North Rim Sunrise

New Gear for the Trip

I have a fairly short list for the new gear I'm getting this time out. I've decided I really need a second camera body as I spent $200 getting my sensor cleaned twice during cycle #1 due to the dirt that got inside during lens changes. Even being very careful it's almost impossible to keep dirt from entering the body. Images taken during the last few weeks of my trip looked like they had chicken pox with all the black shadows. It's very time consuming to fix them (in Lightroom) and I always worry about degrading my images while trying to fix the problem.

Anyway, I found a great deal on a Canon 6D at B&H which combines the camera body with a Canon Pixma 100 photo printer at a price less then the camera body alone. I'm not really too excited about the printer yet (it's the razor while the blades ... ink and paper ... are the real cost items) but it'll come in handy if I want to print some small (12x18 is max size I think) samples for proofing my processing and for handing out to prospective clients for my much larger prints. I actually save $250 with the combination which is almost 20%. I'm also getting a super wide fast lens (Rokinon 14mm f/2.8) for astrophotography and some miscellaneous items for my computer. Not a lot of money but will help me get the job done.

North Rim Sunrise

I spent 2 days on the Grand Canyon's north rim at the end of Cycle #1. Slept in my truck in the parking lot of the lodge as there was no room and it's very expensive. Not even a campground site could be found. The north rim is only open during the summer (starting May 15th) and early fall. Too bad as I suspect the canyon is amazingly beautiful when it snows there. There are ways around the closure but they entail a very dangerous dirt road which I'm not inclined to attempt with my little Nissan pickup.

I wanted to get a sunrise shot so managed to drag my nearly dead body out and wandered to an overlook near the lodge. I was the first person there but soon others managed to make the trek to see the sun break on the canyon's eastern edge. As I've stated before, sunrises are spiritually different than sunsets. The air is dead calm and cool. The birds put on a great show, singing to greet the new day. It's such a wonderful feeling to wait and watch the world come alive.

Grand Canyon NR sunrise - 16mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm

Water, water everywhere but...

Traveling the West was an education in water and the lack thereof. Everywhere I went I confronted the impact of the devastating drought that is topic number one throughout that part of the country. I saw it in the empty reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, in the complaints of rangers in Grand Canyon about the complete lack of essential spring floods and the accumulation of damaging sand and silt in the Colorado River, in signs everywhere to conserve water ... I couldn't get away from the impact. And then there's California's Central Valley. You'd never know there was a drought given the massive amounts of water they use to keep their crops alive. I was amazed at some of the things the farmers were doing. I saw more new orchards being planted and watered than made sense given the water is running out. And, in the heat of the day, I saw massive watering operations going full tilt ... imagine the evaporation and how much water never got to the thirsty plants. I seems many haven't gotten the message that water is RUNNING OUT. Farmers think it's an infinite resource along with several large municipal water authorities (I'm looking at you LA). In Mono Lake the LA water authority came around in the 1920s and basically confiscated all the streams that fed the lake. You can imagine the outcome ... the lake almost disappeared. It took decades of fighting and court battles to get even a little of that water back and now the drought is sapping that supply to death so the lake is still very much in trouble. And you read about the convoluted legal arrangements and you no longer need to wonder how this all came about. It involved politicians so the outcome was foregone ... an absolute screw up. They made the mistake of creating fixed allocations ... each entity got a certain absolute amount of water and, unfortunately, the amount they worked with was a historically high measurement. Now there's not as much water but everyone still wants their fixed allocation and screw everyone else. It's a huge mess and I'm not sure if anyone, but especially politicians, can square the circle to fix it. But fix it the must because the future of the West depends on finding a solution. It should be interesting ...

Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm

As I've stated before, I spent a month in the Great Basin of Utah and Arizona because the cap for my 15 year old Nissan pickup needed to be special ordered. When the day came to have it fitted I was informed by the store that the truck carrying it had been diverted down into Texas and Oklahoma and would be delayed for 4-5 days. I wasn't about to sit around Albuquerque waiting at $65/day in a hotel so I jumped in my truck and headed north into Colorado and the Great Sand Dunes. I got dumped on big time ... two nights of heavy, wet snow (which collapsed my tent at 3 am) and froze my proverbial ass off. But bad weather makes for amazing photographs and I got a ton. The dunes were covered with a frosting of white and the sky was heavy with storm clouds ... a photographer's dream for sure. So I put the 70-200 mm f/4 zoom on the DSLR and went hunting for nice compositions. Along the road into the park there were downed trees and that's where I found exactly what I wanted. This is an HDR of 3 images with some Lightroom touches at the end. It's nice and pleasing to the eye and those storm clouds ... what more can I say.

Great Sand Dunes - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY NC 4.0

Great Sand Dunes

No, I haven't fallen off the edge ... yet

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.

Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm - 200mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100, license CC BY-NC 4.0

Click to get a much bigger image. There's 85 base images in there. Somewhere in those clouds is a 14k foot peak. The sand is covered in snow and the contrast is amazing. I could, of course, take just a portion of the image and create something impressive but I couldn't get anywhere close to this masterpiece. The clouds hanging on the mountains gives it just the right touch of ominous. Damn it looks good ... doesn't it? You should see the original! Let me know what you think.