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Backpacking to the Macey Lakes [1]

2009-07-08T04:27:26Z

Upper Macey Lake

Now what does an Englishman in the USA need more than anything else on July 4th weekend in Colorado? Yes, some solitude and peace and quiet, well away from all that overblown, misplaced celebration ;-)

So, Alice and I set off to the voluptuously named Sangre de Cristo Wilderness in south central Colorado on a backpacking trip to the Macey Lakes. The Sangres are amongst the most spectacular mountains in the Rockies – in simple terms, they look like mountains the way a child would draw them: pointy, steep and jagged.

The trailhead (Horn Creek) is easily accessed out of Westcliffe. Due to private land holdings however, you need to hike three and bit miles south on the Rainbow trail (which skirts the foothills on the east side of the Sangres) before turning right up the Macey Lakes trail.

In total the trek is 7 miles and around 2,400 feet of elevation gain up to 11,200’ at Lower Macey Lake. There are in fact three lakes in the drainage, but only two names: Lower Macey Lake and Upper Macey Lake. Which of the upper lakes anyone intends by upper remains unclear to me. Here, I mean the highest of the three which lies some 400’ feet higher to the west of the lower lake.

Unnamed 13,200’ peak

We hiked to Upper Macey lake for sunrise knowing that the sun would pour in from the north west at this time of year. The upper lake is simply spectacular with extensive views to a cirque to the south and photogenic unnamed 13,200’ peak.

Although we didn’t see it, there was definitely a bear in close vicinity around the upper lake: we found unmistakable fresh tracks on the hike back down (they weren’t there on the way up), plus other ‘evidence’.

Lower Macey Lake

Lower Macey Lake, just below treeline, looks very lush at this time of year, but doesn’t catch any good direct sunlight during either golden hour. Nonetheless, as in the shot above, there are some beautiful views to be seen.

Yellow arnica

Finally, at lower elevations on the trail, the wildflowers were in excellent form, with plenty of columbine, indian paintbrush, arnica and some lupine to be found.

During three days up at the lake, we encountered only five other people. I suspect the longer hike in puts as many people off Macey lakes as the 4WD road to South Colony Lakes attracts, so if you’re looking for your ‘own’ piece of wilderness, this seems like a good spot.

The trails, while a little muddy in places, were clear of snow (other than one small bank on the way to the upper lake) and the mosquitos were relatively polite.

A beautiful place, well worth visiting.

Pointing toward Independence

2009-06-30T03:28:06Z

Independence Monument

One from the (recent) archives: this is from my first and only visit (to date) to Colorado National Monument on the last day of 2008.

Just stumbled across it while sorting through some images and quite liked it on seeing it once more. I wish I’d hung around to catch some more frames of this composition as the sun rose and started to light Independence Monument proper.

However, if I had I guess I wouldn’t have had this shot, which on balance I think I like better.

It’s a fantastic place to visit during winter, as is pretty much any sandstone location where you can shoot fresh snow against red rock during low angled winter sun!

Roxborough State Park [2]

2009-06-28T22:04:44Z

Roxborough State Park

Roxborough State Park had one of its infrequent sunrise openings on Saturday morning. Alice and I camped out up the road at Chatfield State Park in order to be nearby and avoid too early a drive down there for 5am.

Roxborough features the same foothills sandstone seen at Garden of the Gods farther south near Colorado Springs (and also, for example near the mouth of Sunshine Canyon here in Boulder). The red of the stone (especially under the rising sun) contrasts wonderfully with the lush greens of Fountain Valley at this time of year.

Lyons Overlook

Some of the best views are seen from Lyons Overlook, a short ten-minute walk from the visitor centre. If you ignore the wooden viewing platform, there are plenty of interesting foreground rocks (in a much lighter sandstone – the three hogbacks are all of different sandstone types).

The sunrise was only partly cooperative. We enjoyed a one minute burst of red light just at sunrise, before the sun disappeared behind some clouds off to the east for the next twenty minutes (see the difference between the two shots above).

Roxborough Yarrow

I found the plant above by the trailside near Lyons Overlook on the way the back to the car. The sun had just risen over the eastern-most hogback, so this was shaded by my kneecap…

One of the best aspects of the trip – we saw our first wild black bear, a large male that has apparently been hanging around for the past couple of weeks. Despite the fact that he hung around for a good 30 minutes at no more than a hundred yards or so, I still didn’t manage to get a decent image. Never mind, next time (hopefully).

The prairie in bloom

2009-06-21T04:19:07Z

Prairie Primrose

Alice and I journeyed back to the Pawnee National Grassland in north east Colorado last weekend, to catch the flower display. I hadn’t read any flower reports in advance of arriving, but, as soon as we were east of Ault on the 14, the display became quite astonishing.

I’ve since read elsewhere that this is one of the best blooms in years. Makes me hopeful for the rest of the flower season, given the rain and storms we’ve had for the past month (not to mention the copious late spring snows).

Prairie Primrose Portrait

The primary goal of the trip was to try capture a good sunrise or sunset image of the Pawnee Buttes – somewhere we’ve been three times before, without any real photographic successes to celebrate. Fourth time unlucky… Saturday evening was heavily clouded and stormy (and we didn’t fancy hanging around for the rain to turn the dirt roads to mud, given our recent experiences).

Dawn on Sunday offered nothing but clear skies. Also, the flowers in the vicinity of the Buttes couldn’t compare to those further west in the grasslands proper.

Pawnee Buttes (accidental soft focus)

I wouldn’t normally post such an obviously flawed photograph, but to be honest, despite my temporarily forgetting the concept of depth of field, I’m still quite fond of the idea of this photograph. I haven’t identified the plants, but they’re very characteristic of the lands surrounding the buttes. Shot from down low, they look somewhat butte-like themselves. While there’s too much dead space in the mid-ground here, you can get the idea of something of a line leading through the shot towards the buttes.

After shooting dawn down by the buttes, we ventured back to the trail head and ran into photographers Larry Ditto and Joe Zinn who had been shooting from the view point. By the time we got there, fog and cloud had rolled in from the north east covering the buttes at times, and had provided some better opportunities than Alice and I had found down the trail.

We left the area more or less in convoy. Joe and Larry had spotted the very attractive paintbrush specimen shown below. Not quite sure exactly what species this is (despite looking through 10 pages of images here).

Pawnee Paintbrush

On the way home, we stopped to grab some final close-ups of the prickly pear cactus that was keeping company with the prairie primrose:

Plains Prickly Pear

I’d highly recommend visiting this part of Colorado – in comparison with the mountains, it is effectively deserted, yet has a very special atmosphere of its own. If you’re into rural decay type images, some of the ghost towns and abandoned homestead buildings offer some good photographic opportunities. There are also windfarms and nuclear missile silos to add some technological spice to the mix!

TPE 0.9.0 released [2]

2009-06-18T05:00:59Z

The Photographer’s Ephemeris v0.9.0 is now available.

Fairly minor changes, but useful ones:

You can finally resize the window: those of you with large monitors can now make the most of them to really dig into the details of the map area. Thanks for your patience on this one. So long you don’t go larger than 1200px high, you’ll reveal a selection of additional eclectic graphics down the right hand side, courtesy of my wife, Alice.
If you’re in the Details view and you change the date, the program doesn’t revert back to the multi-day view as it previously did. You can now scroll from day to day and see how the timing of the moon shifts by watching the details graph.
Finally some minor changes to the About page, including proper credit for the moonrise/set algorithm that is used (thanks to Jeff Conrad for the pointer on this)

I had hoped to have a couple of other features incorporated into this version: (i) correction for height above the local horizon and (ii) altitude (i.e. angle in the astronomical sense) of obstructions above the horizon, such as the mountain between you and the glorious sunset.

While all the maths is working (for the first of these at least), getting the UI right is proving tricky. One of the nice things about the current program is that it requires only two user inputs: a place and a date.

Once you introduce corrections for height above horizon and alitude of objects on the map, the number of inputs, and therefore the complexity for the user immediately increases.

So, I try to ask myself (not, in all honesty, having much of a clue as to the answer): what would Steve do? Haven’t worked it out yet.

As ever, your comments and feedback much appreciated.

