Terra Galleria Photography

Posts Tagged ‘nature’

The Organ Mountains – Searching for a View

National parks often consist of mountains. This isn’t surprising since mountains are the most spectacular landforms and the elevation range that they span lends itself to biodiversity. New Mexico’s two national parks, however, do not comprise significant mountains. Carlsbad Caverns National Park is known for its underground wonders. While surrounded by mountains, White Sands National […]

Rio Grande Del Norte National Monument in Winter

Many of the large national monuments I have written about during the last two years have one thing in common: they are quite undeveloped. By contrast, although it was proclaimed in 2013, Rio Grande Del Norte National Monument near Taos, New Mexico, already sports facilities close to those found at a national park: visitor centers, […]

The First Photographs of White Sands National Park?

On Friday, December 20, 2019, as White Sands National Monument was redesignated White Sands National Park, I was one of the few visitors inside the park. This ensured that I would be the first to photograph all 62 national parks, and possibly the first to make a photograph in White Sands National Park. White Sands […]

Night Landscape Capture and Processing Example

Despite being one of the most spectacular spots on the entire coastline of Acadia National Park, Ravens Nest on the Schoodic Peninsula is a little known and unmarked location. I will elaborate in the next article, which will be a location guide. In this article I discuss how I photographed and processed the image using […]

Steps behind the image: Keno Road Fir

Although paved, the Keno Access Road, in the northeast corner extension of Cascade Siskiyou National Monument was so remote that I hardly saw any other car on it. This made it possible to drive slowly enough to look for photographs, a normally hazardous proposition for the solo driver. One of the advantages of going on […]

Cascade Siskiyou Beyond Pilot Rock

Most travelers identify Cascade Siskiyou National Monument with Pilot Rock, whose distinctive profile can be seen from both directions of I-5 between Oregon and California. In this article, I describe four other favorite locations in the monument and discuss some of the photographs I made there. Except for the last one, all of them require […]

Pilot Rock, Cascade Siskiyou National Monument

Our planet is experiencing a mass extinction at a scale unprecedented since the demise of dinosaurs 65 million years ago (UN Report, Center for Biological Diversity). Public lands can act as sanctuaries for biodiversity. In 1947, Everglades National Park was the first large tract of land protected not for its scenic value, but for the […]

Cloudless in the Yellow (Huangshan) Mountains

The scenery of steep peaks and ancient pine trees emerging out of mist and floating above a sea of clouds is an iconic subject in Chinese representations of the landscape. Since the Tang Dynasty around the 8th century, the inspiration for these paintings is the most famous of the Chinese mountains, Mount Huangshan, or Yellow […]

Photographer’s Guide to Havasu Canyon – Now and Then

The Havasupai Indian Reservation, home to the “people of the blue-green water”, is located in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon out of the way from the South Rim. The oasis with waterfalls dropping over red rock into turquoise pools is a uniquely enchanting location in North America with a Shangri-La quality reinforced by […]

Vast and Ancient: Basin and Range National Monument

The Basin geographically defines the state of Nevada. That word may confuse you, since it is included in Great Basin, Great Basin Desert, Great Basin National Park, Basin and Range Province, Basin and Range National Monument. What are they, and how do they relate to each other? The Great Basin is like a huge bowl. […]