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Posts tagged ‘waterfall’

Wildflowers and the Balcones Canyonlands

We’ve had a fairly wet spring here in central Texas, which is great for the wildflowers.  The weather yesterday was ideal for wildflower photography—mostly cloudy and temperatures in the low 80’s.

I left the house with my Fujifilm X-T2 and a few lenses.  The images shown here were taken with my XF16-55mm f/2.8 and XF50-140mm f/2.8 lenses.  I used the builtin Fujifilm  Velvia profile.

I drove north of Austin, finding many wildflowers along the way.  These photos were taken along Ranch to Market Road 1431, between Lago Vista and Marble Falls.

_DSF8245Bluebonnets and Fleabane
(Click any image to enlarge.)

The high season for bluebonnets (the state flower of Texas) was about a month ago.  In many locations, the blue flowers have given way to the yellows and reds and oranges of other wildflowers.

_DSF8231Indian Blanket, with a few Bluebonnets and Coreopsis mixed in

As I prepared this post and looked up the names of the wildflowers in the various photos, I realized how close I came to suffering a painful fate. Read more

Yellowstone National Park

On Wednesday, I planned to get up early for sunrise photography, and to start driving up to Yellowstone.  But I woke to rain in Jackson, and slept in another hour.

I drove up through Grand Teton National Park and the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway and entered Yellowstone National Park at the south entrance.  I continued north, and rain turned into snow.  It was 34 degrees and the roads warm enough to not have trouble with ice.

Click on any image to enlarge.

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I tried to be a tourist and visit a roadside sight or two.  Here’s Lewis Falls, with me standing on snow, watching the snow fall.  Did I mention it was 34 degrees?

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Soon, I decided it was best to just keep driving on to Old Faithful.  By the time I got there, the snow had subsided, and there was just a little bit of rain.  I arrived a few minutes before the famous geyser erupted.  Not the photo I imagined with a brilliantly colorful sky in the background, but this is more of a snapshot anyway.  In the peak of summer (and in better weather), you would see thousands more people surrounding Old Faithful.

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Peak season begins Memorial Day weekend, and I was there just before that.  So it was beginning to get crowded, but nothing like the park sees later on.  Being a week or two before the busy season begins also means that not every road (or campground or lodge) is open—but it’s still a great time to visit.  The creeks, rivers, and waterfalls were really flowing.

Here’s the inside of the historic Old Faithful Inn, with people waiting to enter the dining room.  Some consider the inn the largest log building in the world.

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I walked around for awhile in the rain in the Upper Geyser Basin in the Old Faithful area.  It was nice to get out and walk around.  Here’s one of the pools in the area:  Morning Glory Pool.  Pro tip:  bring your polarizing filter to cut down on reflections in the water.  I left mine at home.

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My destination for the night was Canyon Lodge, so I kept on driving north (no more falling snow!), past the other other geyser basins.  Here’s an overlook showing the Norris Geyser Basin in the distance.

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Hiking in the Dolomites, Part 3

The next day, we took the bus to the end of the road, and went for an approximately 7-mile hike near Santa Magdalena at around 2000 meters elevation.  Here’s the trail we took, hiking from east to west:

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As I mentioned in my last post, the weather turned overcast with a low ceiling, and a nearly constant threat of rain.  The good news is that it didn’t actually rain much—a couple of passing showers that lasted only minutes.  The bad news is that we had to imagine what the scenery looked like:

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(Click on any image to enlarge.)

Once again, I turned to my infrared Nikon D300 to find elements of drama in the larger scene.  On this trip, I used the versatile Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 lens for all of my infrared photos.  This shot is using a focal length of 65mm (35mm equivalent of 100mm) at f/5.

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Another approach to photographing with uncooperative weather is to focus on details, such as this flower.

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I believe this is a Phyteuma orbiculare.
Common name: Round-headed Rampion

The weather improved marginally as we neared the end of our hike, descending to Santa Magdalena to catch the bus back to the hotel.  The mountains were still in the clouds, but we could at least appreciate more of the scenery.

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The next day, we hiked again for about five miles in the same area, heading more east:

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The weather was slightly improved from the day before—the ceiling had lifted ever so slightly, and we saw some blue sky as the day progressed.

Here’s my favorite infrared photo from the day, with the brooding clouds hanging just at the top of the peaks.

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As long as the sky was cloudy, we could switch our focus to scenes that don’t include it.  I photographed these waterfalls with a 1/3 second exposure at f/22.

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The photo below is a 1/10 second exposure, also at f/22.

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If you haven’t figured it out by now, one of the themes of this week was to find different ways to photograph something interesting while having challenging weather conditions.  This led us to time-lapse photography.

Here’s a very short video of sixty time-lapse frames.  Each frame was taken 3 seconds apart, and the video below speeds it up by 36x.  I’ll have a few more examples like this in later blog posts.

Next up, an afternoon in Ortisei, on our way up to our first mountain hut, the Rifugio Resciesa.

Fallingwater

I’ve spent the past week in Pittsburgh, at a conference and visiting some professors at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.  Today, I escaped the city—Pittsburgh’s a great city, by the way—and did a little sightseeing in southwestern Pennsylvania.

I visited the Flight 93 National Memorial and the Johnstown Flood Museum.  But most of my time was spent at Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater. There’s a hint of fall color just beginning to appear—this part of the country is beautiful.

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A year or so ago, I visited Taliesin West.  Both it and Fallingwater have an enormous sense of fitting exactly into their surrounding environments.  Taliesin West sitting perfectly in the desert of Arizona, and Fallingwater belonging no other place than along the stream called Bear Run in Pennsylvania.

Hawaii, Day Four

Today’s word is “mystery”.

Thanks to the Na Pali Riders, we enjoyed a Zodiac tour of the Na Pali coast.  The Na Pali coast is gorgeous.  Because of the rugged mountains and the highland swamps, Kaua’i is the only major Hawaiian island that doesn’t have a road that goes all the way around.  They tried, but abandoned the road machinery in the swamps.  Don’t forget that Kaua’i is one of the wettest places on earth, with the Wai’ale’ale crater receiving an average of about 450” of rain a year.

Much of the land is sacred to the native Hawaiians.  It’s rough topography, it’s inaccessibility, and it’s incredible beauty combine to make the Na Pali coast mysterious and alluring.

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One of the highlights was to get to see the sunbeam near the waterfall of the Waiahuakua Sea Cave.

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