Month: November 2011

Tyson and Jen took me to Garden of the Gods in Colorado several years ago and I’ve been wanting to go back since then but haven’t been able to do so until this trip. The pictures I took the first time I was there were destroyed by an early version of iPhoto that was unable to handle RAW format, but showed jpg versions of the photos as being downloaded. It was one of those moments when you question your commitment to high-tech approaches to photography.

It’s hard to take a bad picture in the park, or even across the road from it, as shown in this shot. That’s Pike’s Peak in the background:

Here’s the view from the first visitor’s parking lot, if you stitch together a couple of wide-angle shots:

This rock wouldn’t seem so remarkable in most areas, but the fact that it’s the only rock that’s not red makes it stand out:

It’s hard to get any sense of how big these rocks are in photographs, but you definitely get a sense of that in this shot taken in the middle of the park because of the people standing at the base of it:

As I walked through the park I was amazed at how different the formations looked from different perspectives:

I couldn’t imagine leaving the park without a final stop at the “balancing” rock.

The park is obviously a “tourist attraction,” the kind of place I tend to avoid, but I’m pretty sure I’ll stop by the next time I’m close to it, I find it that fascinating.

I’m sure these shots are actually much better than the shots I originally took. I used HD Pro for all of them, and the combined shot is better than any of the single shots used to produce the new shot. That said, combining and manipulating them to get the best shot possible takes a considerable amount of time.

One of my goals on my latest road trip was to try to add scenic photography to my repertoire. Of course, I have taken scenic pictures as long as I can remember and have used them in my blog many times. However, I wanted to push myself a little harder and try to produce better shots. Professional photographers often use HDR to produce better quality in highlights and shadows. Both of my cameras will do automatic bracketing if you remember to set it in advance, and Photoshop will “automatically” combine these three bracketed shots into a HDR photo, though, as I found out today, it’s not exactly automatic if you want the best possible shot.

Of course, the weather, at least during the first part of the trip, didn’t exactly cooperate in producing beautiful scenics. It was cloudy and a good part of the time I seemed to be driving through the clouds, not to mention a near whiteout at one point. If I were going to feature scenics on my blog I would have to use a template that would allow for photographs twice as wide as those I can now fit in.

But enough excuses, at the very least, these four photos accurately convey the weather I had on the first two days of my trip. This first shot portrays a river that runs along the highway in Eastern Montana:

The biggest disappointment of my trip was that the Western entrance to Yellowstone closed for the season the morning of the evening I arrived there. Although I considered stopping and taking pictures of the snow, I decided against it because I didn’t want to get trapped there, and, more importantly, I was worried about trying to stop as locals driving SUV’s bore down on me at 60+ mph.

In fact, I really didn’t slow down and pull over until I reached this small town in Idaho where it was relatively flat and the roads were bare:

Considering how cold it was and how hard the wind was blowing, I wouldn’t have stopped if I hadn’t spotted a large flock of swans, Trumpeter Swans, not the Tundra Swans that seemed most appropriate, swimming in the river that ran beside the road.

Considering how seldom I get to see swans, I considered the two hundred miles I’d driven out of my way to get to Yellowstone well spent.

Though I didn’t really get sunny until I was nearly half way across Wyoming, I did shake the snow and the heaviest clouds as soon as I entered Jackson Hole Wyoming, though I’d love to see this shot when the Grand Tetons were entirely visible instead of just the foothills being visible:

Most of central Wyoming is awfully flat, and the most obvious landmarks are oil/gas wells that are far more numerous than the cattle I expected to see. In that environment, ridge lines like this took on an added beauty that is even more clear when seen full size. It’s actually six different photos stitched together in Photoshop.

I’ll post a better set of shots from The Garden of the Gods in the next few days.

Although I seldom attend more than one soccer game in the weekend, I made a major exception last Saturday because I’m so seldom in Colorado.

We started the morning by watching Logan’s game. He started at forward, but but played the last half of the game as goalie.

The last half was a little tough, because he wasn’t getting much help from the defenders.

After his game is over, we went to Sydney’s game, which was really half practice and half-game.

We ended the day by watching Zoe play her game. It might well have been the highlight of the day. She must’ve scored over five goals.

If you have to watch three games in one day, that’s the way it should go.

The posting has been slow around here because I’ve been in Colorado most of the week visiting grandkids.

I did manage to get some scenic pictures on the way over, but I have to wait till I get back to Photoshop to join them together and improve the exposure.

Thursday we went on a hike right outside of Boulder Colorado. It was only a three-mile hike, but at this altitude and having been here only a few days it certainly seemed strenuous enough to me.

I took this picture of a of an old fire engine a little ways out of Boulder.

We began our hike with this fabulous view of Boulder.

Tyson and Jen just got a new puppy, so it was easy to think of our group as a small pack:

I actually did better than I was afraid I might, but it wasn’t unusual for Tyson or Logan to be way in front:

Unfortunately, we didn’t see many birds or wildlife, so I had to settle for pictures of Colorado’s unusual clouds:

I suspect blogging will be sporadic for the next week or so until I can get home and get to my computer.