Here’s another image from my trip to the big island of Hawaii with Jon Cornforth in December, 2009.  It was taken at the Kapoho Tidepools near Hilo, Hawaii.  We spent most of the week on the less rainy southern side of the island but got choked out by volcanic fog most of the week and didn’t get a ton of great pictures.  When we went to Hilo, the overnight rains broke just long enough to give us one absolutely majestic sunrise over the tidepools.

A quick aside:

I never fully appreciated how dangerous landscape photography really is – both to myself and my gear.  This picture was taken about 50 yards off-shore and it took a very treacherous scramble over really slick lava to get to this spot.  Here’s the irony – not only is lava slick as ice, it’s as dangerous as broken glass.  If you slip and fall on this stuff, you’d get cut to ribbons.  The photo gear would likely tumble into salt water – and that would be the end of that gear.  On top of all that, being in position at either dawn or dusk requires a scramble over this treacherous terrain in darkness.

Fortunately no photographers or cameras were harmed in the making of this image.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 24mm.  ISO 100, f/22, 3.2 sec.

Zion National Park is one of the most spectacular National Parks in the nation – everything is gigantic and dramatic.  This makes photography difficult – since the dynamic range is all over the place.  The lights are very light, the darks are very dark.  Even at dawn or dusk, there are parts of the park deep in the Virgin River canyon that the sun never really lights up.

This bend in the river is near Big Bend on the road to the Temple of Sinawava.  I exposed three pictures to create this three-shot HDR image so that I could control the extreme range of light and dark between the sun on the top of the canyon and the rocks in the river.  Most pictures in this location are taken in the fall when the trees are covered with colorful leaves.. but this makes a nice image since the river becomes the subject of the picture.

Go Somewhere Special!

Today’s shot is one that I took on the Big Island of Hawaii back in December of 2009.  I had just completed making the “One Last Evening in Paradise” image (featured earlier this year) and was waiting for Jon Cornforth to finish his shoot.  While I was waiting, I framed up some rocks in the foreground to make an HDR of the setting sun.  I bracketed nine shots and made the above image.

The major problem with this picture is that it was a mile and a half from our car over very rough lava.   As you can see from the sun, there isn’t much light left in the day.  A good chunk of the hike was made well after the sun went down and at one point we relied on the light from our iPhones to pick our way over the rocks.  It was a pretty treacherous hike – but we had a few cairns of white rocks to guide our way back to the trail to the car.  Afterwards, we rewarded ourselves with a traditional Hawaiian porkchop dinner at an old hotel near Kona.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 30mm.  ISO 200, f/22.

Late Night Maintenance on the Cumbres and Toltec

This picture is of the inside the maintenance shop for the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway in Chama, NM.  The 488 had just returned from its daily run bringing tourists over Cumbres pass and was about to be serviced in the Chama shop.  It had departed that morning from Antonito, CO bringing a half-dozen cars 64 miles through the mountains.  Since the 488 would be returning to Antonito in the morning, it was to be kept hot after the service is done so that a fire wouldn’t have to be recreated.

In this picture, they were just about to move it inside of the shop to start the nightly lubrication needed to keep the old engines in good working order.  A companion picture – my “Jiffy Lube” shot was posted earlier.  It can be found here:  I’d Like Your 29.99 Oil Change Special, Please

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 40mm.  ISO 100, f/9, 3 shots bracketed +/- 2 stops and merged to an HDR with LR/Enfuse.

This my friends is Number Eighty One.  She’s a Wissota B-Modified dirt track stock car – and she’s the pride of Jared Boumeester of Waseca, MN.  Jared just finished building this Skyrocket-framed beast and yesterday was her maiden voyage at the Deer Creek Speedway in southeastern Minnesota.  I was in Waseca yesterday to have my taxes prepared and I stopped by to take a few glamour shots of #81.

