The photo above was taken yesterday morning in the Texas Hill Country. It's a 2009 image, but as I welcome the new year, I recall all the great moments and wonderful events of 2009.
Best wishes to you all in 2010 and may this new year bring you happy moments and good times.
I spent nearly 10 full days in the park and surrounding areas. During that time, I attended a TME (The Mindful Eye) six day photography workshop lead by Craig Tanner and Marti Jeffers.
The shooting opportunities were slightly different during this trip. Usually, my visits to the park are on my own terms, and I focus on specific areas, mostly accessible by hiking. The workshop itinerary focused mostly on the easy-to-reach, iconic locations in the park.
In project terms, this last trip was definitely a sub-project, much like my badlands project was this past March. I had a lot of opportunity and time to shoot well-known locations, something that I had not really done before.
My goal during this last trip was to shoot the easy spots and create a sense of place. The resulting collection of photos will hopefully add some balance to my larger, on-going project.
The Friends of Big Bend National Park have used my photo below in their recent newsletter.
This is a scene of Scarlet Gilia on the Lost Mine Trail taken in September 2007.
BigBendChat.com will publish the following four photos in their 2010 calendar:
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The photos, top to bottom, are:
- Rainbow from the South Rim, Sept. 2007
- The Window just after sunrise, Sept. 2008
- The Painted Desert (badlands near Dawson Creek), Mar. 2009
- Meteor over my tent, Mar. 2009
Many thanks to both FBB and BBC for selecting and using my Big Bend photos!
The above photo was taken in Pine Canyon at the end of the trail near the pour-off. The trees had turned lovely fall shades.
The above photo was shot near Dugout Wells on a windy, sub-freezing morning. Finding that particular clump of cactus took a long time. Fortunately all the walking warmed me up :-)
More from Big Bend later...
It didn't really stick well. There was a little accumulation in the grass and on roofs, but it quickly melted. It was fun while it happened and a lot of fun for the kids outside.
The following morning saw a very heavy frost. I stepped out into my backyard after the sun came up and saw a lot of little, interesting ice formations.
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We don't get this kind of weather often here, so it was definitely a photo opportunity!
I have a lot of photos to sort through, process, and edit. I'm posting a couple here that I editing during the workshop for critique.
Stay tuned for more...
Many thanks to Texas Highways for a second year in a row choosing one of my photos for use in their calendar!
This is a short video made from 297 photos taken over a period of nearly 45 minutes. Each photo was 8 seconds long (shot at 24mm, f/1.8, ISO 12.8k), and there was a break of 1 second between frames.
I turned off the long exposure noise reduction, but turned on the high ISO noise reduction. It did help some, but I still applied noise reduction in post processing. The files were shot as small JPGs. I contemplated shooting sRAW, but didn't want to deal with file sizes 4 to 5 times larger than a fine quality JPG.
This was an experiment to see if it could be done, and I think it worked quite well. The movie is a little jerky - probably a resut of 0.125 sec. per frame (i.e. 8 frames per second video). I'd like to redo this in the future with different software and perhaps make it faster (maybe 15 frames per second).
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24mm, 25 sec., f/2.2, ISO 6400
The greenish light was from an aerial light near our cabin. The yellowish glow on the horizon was a distant small town or maybe another ranch.
The white streak in the upper left could possibly be a plane, but at 100% I cannot see the usual dot-pattern that results from blinking lights typically seen on planes. It might very well be a meteor, but I was not looking at the sky during the exposure, so I really don't know.
The white, fuzzy glow (middle right) looks like a galaxy. I'm not sure which one, perhaps Andromeda (M31)? This shot is looking roughly NNE about 2 hours after sunset.
It's kind of hard to see in this small web-sized pic, but there is a bluish glow on the tree. I inadvertently light-painted it with my LED headlamp.
I set this shot up and hit the shutter, then turned my back to the camera and paced around a bit (while talking to my wife on the cell). All the while I had my headlamp on. I was careful not to look in the direction of the shot, but the light reflected off the ground, then off the tree, and was recorded by the camera. It's just that sensitive!
These were all shot at ISO 400. I was dealing with shutter speeds around 1/12 second and shooting hand-held. The F30 does not have image stabilization. I took a bunch of photos and several came out fairly sharp. The F30 performed well, as it always does with artifical lighting.
The moon was new during our visit to the park, and I was fortunate that on both nights during our trip, the skies cleared from evening thunderstorms after sunset.
Both shots were taken at 24mm, 30 seconds, f/2.2, and ISO 3200.
