Mordor

On our camping trip in Eastern Oregon, we went rock hounding in a place called Succor Creek. With the storm starting to move in that would later threaten our camp site with high winds, the sides of the canyon reminded me of the fictional Mordor from Lord of the Rings.

Sunset on Lake Owyhee

I believe this was the first night of our camping stay on the Owyhee Reservoir. I took several shots of the sunset across the lake and far edge of the canyon. One had a piece of driftwood in the foreground, but the cleaner look of the rocky shore won out. This is an HDR composite of several exposures in Photomatix, but I ended up masking back in the sky and the water from the original shots so much of the merging process was done manually in the end. There is a version of this photo available as a free wallpaper here as well.