Crest, Cliff & Canyon

Gray Canyon Sunset

Jackson — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:58:46 +0000

Here’s one I’ve sat on for a year and a half: enjoying the evening light in Gray Canyon on the Green River, eastern Utah.

Favorites of 2011

Jackson — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:45:52 +0000

It’s been a very good year, and not easy to limit a selection of favorites to an arbitrary number (especially as I look through my archives and see good stuff I still haven’t processed). But here are twelve front runners. We’ll begin with what is probably my absolute favorite of the year, and also the only one I haven’t yet blogged, an evening storm and wildflowers in Nevada’s Schell Creek Range:

And the others…. Rio Puerco Sunset (Sandoval County, New Mexico):

Notch Peak Spotlight (Utah west desert):

My trip on the Illinois River in Oregon is almost its own category and it’s hard to pick favorites. But these two distill the experience pretty well, and I’m certainly fond of them. Klondike Creek meets the Illinois:

Greenwall Rapid:

Dawn over the Pahsimeroi Valley (Lost River Range, Idaho):

Syringa and River (Middle fork of the Salmon, Idaho):

Middle Fork Rainbow (Middle fork of the Salmon, Idaho):

Western Redcedar (Selway River, Idaho):

Baker Cirque Dawn (Great Basin National Park, Nevada):

Bighorns and Cliff (Pecos Wilderness, New Mexico):

December Eclipse (Sandoval County, New Mexico):

And just for fun, here are the top searches which found Crest, Cliff and Canyon in 2011:

pecos wilderness
geology of dinosaur national monument
the photographers ephemeris
gospel hump wilderness (guess I need to take some more pictures up there, considering I have all of one)
dagger falls
san juan range autumn
gila wilderness
lodore canyon
october dawn (it’s a damn good poem!)
gila river rafting

All worthy subjects. But here, on the other hand, are some searches for which I was surely a great disappointment:

securing an impaled object (I doubt they meant a 14-foot raft.)
burnt and impaled (I’m hoping to avoid blogging this in 2012 as well.)
downtown santa fe, nm (Lousy with photographers [or expensive cameras, anyway], but not really my thing unless it’s flash flooding.)
challenging rivers in illinois (My condolences. Come to Oregon!)
dagger falls naked (I don’t recommend it.)
peoplez shootin, folkz dyin (I do hang out in some pretty redneck areas.)
schots who hump sheep (Oh dear. There would be a Sheep Creek in the Gospel Hump, wouldn’t there?)
why am i here?

Okay, anyone who’s read this far down deserves a better note to end on. Here’s another personal favorite that I haven’t yet blogged, from the Ruby Mountains in Nevada:

Idaho Rock Art

Jackson — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:21:00 +0000

The Sheepeater Shoshone didn’t produce spectacular and intricate panels like some cultures, but there are nonetheless some very cool pictographs scattered around the Middle Fork Canyon.

Handprints are a fairly universal theme in rock art, and well-endowed gentlemen are another. This panel has a variety of names according to the political correctness of the various rafting companies. The prudish refer to it as Shark Fin after a distinctive rock nearby; my outfit knows it as One Hung Low; the real rednecks eschew all euphemism and call it Big Chief Long Dong.

Incontestable evidence of armadillos in Idaho in early historic times? We report, you decide.

Here’s some very different rock art from southern Idaho’s Snake River country.

Merry Christmas

Jackson — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 05:00:20 +0000

Baker Lake Dawn

Jackson — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 05:12:22 +0000

Here’s a new one from this summer that I just processed. This is dawn in the Baker Lake Cirque, high up beneath the crest of the Snake Range in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park.

Cold Desert Eclipse

Jackson — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 05:45:20 +0000

My eclipse chasing worked out pretty well, but I was very glad I had considered multiple options! After shooting a nice evening moonrise among the volcanic plugs of New Mexico’s Rio Puerco Valley (results from that session coming in time), I drove up to the trailhead for my planned eclipse location and ate dinner. I considered simply crawling into the sleeping bag and sacking out for the night, but instead talked myself into scouting out my location for the morning. A beautiful moonlight hike took me to the snowy summit of Cerro Chato, a modest, somewhat homely volcanic neck surrounded on all sides by its more impressive siblings. The views of the snowy badlands and towering basalt crags under the full moon were amazing, but I realized on top that the shot I had in mind for the eclipse was simply not going to work. Any composition zoomed in far enough to show the moon to advantage would be much too narrow to encompass Cerro Cuate, the twin-summited peak beside which the eclipsing moon would be setting. My ambitions to capture the eclipse in the context of a nice, big landscape would not be realized here.

