Jansen Gunderson Landscape Photography

To plan for the Red Desert photography expedition we took a flight over the red desert to check out some potential landscape subjects. Areas of particular interest included the Oregon Buttes, Continental Peak, the Honeycomb Buttes, Killpecker Sand Dunes and the Boar’s Tusk. After the flight I was able to consult National Geographic Topo! and Google Earth as well as the LargeFormatPhotography.info Sun and Moon Calculator to determine optimal subjects for evening/morning light. For instance, the image below is of the Oregon Buttes, looking south east. I’m very much interested in photographing the buttes but would like to know exactly where the sun will be illuminating them at any given time and what other landforms might potentially obscure the sunlight from hitting the buttes.

Locating the coordinates on Topo! I am able to determine the azimuth of the sun at sunset and predetermine weather this will be a potentially good photograph of the prominent southern butte.

From the topo I can tell that the buttes to the north west will be obscuring the sun on a large portion of the southern butte so this may not be the ideal subject to photograph. A quick check in Google Earth affirms this.

So I’ll have to look at other potential subjects.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Wyoming Project.