I decided to have some fun with these pictures and went for something really grungy and radical looking.  It’s a dirt-track racer, after all!  The processing is over-the-top, and some people are going to instinctively hate it.  Others are going to love it.   This image was made by taking 9 different exposures and merging them as an HDR with Photomatix Pro.   Once I merged them, I tonemapped them into the wild scene you see above.  This technique is like cilantro – little bits of it are good, but you’d never want to eat a whole bowl of it.   I’d never use it on a nature shot – but unfortunately others do.  Because of that, this technique gets an ill-deserved bad rap.

Because I stepped out of the box and went for it – I’ve got a vibrant image that I love.  It fits the subject matter perfectly, and the car just looks fast sitting there.   There’s your lesson for today – don’t be afraid to ditch the comfortable and do something that isn’t your style.. you may get some wild fun results!

Wanna hear her roar?  Check out Jared revving her up yesterday on this iPhone video: http://yfrog.us/6bpj9z

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17mm TS-E f/4L.  ISO 200, f/6.3, exposures bracketed from 1/6400 to 1/25 sec.

I love doing architectural photography – it has so much in common with landscape photography but doesn’t involve getting up before dawn or hiking in the dark.  My good friend Vince from Memory Lane (www.memorylanemn.com) asked me do some images of a house he recently built.  It was an amazing home – it even included an indoor snowmobile garage that allowed the owner to drive right out onto the lake from the house.

It was a challenging shoot because the house is being lived in by a family of 4.  We only had about an hour to get the pictures – and we had to dodge cleaning people the entire time.  This meant Vince scrambled to hide extra knick-knacks and vacuum cleaners while I lined the shot up.  I’d fire three bracketed shots to compose the HDR picture, and he’d run around putting everything back while I moved to the next room.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 17mm  ISO 200, f/16, 1.3 sec.

Today’s image of the day was another shot capturing the grandeur that is St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.  This structure is the baldacchino – a one hundred foot pavilion marking the spot where it is believed that St. Peter is buried.  At one time it was thought to be the largest bronze structure in the world – and probably still is.  This isn’t one of Michelangelo’s works – Bernini gets the nod for this one.

Vital Stats: Canon 350D w/Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 10mm  ISO 1600, f/5, 1/30 sec.

This ancient pickup has certainly seen better days.. probably about 75 years worth of better days.  The remains of this pickup is sitting at almost 12,000 feet above sea level – it is just above Animas Forks on the way to California Gulch.  It is so fun shooting in the San Juan mountains – there are mining relics scattered everywhere.  This shot was taken just before the sun popped over the mountain behind the truck giving it that cool halo-like glow.  I drove up to Animas Forks to take dawn shots only to realize that a) the sun didn’t hit the town until about 9:30 AM due to the mountains and b) it was really cold waiting in the dark for the sun to rise.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @24mm  ISO 200, f/16, +/- 2 stops

Here is a picture from the west ridge of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  I’ve featured this tree in another picture of the day – but this is a slightly different composition and framing than the first.  This picture was taken very near the end of my father’s patience for waiting for me – so I was a little rushed to get this shot taken.  Fortunately, everything lined up and I got what I wanted and was able to get back to the van in time for us to continue our journey.  Like the others, this is an HDR shot with three images blended.  That was quite a challenge with 40-50mph gusts of wind!  I had to time the three shots between gusts to minimize blur.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @ 24mm  ISO 800, f/16, 3 exposures

Here is another one of my shots from my trip to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  It’s not of the canyon itself, per se.. there are lots of interesting things to take pictures of on the rim of the canyon.  We just don’t have gnarly little trees here in the verdant Midwest – so I love taking pictures of them.  There was a high wind from the right side of the frame when I took this shot – so it was difficult to get three bracketed shots off in the brief pauses between gusts.    Fortunately, I was able to catch a 15-second break right when the light was perfect.  To minimize motion blur across the three exposures, I had to boost the ISO to 800 to get faster exposures.

Vital Stats: Canon 5D Mark II w/Canon 17-40 f/4L @24mm  ISO 800, f/23, 3 exposures centered around 1/20 sec.