Thankfully, I had chewed over numerous other options, the most promising of which was not too far down the road. A damn cold, frosty morning found me up on the gypsum ridges of White Mesa, with my modest telephoto lens zoomed back towards Cabezon Peak, the largest of the Rio Puerco volcanics, now lying well off to the west across miles of mesas and badlands laced with snow. I happily photographed away as the light increased and the eclipsing moon faded like the Cheshire Cat’s smile into the glow of dawn.

Update: Lots of good photos from yesterday out there! For instance (some of these may expire):

Eclipse Approaches

Jackson — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 05:28:41 +0000

It was almost a year ago that I made my first attempt at lunar eclipse photography. Last December was basically just playing around, since the moon was high in a dark sky. But in a couple days, on Saturday morning, we dwellers in the western U.S. will see a moon at or near total eclipse right around moonset, i.e. dawn, which is an amazing photographic opportunity. The moon will be down low where it can be photographed next to landscape features, and the building light in the east will give that same landscape some illumination of its own. The potential is there for something like this really sweet eclipse shot from Iran.

I’ve got two or three locations under consideration, and my final choice will depend on the weather forecast, whether or not I can drive and camp out the night before, and intuition. What I’m looking for is a long-ish view containing bold topography that will show up well through a telephoto lens. My experiments last year showed me that 100-200mm (on a 1.5 crop sensor) will render the moon large enough to be an interesting element in a landscape comp. (Even so, it’s tempting to rent a longer lens for the weekend, but going much longer would really start to limit one’s options for including landscape elements.) I’m also after high views looking down and fairly unobstructed vistas to the WNW; total eclipse is pegged for 7:05 MTN, which is the precise time of sunrise in my neck of the woods, and I don’t want a mostly-eclipsed moon to fall out of my view below a mesa top any sooner than it has too. The Photographer’s Ephemeris, ClearDarkSky.com and Google Earth are wonderful modern luxuries for this sort of thing, though I’m also happy to have paper maps, an old-fashioned Silva compass and a healthy mental database of local geography.

Anyone else looking to get out there with a camera might want to take a look at How to Photograph a Lunar Eclipse. One thing I don’t think I’ll try, tempting as it is, is a multiple exposure composite. I discovered first-hand what a bitch those are last year: really regular timing is necessary, the exposure needs to be constantly adjusted, and it’s harder than you’d think to predict the moon’s path to keep it in the frame. I don’t feel up to it, especially not at the expense of staying flexible with my single-exposure comps; maybe if I had the luxury of a second camera body.

Best of luck to anyone heading out there!

Here and Gone

Jackson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:18:32 +0000

Just a couple snaps from an unknown New Mexico ruin: it’s always fairly mind-blowing to look at empty, dessicated landscapes in the southwest and know that civilization once was here. This ruin doesn’t look like much. It’s never been thoroughly excavated, only a few test spots have been dug, one of which revealed the walls of the room above. But this was a big one, two stories and something like 250 rooms, with numerous kivas. It’s further south than you might expect, a little outside the area most people think of when contemplating Pueblo archeology. It’s also thought that it was inhabited until a while after the Spanish entrada.

Over-publicizing locations is often a potential moral dilemma in landscape photography, and much more so when archeology is involved. I know of this site only due to local contacts, including the designated caretakers. But though it’s almost completely unknown, it’s also distressingly accessible. I’ve therefore chosen to pass on posting the more dramatic angles on the site, because they contain features that would allow someone sufficiently familiar with New Mexico geography (like a pot hunter) to get a pretty good idea of the location. But I think someone would have to nearly psychic to identify the juniper hills (New Mexico’s landscape default setting) in the background above. And it might even look pretty good if I can make it back in decent light!

Lodore Rim (from the vault)

Jackson — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:35:08 +0000

I made a nice find the other day in the depths of my hard drive while working on a new project pertaining to the geology of Dinosaur National Monument (more on this when it develops, I hope!). It was an absolute joy to reach this seldom-seen overlook on the rim of Lodore Canyon, with not much between me and Hell’s Half Mile rapid and the Green River but a couple thousand feet of air. At the time I preferred the vertical version of this view, but looking back I’m really liking the horizontal in a 4×5 crop.

Autumn by the River

Jackson — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:16:38 +0000

Fall is now almost a month gone in northern New Mexico, and unsurprisingly I didn’t get out much. But here are some bagatelles from autumn along the upper Rio Grande (err… yes, that is what we call the “big river” around here; there’s more of it in the spring):

Cottonwood canopy:

This is about as cliche as New Mexico images get, but what the hell, there it was:

And the little fellow got to enjoy it too: