Somewhere in southwest Kansas.

My daughter picked me up at the Airport car rental counter in Pittsburgh on Thursday morning. We drove into the City to pack the van, and then headed out across country on her move to Santa Fe NM. She drove the interstates until just after mid-night to just short of Topeka Kansas, then we tried, without much success, to get a couple of hours of sleep at a rest stop. By 4 I was driving, and dawn found us out on the back roads of Kansas cutting down across the southwest corner headed for the narrow slice of Oklahoma and then on into New Mexico to hit the Interstate again about 200 miles from Santa Fe. Since we were on a tight schedule (having to do with the rented van), we did not stop very often, and I developed my technique of rolling down the window and shooting off an in-camera HDR of the passing prairie. It should not have worked, since were generally traveling over 60mph when I did it…but the Sony managed to make sense of the three exposures and, most of the time, pull them together into an acceptable image. Amazing technology.

And the prairie sky put on an irresistible show for us…with huge clouds in the morning and then something of interest all the way across Kansas and Oklahoma. I saw this cluster of trees on the horizon and the plume of cloud above it just in time to get the window down and grab the shot. In Lightroom processing, I cropped out the motion blurred foreground, which left me with, I think, a very satisfying image. (We did stop several times for more studied photography. I will post a link to my trip album when I get home.)