Some recent quotations

To end, a handful of recent quotations about TPE:

My all-time favourite(!) from Steev Selby

This is the holy grail of sunrise/set programs

From Wasabi Photo

I am frankly gobsmacked by what this nifty software can do … it is rare that I am in awe by what you can find on the internet for free .. but this is one of those times when I am really blown away.

From Alex Wise down in one of my favourite places, Australia

I’ve seen similar things done in the past but find this much better and think its a must for any landscape photographer.

On EOS-Network

Just occasionally, you find something really useful. If you only found this blog today, then today is your lucky day because this’ll be the second really useful thing you’ve found!

Hola! Witaj! Szervusz!

Finally, hello to visitors from Spain, Poland, Hungary. Looks like TPE has been picked up via a number of sites over in Europe and indeed the majority of traffic over the past few days has been coming from those parts of the world.

I appreciate your linguistic abilities and forbearance with my anglophone application :-)

Shoot it while you still can [1]

2009-06-08T03:59:43Z

Here Colorado today, we’ve had tornados, double rainbows and a full moon rise.

I have not a photo of any of them. My fault. However, chances are that all of the these will recur at some point in the future (and the last of them had better recur, otherwise something would be badly wrong with the world).

However, not everything that deserves to be photographed lasts forever.

Three examples:

Aztec Butte

This is a location in Canyonlands National Park, Island in the Sky section. I’ve never been there. I was planning to go, but discovered on googling the location that the puebloan granary perched so perfectly under the rock shelf had been destroyed by careless visitors (most likely trying to crawl inside). It appears however, that the granary is only partly damaged and is still worth a visit.

The Teapot

The Teapot is, or rather was, a most remarkable sandstone feature located in what is known as Fantasy Canyon south of Vernal in eastern Utah. We were planning to go there as part of recent trip to Dinosaur National Monument. Three years too late, however. The feature collapsed in 2006. Likely at the hands of people.

SS Dicky

The wreck of the SS Dicky has lain on the eponymous Dicky Beach since 1893. We were there in early May to shoot it during a recent trip to Australia. Since we left, heavy storms and high tides have caused significant damage to the wreck (see the link above). Read more here.

We were lucky enough to visit the wreck before the most recent damage, and it still remains highly photogenic. But there’ll never be another shot like the one above of the SS Dicky – that foreground section is the piece that collapsed.

However, it has been somewhat surprising to me that three separate locations that I’ve planned to shoot have been damaged or destroyed. I’m sure, sadly, that they won’t be the last.

A very simple moral to the tale: if there’s somewhere in the world you really want to see, don’t delay. The second law of thermodynamics (and careless humans) are working against you…

Spring in Boulder

2009-06-06T05:03:47Z

Spring is in full flight in the foothills. I headed out to favourite local haunt Chautauqua last Sunday morning to see what was going on wildflower-wise.

Flatirons Spring

I’m no flower expert and don’t have a book to hand, so no real idea what the above flowers are. However, as of last Sunday they were looking just a little past prime, but still in decent shape. Just as well I went out that day, as the next three mornings brought rain and clouds.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with two other local photographers, Nick Moore and Bill Meikle, respectively English and Scottish. Of course, I hear you say, why wouldn’t three UK nationals gather by chance at 6am on a Sunday morning in a Colorado meadow? Small world.

A little later, I headed up around the Bluebell Mesa trail, carpeted in flowers and patrolled by a number of spectacular hawkmoths, and looped back down the main trail. I captured this iris macro to round off the morning:

Wild Iris

Dinosaur in the mud

2009-06-01T00:26:37Z

Approaching Storm, Escalante Overlook (click for large view)

Alice and I decided to visit our last unvisited Colorado National Monument/Park for Memorial Day weekend. Setting off early on Thursday evening, we staying in Steamboat Springs to break the journey and hit the monument early on Friday.

Our plan was to camp for two nights at Echo Park, widely reputed to be one of the finest camping locations in the state, particularly at the height of spring.

Getting there involves a twenty-something drive north out of the Colorado-side visitor centre on paved roads criss-crossing the state-line (Dinosaur National Monument straddles the Colorado-Utah border), and then a 13-mile drive down a steepish dirt road (the Echo Park Road, shown above).

We met a (grumpy) ranger who had just come up the road as we turned into the junction, and enquired after the road condition. “Fine. It’s dry,” he grunted, adding “just drive slow,” presumably to achieve his quota of holiday weekend visitor admonishments.

“-ly,” I said to myself.

We easily made it down to the campground in our SUV, found a handful of other visitors there and settled in for our first night’s camping. It began to cloud up dramatically later in the afternoon and the early part of the evening was blustery and grey, although without rain. We planned to be up for sunrise the next morning and so hit our sleeping bags early.

It rained all night. We didn’t bother getting up for dawn (what dawn?). I managed to find a weather forecast on a local AM station around 10am – rain and storms forecast through Tuesday. “Impassable when wet” was foremost in our minds.

What to do? After some brief debate, the matter was settled when the rain returned. We decided to make a run for it, rather than be stuck in the campground for the rest of the weekend and beyond. We’d seen some other campers leave too and so figured there’d at least be company on the road.

Now, there are two ways out of Echo Park. The “impassable when wet”, 13-mile Echo Park Road and the not-marked-impassable-when-wet, 28-mile Yampa Bench Road, reputedly not as steep as the former. At the T-junction, we figured this was the way to go.

At first, no problems. The road was quiet and while wet and somewhat sticky, the gradients were largely flat. However, around nine miles in, things took a turn for the worst. The intense red clay (as seen in the photo above) made a return.

This stuff is pure evil when wet. The car began to slide around alarmingly. Worse still, the road became twisty and steeper in places. Before long, conditions had deteriorated significantly. Whenever we encountered a camber on the road, the car would begin to slide off towards the side of the road (nearly always to the left, the river/ravine side – naturally).

We had to stop repeatedly. Particularly on left hand turns, and no doubt due to my inexpert mud-driving technique, we’d end up sliding into the crook of the bend, stopping before the PNR (point of no return!) and carefully placing rocks and branches to try to get some grip to propel us back towards the safe side of the road and around the bend.

We’d seen no one else, which of course, only served to reinforce our sense that we’d made a bad choice somewhere 15 miles back up the road. 28 miles began to feel awfully long.

All of a sudden, while placing more rocks and brush under the wheels, we saw two men round the corner on the hill below us. They looked very pleased to see us. “How’s the road further on?” I asked. The fact that were walking up the hill towards us should have been hint enough. Sure enough, their truck had slid partially off the road, just around the next bend and they’d been forced to spend the night sleeping in the cab, with one front wheel off the road (something of a drop below), a rear wheel up the air and the other two embedded in red, sticky clay.

We edged down and around the corner, managed to squeeze past the back of the stricken truck by millimetres (that old side-slip thing again) and eventually positioned ourselves for the tow-out attempt. Orlando (the truck owner) had a chain we could use to tow.

What began as a careful attempt to tension the chain before applying power, quickly degraded into a reverse-create slack-floor it exercise (as the truck refused to budge with the more demure approach). Despite the numerous, chassis-shaking stops caused by the chain snatching, eventually the truck was pulled free.

With the 4-wheel drive blown, one tyre out (plus the fact that the spare had blown the night before too), the truck wasn’t in the best of condition. However, we decided to proceed on out in convoy, the guys deciding to abandon their fishing trip (it seemed they might have been minded to press on one point).

Just as well, we ended up needing to pull them out twice more, and in turn, they pulled us out of what otherwise would have been a game-over moment (for the car at least).

Eventually, the truck gave up altogether when the flat front tyre ripped off the wheel. We abandoned it around 30-miles from Dinosaur town (what the National Park Service brochure doesn’t mention is that once you get off the Yampa Bench Road, you still have a further 20-miles of dirt and gravel roads to manage before you hit the highway).

The whole saga took around six hours. There’s no way either of us would have made it out without the assistance of the other. We saw only one more car the entire journey, and that was out towards the end of the road.

