Another birthday, another trip to Death Valley

The last time I was in Death Valley, for my birthday, I did a lot of hiking and photography. I also watched plenty of crazy people riding around doing the AdventureCorps Spring Century and Double Century ride. I remember seeing them either struggling in a huge headwind, or flying past me - depending a lot on the direction they were going. Looked like a lot of fun.

I happened to mention the signup for this race to a friend and was surprised to see a few months later that he was in. I quickly decided to go too and talked another friend in for the ride.

We flew in to Las Vegas and spent the day there, all the time obsessing about the weather forecast. Snow, rain and cold featured heavily! The wind in Vegas was strong and it was chilly there too. I took the chance to stock up on shoe covers and chemical heaters and we drove out across the desert, via In and Out Burger for some fuel.

Once we got to Death Valley the wind was insane at Zabriske Point. You could lean against it and almost sit down and be held up just by the sheer force. But the ride wasn't until the next day, so we weren't too concerned about that - just the forecast cold and the storm front we could see building ever higher over Telescope Peak. Spent a bit of time assembling our bikes and getting ready then had an early night. Dawn came pretty quickly and things looked good. A little breezy, but clear skies, no apparent rain and I sent Amanda a message saying 'Weather looks good just now...'. This would come back to haunt me later!

The ride start was at 7am. We lined up and were off at a fairly casual pace. Turning out of Furnace Creek ranch I got to quickly realize how sheltered we'd been from the wind at the start. There was a fairly brisk headwind almost immediately and as the sun came up it quickly picked up to around 20-30 mph sustained, in our face. It was cold in the morning and I found some times I was on a significant downhill, peddling hard to just keep rolling with gravity! I got to Badwater, 17 miles down the road, in about 2 hours! Luckily right around that point I got into a group with two other riders, Andy & Mark, and we started working well together. We rotated, working along the valley, but still only making a consistent 10mph average into the wind. At this point the course is entirely flat. There's no shelter. Typically, you'd expect to be trucking along about 20-25mph in a group and we were giving it everything we had to hardly move!

On we slogged. Eventually, we made it to the start of the only climb. 5 miles straight up to the pass and the turnaround point. We are all pretty tired by this point and the main thing keeping us going is knowing that the way back is going to be so much easier! The noise of the wind had been wearing us down, my arms were sore from fighting the bike trying to blow across the road - but we were going to fly back!

The hill climb wasn't too eventful. The wind died down, the sun came up and it got warm, but I plodded up the climb and made it to the turnaround point in just over 5 hours. 52 miles. In 5 hours. The last century I rode took me about 5.5 hours to do the whole 100 miles! This Death Valley ride was possibly even flatter than that previous ride and here we were, only half way. Time for payback for all the work we'd put in getting here! The next hour was glorious. Firstly, a long, fast descent back down the hill, hitting 40+mph and getting cold. Then we were back on the flat roads, with the wind at our back - and we were flying! Working as group we were riding along easily hitting 30mph. I'm thinking I'll be back home in a couple of hours, ready for a beer. Further down the valley I could see a strange haze rising above Badwater but I thought it must just be dust getting kicked up by the wind that was blowing us so quickly back there.

Then we got closer to it. We crested a slight rise and our pace went from 30mph back down to 12 mph in the space of a few minutes. Some crazy way the wind had switched around on us! What had been such a strong tailwind a few minutes before was right back to an even stronger 35mph sustained headwind. I couldn't believe it - we still had 30 miles or more to go and the wind was stronger than it had been all morning and right back into our faces. We struggled on back to Badwater and lunch. 17 miles to go and it had already taken more than 7 hours to ride 88 miles. 12.5 mph! Probably the slowest average speed I've ever ridden a bike. By this point I started noticing more and more bikes on the SAG wagon. The two guys I'd ridden so far with had some mechanical issues and the wind was getting even stronger and it blew apart our little pace group. I was back on my own and still had about 15 miles to cover. Then it started to rain.

There's a point were things get so ridiculous that you just start laughing in the face of it. I rode on as the clouds built up ahead and the valley put on a great show of what amazing weather can be seen there. Clouds lit up with sunlight, towering black thunderheads, back-lit rain and dust storms blowing past. Beautiful in a primal, humbling way - particularly when you are fighting to push a bike through it, exhausted after a whole day battling the weather.

Somehow I found enough legs to make it back to Furnace Creek Ranch. The last downhill stretch was certainly a gift! 9 hours and 41 minutes after I'd started, I got off my bike and started eating the free pizza. Sure tasted good!

