn't jump off the page, it's still quite pleasing to me.