Nevada is starkly beautiful. Scrubby or salt flatted foregrounds, abrupt mountain ranges with snow higher up, lines of utility poles stretching into the empty distance, all punctuated with the occasional ghost town. Like Goldfield…

Shooting anything in daytime is quite different from lighting and shooting at night. Yes, there are obvious attractions you travel for, but it's a mood difference. You're an observer, a recorder of memories during the day. You see a tumbled-down ruin of a building, backed by dry desert mountains in harsh, bright sunlight, and that's what you capture.

But at night…

First we saw a small semicircular munch out of the top of the sun. More and more got eaten up until all you saw was an orange ring…

I spent a month mostly on my back in bed. With intense pain shooting down my left leg to the foot whenever I stood or walked, I didn't want to get up.

On the other hand, I have a compulsion to photograph. That pushed me to walk around my house a little, then around my block, and finally to hike in the Sandia foothills again. And that was the start of a new photo project - what dogs do at home.

Osteoarthritis makes it very necessary for me to lighten up. The RF 100-400mm f/5.6-8 looks like a great way to do it.