It's been a while since I did an entry here. I've not disappeared or been injured or anything like that ... I've been in lala land ... California. Strange as it might seem it's hard to get a good, free Internet connection in California. You can always pay (quite handsomely it turns out) but I'm not inclined to do that. Why pay for a very slow wifi connection? That's what you usually get. A few days ago I was in a truck stop and wanted to send my family a simple email and had to cough up $2 for 60 minutes of connection. It took most of that time just to get the message out. Taught me to not do that anymore. And I'm usually in a fast food place somewhere competing for bandwidth with a few dozen others (as I'm doing right now) and uploading images is just too damn slow and painful (since the connection almost always blows up while the image is still hanging out there somewhere). So I've been taking my pictures and dreading the day when I'd have to devote basically my entire waking hours to getting out a few blog posts. That's where I am today. So, I'm going to backdate these so they are essentially in line with when the pictures were taken. I hope you'll forgive me.
Finally got the truck cap and it's great ... sort of
I finally curtailed my travels and headed back to Albuquerque for the cap. The owner told my cousin that it would arrive on Friday, May 8 so I packed up everything and drove like crazy to get there. Then Friday arrived and bright and early I drove to the store believing I'd get the cap and be on my way. Imagine my surprise when he comes over and tells me that the shipment hasn't arrived, that it's been diverted to Oklahoma and Texas first so I shouldn't expect any cap until Tuesday, the 12th. I wanted to rip his head off but realized that would probably only delay my delivery even further. Went to my cousin's house and sat there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do. Staying for 4 days in Albuquerque wasn't one of the options I considered. Paying $65/night for a hotel room was eating into my meager budget big time so I had to plan something else. Looking at a map my eyes naturally scanned north and south since going west came after the cap and I didn't want to go back to the Great Basin for a few more days. My eyes came to rest on a small patch of green on the map ... The Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. It was only a few hundred miles away and I remember a family vacation long ago and an very enjoyable evening under the stars with my kids. What the hell I figured. So I gassed up the truck and pointer her nose north up I25. It took a while as I got tired somewhere north of Santa Fe but on Saturday morning I arrived. It's early in the camping season and I was lucky to get a spot near the dunes. Set up the tent and headed to the parking area nearest the massive sand structure to see what photo ops I could find. That's when it happened all over again. I'm siting pictures and see this big, black cloud coming fast from the west. "oh C*&p" I thought. You can guess the rest ... soon it was snowing and coming hard, windy and cold. Finished pictures and headed back to campsite as the sun disappeared behind the black wall. Spent the evening freezing in my tent and went to bed way too early.
The next morning my tent was covered in snow. Cleaned up as much as I could and then jumped in my truck for the 30 mile drive to Alamosa to send my family an e-mail. On way back I spotted the perfect picture. I was still several miles from the park but realized I could use my 70-200 to compress the sand and mountains into a really awesome image. Only problem was the final dimensions. To really capture the dunes in all their majesty I needed an image that is very wide and not very tall. I'll let you see it and then continue my comment.
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| Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm - 200mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100, license CC BY-NC 4.0 |
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