If you find yourself in Roswell, New Mexico and you want to do some non-alien exploring, nearby Bottomless Lakes State Park is a hidden gem worth seeking out. The lakes are actually sinkholes filled with water, and as always, to my disappointment with such things, not truly bottomless! Some are up to 90 feet deep though, which for the desert, is pretty far down. You can hike all along the ~6 lakes even circumnavigating the rims of each which offer unique views adding even more to the sense of bottomlessness of the water. I had both my camera and drone with me to capture these lakes from all angles. Let me know in the comments if you have been to this state park, or after seeing these images, if you will be planning to visit.
On a recent trip to Angel Fire, New Mexico for a rural land client, I sent my DJI Mavic 2 Prodrone up and was shown a landscape totally different than from where I stood surrounded by tall trees. Going up a hundred feet allows for unique landscape photography. Combining dramatic clouds filling the sky, with the tall pine treetops, and the distant mountains, these drone aerial photos are some of my personal favorites that I have ever made in New Mexico. Here on the Jason Collin Photography blog I always like to show you unique views of known places. Angel Fire is a ski resort town, but I have actually never seen it in snow despite three trips there! So if you have only seen it in snow, from these drone photos, you can see how visiting Angel Fire in the spring after the snow melts reveals it is still a very special place with amazing scenery, especially from the drone’s viewpoint!
Composite photos for the best commercial photography
I was contacted by Planar two months ago to make professional commercial photos of their LED panel displays products they installed in a call center in Hobbs, New Mexico. However, Covid-19 soon shut everything down and it took until now for it to be safe to travel to Hobbs and finally make the photos. To make these images I knew the challenge would be how to capture the bright LED displays in a dimly lit space.
Many times I have driven up and down HWY 550 in New Mexico on my way to and from home in Albuquerque to Navajo Dam or Farmington in northern New Mexico. Each time I stared at this mesa, or rather a volcanic plug as Wikipedia describes it, off to the west visible from great distance. This rock formation is named Cabezon Peak, and finally, I had the time to actually drive right up to its base. From this vantage point I sent up my DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone to capture 4K drone video, a 360 panorama drone photo, as well as regular aerial drone photos, before finishing with sone telephoto shots of the peak with my Sony a7 III mirrorless camera. I actually found viewing Cabezon Peak from a little bit of distance to be the more impressive view than standing right before it.
Cool things can happen when you leave the shutter of your camera open for more than just a fraction of a second. Look around the photo above where I left the shutter open for 10 seconds. In that time I managed to capture 3 lighting bolts, and the light trails made by the head and taillights of passing cars. Plus, the long exposure created a starburst effect with the street lamps.
We went up to Santa Fe, New Mexico to see a Guinness Book of World Records setting whale! How is that possible with Santa Fe not only being landlocked, but also mountainous? Well, it is a whale made of recycled plastic on the campus of Santa Fe Community College. Regular readers of Jason Collin Photography will note how many times Atlas Obscura sites are featured in my photo stories, and thanks again to that site (and for Jessica finding it), we had a whale of an adventure hundreds of miles from the ocean. See the photos below to learn what makes Ethyl the Whale so special. Want to visit this site yourself? Check out the map at the end of the photo story.
For those with enough adventurous spirit, and the right vehicle, and the in the desert with not-so-accurate-GPS navigating skills, somewhere far south of Bloomfield, New Mexico, some 18 miles down dirt roads, you can find Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness Area and its amazing hoodoos. What are hoodoos? They are a rock formation that look like toadstool mushrooms. This was actually my second hoodoos rock formation site to visit (check out the first). What an alien landscape this was to explore with the hoodoos forming on the banks of an arroyo, very, very far from any civilization. This is a fantastic New Mexico True site to visit. There is a map at the bottom of this blog post, and be sure and watch the video below I made right in the middle of the hoodoos!
