Arches in the Day

More of Arches National Park! Cody has raised the bar - no DSLR? I am impressed. My trip was with a new Canon Rebel, and unfortunately only during the day.

Whenever I travel, I look for unique shots. We've all seen the same image of Delicate Arch, straight-on. A quick climb up the ridge lent a broader view to show off the natural amphitheater over which the arch presides.

What amazes me is how much of the park is inaccessible to both roads and trails. This is one reason why I love my camera: the telephoto lenses. The vistas are beautiful and the myriad of geological shapes are doubly so.

Oddly, all of the rangers we heard, as well as the museum exhibits, focused on water as the force that shapes the park. However, the real creator of the landforms is wind erosion (otherwise, all those arches would be natural bridges). While water plays a big part, wind is the uncredited source for the twisted forms of sandstone that we enjoy today. It also pares down the dead trees to the point that many people wonder how so much driftwood can be in such a dry place.

One final picture: Balanced Rock, probably the second most popular (after Delicate Arch) feature of the park. As I circled around the loop, a European gentleman stopped me (apparently I look like I know stuff) and asked what the spiritual significance of the cairns (small rock piles) is. He was disappointed when I said they mark the trail.

Enjoy! -Josh

So it's late, and I'm waiting for a call to go pick up my little brother from a friends house. Makes for the perfect time for spelling and grammatical errors.


First off, I just want to tell you how amazed I am that my point and shoot was able to capture the images you are about to see. I've yet to purchase a DSLR, and the portability and image quality my little Lumix LX7 is making me hesitate even more.

I recently got back from a trip to Arches National Park, while there I primarily focused on night photography. I wanted to get images of what you see after everyone goes home. Lets just say that Nature puts on her best show at night.

The first night I managed to rope a couple of people into staying at Delicate Arch longer than they had planned. I told them how to activate the shutter on my camera and I promptly ran to the arch to do some light painting.

Here is my favorite out of that group:

And yes, I did capture a meteor on this shot :)


As you can see, clouds were beginning to roll in, and I decided to head back early (10pm) After hiking down to the parking lot, it appeared that there would be some decent breaks in the clouds, so off to a new location.


The first spot that came to mind was Double Arch. As I pulled up I noticed a faint glow coming from the arch, someone was already timelapsing! Good news: Awesome light was already on the arch. Bad news: I wasn't able to try any lightpainting of my own.

Here are a couple from the location. One looking out through the arches, and one with a mini-startrail from the other side.

The Milky-Way was visable! That alone made my night!


After wanting to try one last thing for the night, I bid the fellow photographer farewell and headed on my way.

Balanced rock!

While the lightpainting wasn't the greatest quality, I loved the look of the Milky-Way behind this precariously settled formation.

Even though this was one of the worst paintings of the group, it also happened to have several meteors in the same frame! I figure it was worth a share:

I highly regret the fact that I fell asleep in that parking lot and didn't take advantage of the amazing shots that could have happened at sunrise.



Day 2. Essentially a retake of Delicate Arch, but with the goal of capturing the Milk-Way as well.


So, without further ado, my favorite shot from the entire trip:

Please enjoy the funky white balance, I feel like it was more true to what I saw, mostly due to sleep deprivation. I was running on six hours sleep powering the last 72.


So there you have it, my trip to Arches. I look forward to seeing some daytime shots provided by Josh!

Irresistable lighting and a promise to keep

So I promised myself to post some non-railroad pictures. But I broke that promise.

Normally I try to run my pictures through at least the bare minimum of Photoshop, but this evening as I drove home from a history seminar I presented, the lighting of a passing thunderstorm was too glorious to resist, especially as I passed a string of equipment owned by the Utah State Railroad Museum that is in storage. Here's the raw result:

Once I put it through some post production I'll post a followup. And then the promised absence of trains. I've got some good stuff from Arches National Park!

More from Promontory Summit

It's been a while, folks. How about some more steam locomotives? This time in snow!

Steam and snow. Snow and steam. The two seem to go together perfectly, and any winter live-steam event is sure to attract plenty of photographers. Since the local Heber Valley Railroad's two steam locomotives are down for maintenance, Utah photographers have had to settle with Golden Spike National Historic Site. Which is great, in fact. That place is just wonderful for photography, in case you haven't noticed...

But anyway. Of the 50 or so pictures I took in the two hour visit at the annual Winter Steam Festival there, only about 15 were suitable for post-processing, and I present you with what I think are the two best. Funnily, Railpictures.net rejected them for not "fitting their standards of artistic composition."

Regards,
Josh

Water!

So I finally decided to post some new pictures. As usual, most will be macro images.

Have you ever though about what a drop of water looks like as it crashes into the surface of a pond? I spent thousands of clicks of the camera figuring this out. All the colors in my images are from the camera, no fancy photoshop trickery here. :) 

This is what my setup looks like:

Plenty of light, a tripod holding a leaking bag of water, a back drop (in this picture is was dvd cases) and of course my macro lens. 

The resulting images blew me out of the water, pun insufferably intended.

So the images taken were from different backgrounds, different settings, and different light schemes, (and obviously different individual droplets) but I'm trying to show the life cycle of a colliding water drop.

Step one: The drop has yet to hit the surface of the water, all looks peaceful, but in a moment wonderful motion will ensue. 

Step two: The droplet collides, sending out a fine mist as the surface tension shatters. This was the only picture of this stage I was able to get. It's over unbelievably fast.

Step three: The droplet is now consumed by the body of water, but the jet is now expanding out, shooting out little water droplets as it goes.

Step four: The crown that formed in step three is being pulled back in by gravity and surface tension.

Step five: As the energy travels inward it is forced upward. These pillars form with a secondary drop separating as it rushes up.

Step six: The rest of the column separates from the body of water into various numbers of droplets (The speed and size of the initial droplet control how these shape)

Step seven: The fall begins anew, these droplets chaotically fall back into the water. They do not have the required energy to form new pillars, but new crowns sometimes form.

Step eight:  An extension of step seven, the actual connection point of droplet back into the water. Odd stair-like ripples form as the droplet is compressed back into the water.

Step nine: Basically step eight, except that everything is now connected to the water. Again, note the interesting patterns on the collapsing drop.

Step ten: Everything is back into the water, no droplet is visible. Its separate identity is now over.

In case these pictures weren't enough for you, here are a couple of my favorites from the shoot.

 I was way excited when I was able to get the rainbow to refract through :-)

 This is one of my dad's favorites, the way the ripples of light are refracted through the drop makes for an interesting subject.

If you have any comments, I love to hear from you. Are there any colors you want me to try? Which step was your favorite? Any other seemingly mundane everyday occurrences you want me to capture? 

Thanks again for viewing,

Cody