The next morning dawned warm and sunny. No wind. A perfectly beautiful Spring day in Death Valley - great for a bike ride! Out of the 400 people that signed up for the ride, 324 actually even crossed the start line (I think partly due to the snow, rain and cold weather forecasts from before and the wind on the race morning) 124 people are listed as official finishers.

Such a fun day!

Location:Airport Pkwy,San Jose,United States

cow creek

A break from the constant barrage of SoFoBoMo posts. I spent a bit of time this evening looking through the final day of shooting that I did in Death Valley. I'd woken up early that morning, with a vague plan to go back to the sand dunes near Stove Pipe Wells for a final sand shoot. I'd met a few people that I was going to shoot with and we all got together at 4:30am. The wind was howling. But they were all feeling hardy and still wanted to head to the dunes. So I wished them luck!

Instead I went with another group down towards the salt flats near Cow creek. I'd scouted that area on the Saturday when I'd arrived and found some really beautiful fan shapes in the salt. I'd walked out without my camera, towards the center of the valley on that first day, just to get away from everything and listen to the wind. The water and wind had blown rivulets into the salt pan and the shapes were achingly delicate. I'd hoped to come back when the light was good and marked some GPS co-ordinates so I could find it easily.

So on the last morning, I got my chance to go back and it was breathtaking all over again. Such graceful sweeping patterns leading off to the far mountains. The sand from the Stove Pipe Wells dune fields was filling the air in the distance, blowing down the valley and obscuring the hills but maybe adding some interesting mystery to the scene, too. The wind was whipping around my ears and it was a joy just to be up and out there to experience it.

small world

Terry Lawhon got in touch with me after seeing one of the shots I took at Badwater, on my birthday. He thought he recognised the cloud shapes from one of his shots! Turns out he was also out there that morning and took a shot of a photographer that was far off in the distance out on the Badwater salt flats. So that's me, above, in Terry's shot, shooting on my birthday and taking this picture, which has the same cloud form in it that Terry was also shooting.

I've never met Terry, we only found out about this conflux of location when he read my blog. Also Terry mentioned it was his birthday a few days earlier. Thanks to Terry for sending me the shot and also letting me share it here. You can see more of Terry's images from Death Valley at his website in the portfolio section. Small world.

birthday in the valley

One of the reasons I went to Death Valley at the beginning of the month was to spend my birthday out there. Amanda was away for work and I wanted do something, rather than sitting around the house! I spent the first few days doing a bit of short hiking and taking a lot of pictures. I wanted to try something a bit more adventurous on my actual birthday. I got up bright and early on the 4th, at 4:30am and headed out to the Badwater salt flats to shoot the pre-dawn and sunrise. A quiet, soft start to the day and almost nobody out there. I walked out further than I've been before, about a mile and a half, to where the salt really gets flat and white. Peaceful, beautiful and not a sound. Amanda recorded herself singing 'Happy Birthday' on my birthday present, a digital audio recorder, so I listened to that a few times out there!

After breakfast and a bit of packing, I drove over to the Panamint Valley. Both times I'd been to the park before I'd looked longingly at the Panamint dunes. They are a bit tough to get to - about 6 miles of dirt roads then another 5 mile cross country hike, over a rocky alluvial fan then up through sand dunes. You can see the road in the distance on the far left of this shot and then the dunes on the hillside to the far right. This time I was going to get there.

The hike was great - I took about a gallon and a half of water, my camera and some food and set off up to the dunes. It was a warm 85F and sunny at the start and got pretty hot as the afternoon wore on. Click here for a flickr slideshow of the hike. The soft dirt and sand made for quite tough going and I averaged a slow 2.5 mph on the way up. Just before the dunes, I found a big creosote bush and slept under it for an hour while the shadows lengthened and the light got better for photos. My Tilley hat made for a great shade, hung up in the branches of the bush. That was the first respite from the sun I'd found all afternoon and it was really welcome. So much cooler out there out of the sun with the really low humidity. Lovely. About 3 pm I left the pack behind and walked up into the dunes with my camera. It was a beautiful experience to have that whole expanse of dunes to myself, no foot prints, no people, no noise. Nobody for miles around. The dunes there are steeper than those near Stove Pipe Wells, the hillside and wind have combined to really pile them high and sharp. A couple of times I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it to the top of the highest dune, I almost rolled off down one slope. Eventually though I clambered to the top - the view was stunning - all the valley opened out below me. The narrow peak of the dune actually split into the 3 spines - a star shaped dune! Shooting right at the top was a bit disorientating, looking through the camera and trying not to step off into space. I sat for a while and drank it all in.

Heading back down was a whole lot easier, once I found my pack. Creosote bushes all look the same from a distance! A GPS waypoint made life easier, though I did worry about my batteries dying. It was all downhill to the car and not so much weight to carry either. I think I need to find some hikes where I start off at the top, hike down drinking the water then have a lighter load to carry up the hill! I got back to the car just as the sun dipped behind the mountains. All in all, a great way to spend my birthday. A really beautiful desert hike.

Lots more pictures in the map below - click on the labels on the right or zoom in and pan around.

I've been trying out various GPS tools and GPS Visualizer has been really useful. Massaging the data into a form to create the map above took a bit of work, some use of GPSBabel and a few custom python scripts that I wrote to convert co-ordinates into the right forms. The profile came straight from the GPS track log.

australia

badwater basin before dawn.

dune dawn

Early morning light, at Stove Pipe Wells dunes, Death Valley national park. Dawn is special to me - most people are sensibly tucked up in bed, asleep. The light is softer, creeping across the land. Sunsets are easy. Everyone is up and about for them, everyone shares in them. But dawn is special, solitary, beautiful. My favourite time of day - when I can get out of bed.

ghost rider meets Venus

I should probably do something about the rather harsh posterization going on in the Lady Venus shot above. Pushed the colours quite far in Lightroom. That's the one thing I miss in LR, the ability to easily fix up things like that with a lasso and some Gaussian blurring + noise/ dithering. I'd probably also burn down the left hand side to balance the more polarised dark sky on the right. I love what the polariser, combined with the bright desert sky and low angle is doing in the ghost rider shot. I did drag it a bit further to the dark side too, feels like it fits with the theme.

zabriske

Got up early on the first morning and went to Zabriskie Point. Never really been that enthused by the view out over Manly Beacon (to camera right). It always seems a bit uninspiring when I've been there. This time the badlands off to the left were more interesting, particularly with the cloud formations overhead. I'm interested in comments on this one - I'm not entirely convinced by the composition.

titus canyon

One of the fun things about visiting a National Park on my own was being able to set my own schedule. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. Rather than on a workshop, where locations are dictated by the group or instructor, or with friends where photography is a reasonable last place. On this trip I could take my time, stop when I was interested in the landscape, take some pictures, scout out potential new areas for future shoots. There was time to just slow down and enjoy where I was. Workshops are a hugely creative, energetic experience but there isn't a whole lot of time to think or explore. The mid-day hours are given over the classroom work or critique and the rest of the time is a rush between shoots, sleep and food. On this trip to Death Valley I had a chance to go to some places I hadn't been before, including doing the 26 mile drive down through Titus Canyon. I left the park and made a trip to Rhyolite to shoot around there and had lunch, then set off down the 4WD only access road to the canyon. The sun beat down from a mostly cloudless sky but it was a still a pleasant 80F in the shade. The road wasn't particularly rough going and the scenery was breathtaking. I was amazed how much it changed over the drive, as I twisted and turned towards the small ghost town of Leadfield. Along the way I saw a red tailed hawk of some kind catching and circling above me with a snake in its talons. It soared on the strong breeze and just hung in the air over head for several minutes. I'd had enough of ghost towns with Rhyolite, so didn't stop in Leadfield. There were a few tin shacks and I'm sure some interesting things to explore, but I pressed on. After Leadfield the landscape changed quite quickly as the road dropped down into the real canyon. The walls got steeper and steeper and closer and closer. The early afternoon sun started to dip behind the canyon walls, giving some relief from the constant sun. The bouncing light between the canyon walls softened and picked up the orange glow of the rocks. Still the road wasn't particularly bad - certainly required high clearance in some places but nothing particularly testing, as it was dry. I found some petroglyphs by the roadside and stopped for a look. Unfortunately they are well marked and as a result have been added to by plenty of visitors.

Nearing the end of the canyon it got particularly narrow, finally birthing out onto an alluvial fan on the side of Death Valley. There's a small car park at the start of the two-way access road. I parked and walked back into the canyon a bit. The narrow canyon walls loomed over me and I was listening for cars all the time - there wasn't much room to get out of their way!

Titus Canyon was a really enjoyable drive, easy on the car and easier on the eye. Dramatic mountains, steep cliffs, red earth and black rock really add to the whole experience. I saw a few other people in there but mostly I was on my own and had a great time, traveling at my own pace. As I uploaded the images to Flickr, decked out with the appropriate GPS co-ordinates, I took a couple of screen captures of how the images appear in Google Earth and also on the Flickr mapping tool. Still exploring what is possible with the geotagged images. Being able to find them in Google Earth is interesting, seeing what other people have shot in the same area is particularly useful.

stove pipe wells

This was taken towards the end of the first full day in Death Valley. It had been extremely windy the night before and was still pretty breezy that morning. That might not sound ideal but it sure cleans up all the footprints on the dunes. These are quite close to a road and get a lot of foot traffic, so it is quite rare to get to photograph them without foot prints criss-crossing all over them. I like this particular shot because of how the cloud formations and shadows in the mountain are echoing some of the cracks in the mud. The shape and slope of the dune is also reflected in some of the deep cracks in the mud and the low angled late evening light warms and defines the deep splits in the dried mud. On this trip I realised that the dunes run diagonally along side the road - previously I've parked at the closest point and slogged up and down over smaller dunes to get into the middle of the field. Doing some scouting ahead of this trip on Goggle Earth I was able to see that if I stopped down the road, actually further away from the dunes, I could walk in along the ridges of the dunes. That made for a much easier time! I had to walk maybe a mile but it was over flat, hard packed mud, rather than hiking over the dune fields. It also let me find these great mud deposits that were a lot more expansive and thicker than I'd seen before. This time I approached from the upwind side, so sand hadn't really covered the mud and also I think this side is where the prevailing mud flows come from, so there was a much larger expanse pushing up against and no doubt being stopped by the dune field. The Google Earth scouting via satellite and road maps was really useful on this trip. I was able to mark specific way points then upload them to my GPS. Certainly helped me find my way around on the various small dirt roads and tracks that I got to investigate on this trip.

contrast

I was amazed this time around when I got to Death Valley national park. In the past it has been a beautiful, desolate landscape. Nothing but mud and rocks with the occasional creosote bush to break up the scene. The sun bakes down from a typically cloudless sky and the temperatures can soar to 130F and beyond. This time there was a carpet of 2 foot-high, yellow flowers across the whole of the area around Furnace Creek. They stretched all across the flood plains and up through the small valleys in the foothills. I noticed a particular increase in the density of the flowers around the roads. I'm told that cars driving along increase the local humidity around the road due to the exhaust moisture from the engine.

The wide open skies and flat desert was quite a contrast to the scene the night before in Las Vegas. I met my friend, Marti, at the Vegas airport and then we went for a walk around the Strip to find some dinner and do some shooting. I didn't take a tripod but managed to find enough ledges and walls to perch my camera on to get a few long exposure shots that I'm happy with. These days, the best thing about Las Vegas is using it as a jumping off point to all the amazing national parks that cluster around that part of the country. Only about a two hour drive between the scene above and the scene below.

rhyolite

Just got back from Death Valley, real early this morning. Haven't had much time to look at the pictures yet but did get this one finished. I went to Rhyolite, which is an old ghost town, just to the North of the park. There is a rather strange set of art installations that made for some interesting pictures. Great trip. I drove about 900 miles since Saturday and took over 1600 pictures. I'm hoping a couple of them work out.

Death Valley, after the storm

I'm heading off for a few days to Death Valley National Park. It's my birthday and I'm taking a few days to do some shooting and maybe try to write a bit more. This shot here is one of my favourites from the first time I went to the park. I'd been shooting all week and this was the final day. We were stretched thin by lack of sleep and there had been a blowing sandstorm a few hours before. I'd hiked out with the group through the sand and got some beautiful shots of the sunrise. I was tired and finished. Walking back to the car with the instructor, Craig Tanner, we were just chatting about things, then suddenly we noticed this scene unfolding in front of us. I was tired, ready for breakfast and almost didn't bother taking a picture. The sun was up. The shadows were getting pretty harsh, it just didn't look like a good photo to me, but Craig was excited. So I took a couple of frames. For me, this was probably the biggest lesson of the trip. I still haven't quite worked out what that lesson was, though, three years later. So I'm going back for another crack at it. See what I can learn on my own this time, listening to my own thoughts. I think since then, I've come to learn what a huge part clouds play in Craig's process - so maybe that was part of his excitement. I was on my first ever landscape workshop and hadn't really taken that concept in, until I got home and looked at the images I shot this particular morning. I was also still pretty green at making black and white images - still am really. This shot took a bit of coaxing to really appear from the original. Mostly though, this shot takes me back to the conversations I had that morning and the feelings I had enjoyed surviving the blowing sand and making great pictures. Nobody else gets to feel about this shot, the way that I do and that's okay. Maybe that's the lesson - the images have to stand on their own, as they don't tell others how you felt when you took it. Unless you really manage to put your heart and soul into them.

book design

Book design. I know nothing about it. Looking back at the three previous PDF portfolios I've put together, not only do I know nothing about it, but I'm obviously terrible at it. Embarrassingly, painfully bad. I can see that those first efforts are ghastly, but I'm not aware enough to know why, or how to fix it. For grins, here are links to my first three folio/ book attempts - that mostly look like the bad powerpoint presentations that they are.

• Death Valley
• Wildflower Center - six months
• Blurs

I did find a good book on Safari yesterday and got through the first half last night. The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams doesn't claim to be teaching good book design but it at least has taught me some of the fundamentals and opened my eyes to be able to see what is wrong. I think that's the first big step - if I know it isn't good and can identify what's wrong, I'm on the path to finding out how to make it look better. The book is based around the fantastically unfortunate set of four steps. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity are the keys that good design is unlocked with. The first half of the book demonstrates how these four elements combine to improve layout and simplify design. The second half delves into aspects of typography and font selection. The CRAP principles seem easy enough to apply and more than that, my eye is now a bit more sensitive to what is actually needed to improve a design. I've taken my first few steps in understanding the language of book design, at least.

the amanda project

I've been talking a lot over the last year about the value of projects. A recent vacation to a few national parks seemed like the perfect opportunity to work on something with a consistent theme. For this trip, I picked my wife, Amanda, as the subject. The goal was to take a set of good pictures (around 20) of her that we were both happy with, in the various locations we found ourselves.
I decided to limit it technically too - I just took two lenses with me. I had a 50mm prime and an 85mm prime. The 50mm is one I haven't used much at all and the 85mm has been my go-to portrait lens for the last year. In fact, it's been my go-to lens for almost everything for the last year. I wanted to use the 50mm but put the 85mm in the bag as a fall back position. I tried to shake things up a bit by shooting almost everything with the 50mm. It turns out that about 90% of the shots I took were with the 50mm. Quite a turn around for me.
Now a 50mm and 85mm lens aren't exactly classic lens choices for a trip around national parks like Death Valley and Yosemite. Typically, you'd be thinking about some super wide lenses in the teens range and also a longer telephoto to abstract elements of the landscape. I decided to totally skip those options. I've been to Death Valley before and shot a lot of very wide scenics. I've never been to Yosemite but I've certainly seen a lot of classic landscapes from there. I wasn't going to compete with those images. I didn't even want to bother recreating various Ansel Adams views of the park, in worse light, or David Muench cloned images. Maybe I've finally gotten to the point where I have the courage to look for my own vision rather than copying others. Or I've switched to copying portrait photographers - I guess I'll find out over time. A few people suggested I was mad in taking this approach. That I'd spend the entire week regretting the decision or kicking myself, missing shots of a lifetime with the wrong lenses in my hand. Instead I took shots of my life and my times - I shot what matters to me. More valuable to me than pretty scenics of well-worn subjects. There's a joke that says half dome requires an extra stop of exposure now, than it did when Ansel Adams first took his shots of it, because so many photographers have sucked the light out of it. I contributed a bit, but with a slightly different motivation.
So the Amanda project was born, from an idea from Steve Barth with his excellent series featuring his wife. One week, 800 shots, lots of locations, dramatic changes in lighting, collaborations on clothing choices, hair. Hiking for miles, 4am starts, rain, bear sightings, climbing, driving : all in all a great time for both of us and I think a pretty good collection of images with a consistent theme.
I did cheat a touch on the only 50mm/85mm lens selection aspect - I took along a small, wide-angle, panoramic format point and shoot that I used a couple of times in this collection - but other than that, nearly all 50mm. I think there is one 85mm shot and that's the night image from Las Vegas. By the end of the week I was trying to find fresh ideas, use lighting, new focal lengths. I never actually felt I was missing out on shooting the grand landscapes by not having a wide angle lens. Yosemite is beautiful. Death Valley is amazing. We drank it all up, together, looked at the views, enjoyed the sunrises, sunsets and times in between. I did take a few landscapes and I'll start posting them up later, but I had a much more interesting project to work on, than scenery.
The project focus also pushed me beyond some of the standard portrait shots I'd have taken. I started looking for new angles, compared to how I've been shooting with the 85mm. Normally all I do is fairly tight head/shoulders portraits. The 50mm forced me to step back a bit. Shooting the same subject for an extended period forced me to look for new angles, new body positions, new ways to move. It got me thinking about posing a full person, even when they aren't posing as such, rather than just eliciting an expression. So again I found that pushing a subject area via an assigned project has helped me break new ground. I also pushed my lighting skills a bit, using room lights, rearranging furniture, etc. to light the night time Las Vegas shot. Something I probably wouldn't have done without this assignment in the back of my mind.
Hope you enjoy the results. We had a great time shooting them all. Click on the collage above to go to the set of images. Comments are very welcome.

