Tioga Pass Resort is one of those great California places.

At least, it used to be in the winter.  Each year we eagerly await to see if it will be open and each year we’re met with disappointment.  For some not-too-clear reason the lodge has been closed for the last several years in the winter (though it remains a popular summer resort).

Its location on the Eastern entrance to Yosemite gives it great access to the Yosemite high country which is otherwise a little difficult to reach in the winter (the ski in to the lodge is about 7 miles up hill which would be a pretty good day with full backpacks).

This photo was taken during one of our visits, on our last day of that stay.  Jim, Jimbo and I climbed up one of the faces above Ellery Lake for one last bowl run before heading out Tioga Pass road.

I framed this up with my Olympus D40 point and shoot camera with Jim along the edge of the frame and waited for Jimbo to get a little distance between us.  The point and shoot suffered from shutter lag like all digital cameras of that era so I wasn’t able to time the shot precisely but I like the results.

I’m happy with the progress that digital cameras have made in the last 5 years but I’m also amazed at the quality some of these earlier cameras were able to achieve.  Really the best improvements to the cameras in that time have been around usability and reliability more than image quality – though that being said, newer cameras do have amazing resolution and low-light capabilities.

But really, it’s about getting out there and being in the mountains more than it is about the camera.

One of my favorite times of the year is the ‘California spring’ – that time of year that the rest of the country calls winter.  This is when we get our rain.  This is when the earth comes alive again after the dust and heat of August and September.  The rains come and it takes a while but by February & March everything has changed.

Driving to the mountains, across the central valley, one crosses the no-longer-brown-and-dusty hills now covered with lush green grass and new wildflower blooms.  As you continue you hit the orchards.

Each year I try to make a point of pulling over and grabbing a few stills.

Lat year I pulled of in Dixon and wandered down the dirt roads and fields in a light misty rain and that’s when I captured this image.  I have a few shots with narrower or wider aperture settings but this one is my favorite.  There’s quite a few of the tree trunks and limbs in focus but just enough (to my eye) of the near- and far-distance out of focus to render a somewhat other-worldly, lushness to the scene.  I didn’t really do very much else to the photo during post-production.  No cropping, very little tonal adjustments to bring the exposure and color in line.. This was pretty much how the day felt.

well.. aside from the rainy bumper-to-bumper drive home from the mountains..

]]> http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2010/03/03/spring-valley/feed/ 0 http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2010/02/23/pelicans-in-the-sun/ http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2010/02/23/pelicans-in-the-sun/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:18:53 +0000 Christian http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/?p=150

While in Belize a couple of years ago, we spent some of our trip on the island of Caye Caulker. This was an awesome vacation spot.  We were staying at a hotel located on the Western edge of the tiny island which meant that each evening we were treated to a sunset stretching to the mainland of Belize.

Near our hotel there was a group of pelicans that hung out on a dock and some old posts and often as we sat lazily by the water we would watch their antics.  It was fun to see the dynamics play out as new birds flew in displacing already-settled birds, much posturing, arguing, and eventual disgruntled adjustments ensued until the group re-settled with its new pecking order.

I took this photo one evening, as the sun was descending on the horizon but well before the actual sunset. Shooting towards the harsh sun like this I knew I’d lose a lot of the colors and would end up with mostly silhouetted figures.  I liked the way each bird has its own position and we’re basically peeking through the trees.

A shallow enough depth of field helped blur the foreground trees and structure on the left to better draw attention to the birds.

While framing up the shot, I loved the way the sun shining on the water created an almost overbearing presence in the background.  Ultimately the detail in the sun got washed away but I knew that would be the case and I intentionally allowed that to blow out as another way to keep the birds as the primary focal point of the image.

At the end of the day, there’s just something incredibly tropical feeling about this image, even though it’s not the typical crystal clear water and sky with palm trees and sand.  It makes me want to escape the rain and head back to Belize.

Of course, the flip side to the great downhills we experience in the backcountry is the climbs to get there.

I actually really enjoy the uphill – it’s a little payment for the excitement of the downhills.  But it’s also a reminder that I’m probably spending too much time on the couch.

In this photo I like that we see the turn in progress.  I like that we’re in the trees (unlike so many of the downhills where we’re out in the open).  I like that there’s a couple of skiers backed up as the going is usually pretty slow.  Otherwise, this is another one of those shots that are just OK and I think better capture a moment than really relate the emotion of the experience.

This is the time of year to be in the mountains.

Back in 2006 a few of us took a roadtrip out to Idaho to do some backcountry skiing in the mountains outside of Ketchum.

For a trip like this I brought along my digital SLR for sure, and at that time it was my Nikon D70 – from the humidity of Vietnam to the cold of the Idaho mountains, this camera proved to me that a digital camera was up to the task of capturing the images I was interested in taking.  In this case, this included action shots of friends enjoying the great snow.

This year we reserved some backcountry yurts which are a great way to get into the remote slopes without having to lug in camping gear (but of course we instead lugged in some deluxe food and drink).  One of the really cool features of these yurts are the wood-fired saunas that they also have on site.

This image is of Mandy having a blast cruising down a powdery slope on our 2nd day in the woods.  I skied down before the crowd, stopping halfway down the slope and setting up my shooting position.

Kneeling in the snow I set the camera to f/5 providing a deep enough aperture to allow for a little play in the focal range (so I could be off by a little as I tracked the moving target) while also allowing enough light to completely freeze the action with a shutter speed of 1/6400.

As usual with shots like these, I fired a few while Mandy was above me and a few below, but the really fun shots are right as the subject passes by – when you can get the vistas in the background, the snow spraying away and ideally, a turn as they move to avoid the photographer.

Boy it’s time to get back to the snow!

Fitting, I suppose given the weather that we’ve been having in the Bay Area this week.

2 years ago I left the apartment earlier than usual for work and spent an hour or so downtown tracking people during their commute, looking for photographic opportunities.  Despite getting a little wet, I had a great time and continued my adventure that evening after work.  I ended up with a few shots that I liked making this week’s selection a little difficult.  I opted for this black & white shot as I like the way the woman seems to be tracking the white line that crosses the frame.

I had set out to try to capture the mood of commuting in the city in the rain – I wanted lots of umbrellas, and blurred motion to signify the movement of the people looking to avoid getting wet.  I had planned on converting some of the images to black and white but I ended up with some great colors in some of the shots and left those as shot.  But shots like this I felt were indeed better when converted to black and white as I had originally intended.

To achieve this shot, I metered the scene and stopped down the aperture to f/22 in order to maximize the shutter speed.  In order to keep the shutter speed from being too slow and in order to introduce some grain to the image, I bumped up the ISO settings to 3200.  I had the camera set this way for several shots and would pick a target and start shooting.  In this case, I chose the woman with the plastic umbrella and I tracked her across the street as I shot – thus slightly blurring the rest of the scene.  In Lightroom I converted the image to black and white.  I altered a few settings to bump up the contrast and increase the graininess of the shot.

I have it on my list of projects to go out and shoot some more like this, but I find it hard to motivate to go out in the mornings in this rain if I’m not heading to work..  Ah well, there will be more rain storms.  That I know.

This is another in a series of walking around shots, this time, taken in San Francisco.

Back in 2007 I was walking to work quite a bit and I’d usually follow a pretty similar path.  This was also in the heyday of sidewalk stenciling, where people were taking their message to the streets quite literally, spray painting stenciled illustrations and sayings on the sidewalks and crosswalks around town.

Along this one section of my walk was stenciled this message:

We are not awake to the changes happening within.

I quite liked the message, it was something to ponder while on my walk.  But what struck me was the way in which it was delivered..  The stenciler broke up the message across a long stretch of the block into ever-increasing length, starting with a simple

We

We are

We are not

We are not awake

etc., etc., until the full message was displayed.  It was a great way to get ones attention.

This image isn’t spectacular in itself, more a documentation of the message and the medium.  To that end, I wanted a close cropping on the words but I wanted to provide some contextual visuals as well so I left in a few of the sidewalk cracks.  I decided to offset the positioning just a little and only provide some of the sidewalk cracks, so that I didn’t end up with a completely balanced composition – I like the slight uneasiness of the framing.  Other than that I just set the camera and shot.  I used my older Canon SD point and shoot camera for this shot as it was the camera I had with me.  As I’ve indicated before, I’ll always carry a camera of some sort with me – these days at the very least a cell phone camera but usually a full camera (if only a point and shoot) for better control over the images.

Last year while on another of those great January hikes, Meghan and I came upon this set of boots strung up in a tree.  It was a bit of an odd scene – we were in a park not far away from the suburban houses of a Sacramento neighborhood.  The boots themselves had an older styling/appearance that added to the oddness of the sight.

There’s nothing particularly fascinating about the photo itself, this was more of a documentation of the scene.  I took this with my Canon G10 and did a little post-processing in Lightroom, adding a little vignetting to help focus the attention on the bulls-eyed boots.

While the photo itself may not be great, I do like the scene.  It can lead one to wonder, just how these boots ended up here..  Was it related to some New Year’s festivities?  Did the owner have another set of shoes with him or did he hike out barefoot from here?

Living in the Bay area, we are often fortunate enough to have pretty incredible weather in the winter time.  As the rest of the country digs itself out of snow and ice, we get the chance to hike through hills lush green from the winter rains.

It was two years ago this week when Meghan and I went for a New Years hike through the Marin headlands and came upon this scene.  We first saw feathers from a distance and upon closer inspection, saw the remains of an owl.  There was no way to determine what brought the owl its demise.  What made the scene particularly odd was the way that several parts of the owl, scattered around the ground, were relatively intact.  Take for example this wing, which aside from the fact that it is no longer connected to anything, looks to be in good shape.

These disembodied but otherwise fine looking owl parts set a bit of a surreal scene.

For this photo, I wanted to capture the wing and how it was just laying in the grass, but I also wanted to include just a hint of the feathers in the corner, indicating more, just out of frame.

I had my Nikon camera outfitted with the 80-200mm f/2.8 lens hoping to capture some not-too distant wildlife while on this hike but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.  I would have preferred the 105mm macro for this shot, but wasn’t carrying it with me.

This year the weather wasn’t quite as cooperative though we did manage to take a misty walk with the dog.

]]> http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2010/01/03/a-wing-and-a-prayer/feed/ 0 http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2009/10/20/snowy-colorado/ http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/2009/10/20/snowy-colorado/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:42:53 +0000 Christian http://www.picsfromtrips.com/weekly-photo/?p=114

In 2006 Meghan and I made a long weekend trip to Colorado to see the fall.  As I’ve said before, here in San Francisco we don’t get great fall foliage so October trips can be a good way to experience fall for a quick weekend.

This year though we were a little late.  The colors were mostly gone from the hillsides and during our trip we were treated to a pretty big snow storm.

I took this photo along the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs – one of the towns where we hung out this trip.  I like the rather stark feeling of this shot – which is pretty colorless except for the band of shrubs cutting across the frame.  This was a pretty typical sight for us, as the skies were grey with clouds and weather and the ground was dusted with snow – obliterating most of the colors from the scenes.

For this shot, I left it pretty much as I shot it, though I cropped the bottom just a tad to square up the image just slightly.