Friday Photo #5

Pagosa Springs and the San Juan River

More travel photos, but this one is much more current. I took a trip to New Mexico a couple weeks ago, to visit my good friends Miya and Andrew. We did some skiing in the area, including an overnight trip up to Colorado, where we skiied at Wolf Creek and stayed at the Pagosa Springs Resort.

I like Pagosa Springs a lot. The town strikes an interesting balance; it caters to tourists but doesn't feel dominated by them. The centerpiece is the hot springs resort, right on the San Juan River. The resort lodging is rather forgettable -- clean and functional at the level of a cared-for roadside motel. The springs themselves are the attraction, and they're worth the visit. The resort springs are manmade pools, sculpted into grottoes that provide an aesthetically pleasing experience. The water itself is mineral-laden and is heated by natural hot springs on the site. The coldest pools are near the river, about 80°F, with the hottest pools above 115°F.

I have visited the resort before, but this experience was unique. Pagosa Springs has been covered in snow this winter, and the whole town was shrouded in white. Another couple inches fell on the day we arrived, which was enough to clean things up and present a soft white landscape. And it was cold. Evening temperatures were just below 0°F; in the morning we faced about -18°F. It made for an interesting hot spring experience, but also for a wonderful effect on the atmosphere. The hot pools produced prodigious amounts of steam, blanketing the town in foggy steam and depositing rime ice on any exposed surface. The brilliant sunlight of the morning was bounced and filtered by the billowing clouds. The net effect was of a warm oasis within a desert of snow.

The photo itself is serviceable but not terribly exciting. I grabbed it with my P&S as we walked back from breakfast. (Prior to breakfast there was too much steam to see anything.) But it's an unusual winter image and provides me an icon to remember a wonderful trip.

Friday Photo #4

Eiffel Tower from Below

Holly and I took a trip to Paris and Belgium last summer. We visited the Eiffel Tower at the end of a long exhausting day, but it was a worthwhile time to be there. The tower in the fading daylight was quite magical.

Travel photography is challenging. Good habits like patience and tripods fall by the wayside when you're trying to get a photo in the midst of milling tourists. Many of my photos from this trip need to be rotated a bit since I didn't slow down enough to square things up. But this intentionally asymmetrical take on the tower works for me. It illustrates the massive size while keeping the tower instantly recognizable. I'm not terribly happy with the open sky at the top but at least the high clouds keep it active. I also need to spend some time opening up the shadows a bit, but I believe there's enough data there to give me some texture and color.

I bought a new lens for this trip and I love it: the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4. One of the big compromises with travel photography -- at least how I practice it -- is that changing lenses becomes rare. It's tough to carry a lot of lenses, and it's tough to find the time and place to change them. (One example: while on top of the Arc de Triomphe, I dropped my 28-105mm onto a concrete bench. Fortunately the UV filter took the impact, but it's the kind of risk you run when juggling multiple lenses in restricted quarters.)

Because of this, zooms rule for travel photography. And for what I like to do, the 17-40mm range is killer. The ultrawide 17mm can be used for unusual and fun takes like this photo, and the 40mm provides a very reasonable midrange for more standard shots. But where this lens really shines is for interior photos. A lens like this will give you outstanding interior shots of churches, museums, monuments, hotels rooms, train stations -- any indoor space. Plus this lens is just fast enough to get you some hand-held shots even without flash, especially if you can brace against a pillar or chair. Highly recommended.

Friday Photo #3 (special Sunday edition)

Falls on Rock Bridge Branch

A much more recent photo, this was taken on New Year's Eve. We'd taken a trip to Red River Gorge for a long weekend, and taken some short hikes to see notable features in the area. This little falls, about 300 yards from Rock Bridge, provide a beautiful highlight of the stratified sandstone ridge.

The composition provides an interesting challenge, at least in the winter. There are only a few good shooting locations if you're not willing to get wet, and the main one is really the only decent choice. I tried a few different compositions, which both offer a larger field of view. I change my mind regarding which one I prefer. This one provides the best sense of the surrounding forest, surprisingly green for late December. The exposure time here is 0.8 sec, which does a good job of streaming the falls without adding unusual effects to the more still pools of water.

I haven't yet worked on this in any detail. I'd be inclined to crop the bright sunlit rhododendron leaves on the right side of the image. That's tricky though because I don't want to lose the darker shadowed rhododendron behind it, which offers a nice counterpoint to the falls.

I'd love to come back here when it's well below freezing; this must make a beautiful scene in the snow, or when it starts to melt. Late summer would be interesting too.

Friday Photo #2

Dunes at Sunrise

Another shot from my big Rockies trip in 2006. This is taken at Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. The sand dunes are formed in a pocket of the Sangre de Cristo range. Winds pick up sand as they cross the wide San Luis valley, dropping it as they funnel into the mountains. The dune field actually seems small in some ways. It's about 8 miles long, which isn't tiny, but you can view the whole thing from Hwy 17. The dunes themselves are massive, ranging up to 750 feet tall (above ground level).

I visited GSDNP early in my trip. I consciously had no agenda, but had headed south through Colorado Springs simply because I hadn't seen much of that part of the state. So that put me close to the dunes. They are known as a 'major photographic opportunity,' but this actually made me reluctant to visit as they're so commonly photographed. But since I was in the area I definitely wanted to visit one of the newest national parks. And I'm glad I did, because the photography really is spectacular.

I spent about a day there. I arrived in the afternoon, set up camp in the campground, and took a photos at sunset. I then arose early and hiked into the dunes at sunrise for more photography. Sunset is probably the better photographic opportunity, because the dunes are all about shadow. With the Sangre de Cristo range just east of the dunes, and the wide San Luis valley to the west, the horizon is much lower at sunset and you would get more dramatic shadows as a result. Still the morning photos are quite dramatic as well and I'm very happy with what I got.

The photos are all very good but probably not quite great. This one is a fine example. It has major lines angling down left-to-right, including the mountain skyline and the edge of the dunes. These are balanced by the strong dark shadowed dune which angles up left-to-right at the bottom of the composition. The weakest element is the washed-out blue sky; I left very little of it in the frame for that reason.

I love the wide range of textures and lines in the sand, leavened with just a bit of green scrub that highlights the barren dunes. The forested mountains in the background provide another contrast to set off the sand, and I think I'll try to bring out the green of the pines just a bit in the final print. (Have to be careful though, as the distance haze adds an important sense of the depth of the scene.)

I might also try this in black and white. Dune photos are a staple of B&W as they have such dramatic shadows and textures. Still, I'm concerned that losing the green of the scrub will change the impact of the sand.

I remember that as a wonderful morning for photography. I felt calm and relaxed, yet excited too. The excitement is a difficult element to balance in my photography, because too much leads me to rush and miss important things. Shoots like this that depend on 'magic hour' light require some haste, yet it's all wasted if I don't take the time to look for the less obvious opportunities. That morning, I was well balanced, and that led to photos I'm really happy with.

The road home

We went to Red River Gorge (in Kentucky) to stay at a rented cabin with friends for the weekend. It was quite a blast -- I had a bunch of fun and feel relaxed to boot. Fantastic.

On the way back we passed through Frankfort. A sign on the highway said "The Kentucky Capital". Now, I would have taken that for poor word choice. But as it turns out, "capitol" is only appropriate for the building, while "capital" is right for a city that's the seat of government.

Huh.

I mean... that's pretty stupid. It's dumb enough that there are two different spellings for essentially the same word. But these two meanings overlap so much, and yet use different spellings? Who came up with this stuff?

I did like the image of a "Kentucky Capital" as being a giant "K" or something though.