Classic Concepts and New Directions: Exploring 125 Years of GSA Discoveries in the Rocky Mountain Region

The Rocky Mountain Region has been the subject of continuous, exhaustive scientific work since the first organized geologic trips to the area began in the 1860s. Despite almost 150 years of scrutiny, the region's magnificent geology continues to challenge, perplex, and astound modern geoscientists. It is a testing ground for geologists and for big geologic ideas. This volume, prepared for the 2013 GSA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, serves both as a progress report on what we have learned over those years of study and a guide to forthcoming scientific questions about the region. The guide's fourteen chapters, which span the region's 1.7-billion-year history, give a retrospective glimpse of early geologic ideas being forged, bring the latest mapping and analytical results from classic locations, and introduce techniques that will form the bedrock of our geologic understanding in the years to come.
Paleozoic to Mesozoic sedimentary formations in the Colorado Front Range, Roxborough State Park: Documenting geologic landscapes and features through geo-photography Available to Purchase
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Published:January 01, 2013
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CitationEllen Morris Bishop, Steve Weaver, Marli Bryant Miller, 2013. "Paleozoic to Mesozoic sedimentary formations in the Colorado Front Range, Roxborough State Park: Documenting geologic landscapes and features through geo-photography", Classic Concepts and New Directions: Exploring 125 Years of GSA Discoveries in the Rocky Mountain Region, Lon D. Abbott, Gregory S. Hancock
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Abstract
Digital photography is an important tool to depict geologic features at all scales. Roxborough State Park offers an excellent laboratory to practice the skills and art of geo-photography. Three regionally significant Paleozoic through Early Cretaceous sedimentary formations (Fountain Formation, Lyons Formation, and Dakota Sandstone) offer important textural details, outcrop patterns, and structural relationships that provide photographic challenges and opportunities. In photographing these features, basic principles of composition apply, including the rule of thirds and the use of leading lines, foreground, and depth of field. To engage these, geo-photographers need to use important in-camera tools that include aperture, shutter speed and appropriate ISO (an adopted standard from the International Standardization Organization), as well as a tripod, and suitable lens focal length. Choice of file format (RAW or jpg) has important consequences for final image quality. Post-processing is essential to ensure that images accurately depict the features intended, and may include adjustment of levels, color temperature, and sharpening. GigaPan images offer an additional tool for examining geologic features at multiple scales using up to several hundred stitched images. Photographs are an important venue for communicating geologic information to both professionals and the general public, and the more the compelling the images, the more effective the communication will be.
- Colorado
- Cretaceous
- Dakota Formation
- data
- data processing
- Douglas County Colorado
- field studies
- field trips
- Fountain Formation
- Front Range
- guidebook
- imagery
- landscapes
- Lyons Sandstone
- Mesozoic
- methods
- North America
- Paleozoic
- Permian
- photography
- public lands
- road log
- sedimentary rocks
- United States
- upper Paleozoic
- Western Interior
- Western Interior Seaway
- Roxborough State Park