New blog: CM400 Adventure

I've recently purchased my first motorcycle. Along with it, I am writing about my experiences as I learn to ride, make repairs on the bike, etc. You can follow that adventure at the CM400 Adventure Blog.

Here are a few frames I did this morning on the P7000 for a post over there.

Grand Falls 2013

This morning I adventured with Preston and Kristen out to Grand Falls, AZ (also known as Chocolate Falls, a name I despise) and took some sunrise pictures.

(my first trip to this area was in 2011. My most recent was on assignment for the Land Rover series).

4:44am wakeup
5:02am coffee
5:16 depart flagstaff after fueling up.

We arrived just in time to choose our locations as the sun rose above a low bed of clouds.

My first location wasn't great:

So I repositioned and was able to get one frame I am very happy with:

Killing time, waiting for the light to move where I needed it. Shot a couple silhouettes of our fellow morning adventurers.

Preston Trauscht, of Trauscht Media, getting the perfect angle.

Honor the Fallen

Got caught on camera today, holding the American flag in downtown Flagstaff.

"Framed by an American flag, a Marine salutes the hearse carrying Staff Sgt. Jonathan Davis back to the Navajo Nation this morning. In the background, Flagstaff residents can be seen lining Route 66 in front of city hall. Daily Sun reader Alicia Hendricks shared this image."

Lake Pleasant

Spent the long weekend (President's Day!) camping at Lake Pleasant with Kristen.

The campsite was pretty darn good. Though there were several drive up campsites that we could have visited, I'm pretty sure those were first-come, first-served. Perhaps we will try that next time. Hopefully those would get us away from the majority of the families with small children and perhaps the bros as well.

Warm weather in February was a welcome change. A little bit of sunburn, it turns out, is just what the doctor ordered. I hope that I will have/make the time to do more of the same next year.

There you go. Nothing super fancy, but some good color to go with a good weekend away from it all.

Stars

Somehow I didn't blog about this particular adventure.
Shame on me.

Towards the end of January, Preston and I took a trip out to the edge of town (and then some) to see if we could capture the night sky.

I, naturally, forgot my tripod. And gloves. And a headlamp.

No worries! I brought with my a portable 3 legged stool that I used to hold the camera, borrowed Preston's headlamp and simply went without gloves. (I now keep a pair in my photo bag full time).

I ended up with this as my final image.

Shot it at 20 seconds, F2.8, ISO 6400.

Having maxed out the ISO on my D300s, I spent a fair amount of time in photoshop working on this image to try and reduce some of the noise. 

I don't have any fancy programs or plugins to deal with that sort of thing, so I took a bit of advice from the Internet and gave it a go.

Luckily for me, Flagstaff is the world's first "Dark Sky City," which means we can see a LOT of stars on any given night. The only hard part from there is to grab an interesting foreground of some variety. 

The orange glow you see is the lights from Flagstaff. Our street lights are seriously that orange.

This image looks OK (ish) on the web but would absolutely NOT reproduce well in print. I think I will spend more time working on this concept and see where I can get with it in the future. Some kind of serious noise reduction software would likely serve well for this. So would a new camera body... but let's not go there.

More Winter Landscapes

Shot these last week during a drive to clear my head.

Sometime you just have to escape everything and spend some time on your own. That's what I did. As I did so, the clouds rolled in over the mountains and it started to drizzle.

6 frame panorama

single image, same location

I photographed a few lovely locations from which I had an almost unobstructed view of the mountains. This was by far the best.

On taking your own advice...

You know what sucks? Taking your own advice.

I know that we all have creative slumps and that it's part of the cycle, but sometimes recognizing that slump and telling yourself to chill out can be a difficult process.

I've been shooting a lot of landscapes recently. They all start as suck-tastic, color, images that I'm not happy with. I see the picture I want in my head and the image I see on the LCD looks nothing like it. Suck-tastic.
Then, I get them on a computer and play around in Camera Raw... and I realize that maybe I don't hate them after all.
That's not to say they are any good - but I am (generally speaking) satisfied with my ability to take the image in my head and put it on a computer screen in front of me. That ability to be satisfied with what you are creating might be overrated, but it sure helps once in a while.

Actually 3 different images...

My first time using a tripod in a long time...