Flight Deck early summer copy 2

The salt grass and spikerush are starting to dry out and the seeds atop their stalks are beginning to turn brown on what had been only weeks earlier a large pond at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. The horizontal band in the sky is smoke from the Black Fire southwest of the refuge. Cooler nighttime temperatures have damped down the smoke some and winds have moved it more easterly. By the end of the day, the smoke was more solid and covered the entire refuge as well as Socorro some 20 miles north and probably beyond.

This image was taken from atop my truck platform 20 minutes after sunrise on May 29th with a medium format digital camera using a 45-85mm zoom lens at 65mm. To take it with a single shot and not need to blend two exposures, I used a 3-stop soft graduated neutral density filter to hold back the bright light of the sky. Without using the filter a single shot would have either significantly overexposed the sky or underexposed the foreground.

A larger panoramic is available that catches more of the grass to the right of the image.