Landscape Photography | Moose Peterson's Website

Home » Landscape Photography

on Mar 24, 2020 in Landscape Photography

Emotion a Subject?

Every time you put your camera up to your eye, you gotta ask yourself, “What’s the subject?” Without that key element in the photograph, it is really, really, really hard to then arrange the rest of the elements to tell your story. With a photo like this of this lonely church on The Palouse, deciding what’s the subject can be a challenge. You might think it’s the church itself. But then you see the clouds and then you’re vision is brought down around again to the church. What is the subject? Is it possible the subject isn’t a specific element but all them wrapped up together to express an emotion? If you think an emotion you are invoking can be the subject, then how can you tell its story? Can shooting in color or B&W be a way to arrange the elements to instill that emotion that is the subject of your photograph? I think so, I do that all the time as I think emotion can be a...

on Mar 20, 2020 in Landscape Photography

Little House on, The Palouse

The Palouse has an incredibly rich history that you can see in its people, land, and buildings. They are all very independent, strong and very much part of the fabric of the region. There are hundreds of old barns and homes that dot the vast landscape and I think I’ve stopped and marveled at least at half of them. I continually return to ones I’ve photographed before, check out ones that I would love to photograph but didn’t before and search for new ones. No matter what, every trip to The Palouse is always filled with old treasures. This trip to The Palouse, I had for the first time the Z and its very fun #17 Charcoal setting in my arsenal. Not B&W, not Sepia, #17 I think of as a “tintype” kind of look. While perhaps a tad older than the structures themselves, this look I think brings a little something extra to the story I want to tell about this part of The Palouse history. You might...

on Mar 5, 2020 in Landscape Photography, B&W Photography

Floatin Snow

I’m up in WY working with Rocky Mtn Bighorn Sheep, so why am I posting snow clouds? There are 1200 heads of sheep in these hills but with the tremendous winds that have been blowing for the past week, most are hunkered down and we’ve only had a band of thirty to work with (which has been great!). With their routine of coming down and going back up during the morning hours and the light on the slope, the late afternoon we tend to turn our lenses to the landscape. It’s gorgeous so the challange is not the landscape photograph, but which landscape to focus in on. There are a ton of options. This afternoon, we decided to point our lenses towards the floatin snow … them clouds that were racing by. The clouds would go by at great speed and as they floated by, they were simple, gorgeous puffies. As they came up to the mountain tops, they pilled up and that’s when they began to release their...

on Mar 3, 2020 in Landscape Photography, B&W Photography

The Missed Moment

Like most shooters, I have locales across the globe I’d like to shoot at someday. One of those is Thor’s Well. Totally on a fluke, I found myself there one evening when Sharon & I were traveling with dear friends. Serious photography was not even on our minds, there was zero planning involved when we found ourselves at Thor’s Well. We didn’t even know it was in the neighborhood. It just so happened our timing was good for the tides and the sky were OK. And while we had a great time, great time, the photo is at most just a quick click of all that fun. But when it comes to the photographic moment, I missed it. This photo is just OK, it could have been so much better and does that knowledge bother me? Na, because it was not a photographic journey, it was a happy moment. And that’s OK! What this photo does do is not only remind me of that evening but put a fire...

on Feb 11, 2020 in Landscape Photography

Yellowstone’s Winter Colors

When you conjure up winter, white is predominant the color that flashes to mind. It takes only a short microsecond traveling through Yellowstone in winter to come to know that white has a run for its money when it comes to color. The one color you see a lot of is gray, as in, gray skies. That color too might make you think that there isn’t much color in Yellowstone in winter. Traveling about even under gray skies you find colors of nearly every shade around every corner of Yellowstone. Heck, its name tells you that even its rocks have color, yellow! When Old Faithful erupts into those gray skies, even the steam stands out from that gray. The colors can be that subtle yet powerful visually. Going from the size and grandeur of Old Faithful to the edge of a small pool in the Mudpots, the colors are unearthly. The yellow of the algae (or is that yellow stone?) against that amazing blue of the hot, deep pool,...

on Jan 28, 2020 in Landscape Photography

The Power of Steam

It’s just steam, but wow, what Mother Nature can do with it! I was fortunate to be at Beehive Geyser in Yellowstone when it erupted and it sounded like a 737 engine at launch! The water lew out with such power for so long, it almost got boring! I kept asking, “just how much water is down there?” And it’s not just hot water but has all these dissolved minerals which is what makes the cone at the base of the geyser. It’s simple, mind-blowing! Photographing really is pretty simple. Number one, don’t let that steam hit your front elements. It can take the coating right off the lens (yes, I personally experienced that mistake). Next, let the shutter fly! There is no way you can see the perfect explosion during an eruption, then tell your finger to fire, at least I can’t. When I see a series I like, I will take 5-7 frames and then pick the right one later. It’s a gorgeous display so shooting is...

« Older Entries