In the comments, Kate asked: Of the shots in the project montage, were most with the 50mm? Of the 25 shown, 18 were taken with the 50mm lens. 2 were taken with the point and shoot DMC-LX1 and five were shot with the 85mm lens (old habits I guess).

our trip by the numbers

In lieu of posting pictures from our trip around Death Valley, Yosemite and Las Vegas, I'll post some numbers instead. I managed to get them downloaded, backed up and sorted last night. Just haven't had time to finish off or upload any images. Hopefully some time this week!

Between us we took two cameras, my 1dII with a 50mm lens and and 85mm lens and also a Panasonic DMC-LX1 point and shoot. The point and shoot has the nice advantage of being wider than average and also shooting in 16:9 widescreen ratio - good for scenics particularly as I was deliberately limiting myself to a fairly narrow set of prime lenses. Across the two cameras we shot 1563 images in a week. 1351 with the 1DII, 212 with the point and shoot. Out of those, 778 were exclusively of Amanda for the previously mentioned project! About 80 of them are just the two of us, mostly 'long arm' self portrait shots or set up on a mini tripod. Of the lenses I took, 1207 (89%) of the shots were with the 50mm and 144 were with the 85mm. That's entirely different from my normal shooting which is usually almost exclusively with the 85mm - so it gave me a bit of a different perspective on things which was fun. 700 of the shots were taken in Death Valley, 680 in Yosemite, 183 of the shots were in Las Vegas. But we only spent 1 day in Death Valley, 4 days in Yosemite and 2 days in Las Vegas (and 2 days driving between), so I think we peaked early! Truth is we hiked a lot more in Yosemite so time was spent in less photographically intense ways. What do all these numbers mean ? Other than I'm still an engineer at heart ? Well it means that Lightroom has good metadata analysis capabilities and will let you see a lot of information about how you shoot. Being able to call up which lenses were used most often was particularly interesting given that I was aiming to push myself towards using the 50mm for a week. I can quickly see I was successful at sticking with it at least. I can break these numbers down further and see how many shots were taken at f8 (480) or how many were taken at a higher aperture than f8 (124) leaving a huge number taken at a fairly wide open aperture. Doesn't sound like a whole lot of traditional landscape views in there! A combination of not taking a wide angle lens and no tripod pushed me away from that sort of very stopped down view of the world. Metadata in a good browser (like Lightroom) can give you quite a bit of insight in to how you shoot - perhaps exposing areas that you are weak on or deliberately avoiding. I've used it in the past when I moved from a point and shoot to a DSLR to take a look at which sorts of focal lengths I use the most - in part to help me decide which lenses to buy. It can also point towards focal lengths you never use - something maybe to explore in the future. My clear preference for shallow depth of field can be seen in the metadata from this trip, for example. Now - is this all just useless measurebating ? Or can it provide worthwhile insights ? Shouldn't I know all of this already ? Probably - and mostly I do - but it can be interesting to confirm your suspicions - you might be surprised. Digital capture and EXIF data gives access to all of this information in an easily digestible form - do you ever use it to improve or inspect your process ?

where the sun shines

Amanda and I are away for a few days, visiting some national parks and generally getting away from it all. Death Valley National Park is a beautiful, awe inspiring place. Austere, stark but riveting at the same time. We have been having a great couple of days soaking it all in. Catching sunset at Dante's peak, sunrise out in the sand dunes, hiking through canyons in the hottest part of the day (only about 100F just now, well shy of the summer 130F's) Then we watched sunrise last night at Badwater - the lowest point in the western hemisphere. Amanda took this shot of me this evening out on the salt flats. Not a bad way to spend a weekend...