Lesson learned: if a road is marked “impassable when wet”, they mean it. If a dirt road is not marked “impassable when wet”, but is three times as long and located in the same vicinity, then chances are, it too is impassable when wet. I’m wishing we’d taken photos of the drive out now, but at the time, stress levels and a beat-the-rain urgency suggested focussing on the task at hand.

Miraculously, the car escaped unscathed. Of course, we managed to blow a tyre on the paved road on the way into Vernal, Utah that night. Divine retribution, I’ve no doubt.

The next day, we ventured back into Dinosaur National Monument, not straying from the paved roads. At Harper’s Corner overlook, I saw the most intense Indian Paintbrush I’ve seen since moving to Colorado – way better than anything else I’ve seen colour-wise:

Indian Paintbrush at Harper’s Corner

This was the view of the Green River (yes, it’s brown – from all the evil red clay) from the overlook itself. The rafters seemed to be having a great time of it, from what I could tell two thousand feet above:

Green River, stained red by evil mud

So, a drama-filled visit to Dinosaur National Monument without a single photo of the famous Steamboat Rock from Echo Park. Maybe next time.

They sure can build here in the USA [2]

2009-05-19T03:42:46Z

(Off-topic)

I drive Highway 36 from Boulder to Broomfield most days for my daily commute. In the past three months, they’ve built, from scratch, a complete overpass across a major four lane highway. They’re pretty much done now and there are no road restrictions in place any longer.

I’ve long been impressed by the American construction industry. I had the opportunity to compare US and UK construction practices at first hand in an earlier life (when I looked after a number of automation system installations in theatres and opera houses). UK projects would very often be staffed by clipboard-weilding busy-bodies, more concerned with procedure than progress and generally uninterested in demonstrating flexibility of approach.

In constrast, US projects progressed unstoppably with a fantastic work ethic and refreshingly pragmatic attitude. And things got done. Once tasked, the construction workers pressed on to get the job done and deadlines were met.

Back to highway 36: if this was in the UK, not only would the project have taken 10 times longer (it’s a blog, I’m exaggerating), at least half of this excessive duration would be consumed by setting up and tending the requisite 20,000 fluorescent orange cones and installing the oblgatory speed cameras!

(Having said all that, UK drivers are generally way more aggressive than Coloradoans, so maybe those cones play a role after all. But that’s probably for another post.)

Leaving Australia

2009-05-10T02:55:45Z

I’m sat in the Air New Zealand Lounge in Sydney airport, enjoying one of the rare oases of free wifi in Australia before heading back to Colorado. It makes for a long day – leave Sydney at 2:45pm, arrive more or less at the same time of day in San Francisco, not counting the 14 hour flight.

We spent our final night in Queensland back at Dicky Beach, capturing the image above a while after sunset. The SS Dicky is a photographic gem, very conveniently located a few hundred yards from car parking at Dicky Beach near Caloundra.

The only people who keep the same strange hours as photographers are the local surfers. The other morning, we arrived at 5:45am for dawn, only to be joined by around 40 ten-year old surfers and their instructors by 6am. At least at sunset, they depart as the light fades.

We’ve spent the weekend very enjoyably in Canberra seeing my brothers-in-law and their families. We made an abortive attempt to shoot full moonrise over Australia’s Parliament House, only to be foxed at the last minute by my poor map reading skills and a delay to apparent moonrise due to some distant hills. (It certainly prompted some thoughts on improvements I’d like to make to TPE.)

So, no more seascapes for a while – it’s back to the mountains of Colorado.

Forresters Beach [3]

2009-04-29T11:18:03Z

We decided to hire a car for our last day in Sydney yesterday and head off to explore some of the Central Coast.

Forrester’s Beach is a location I discovered courtesy of Flickr contact Brent Pearson who rates it amongst the very best of the Sydney area coastal locations. Brent has also written a fantastic location guide (available here), which is invaluable for the one-shot trip, i.e. when you’re arriving at a location for the first time in the pitch dark having had no opportunity to scout it out ahead of time.

We had the place to ourselves photographically. Only the surfers kept us company. I can see why this spot would draw photographers back time and again – there are endless opportunities to work here.

We wended our way slowly back to town, carving out time for lunch at the wonderfully situated Cottage Point Inn located ~~inside~~ adjacent to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

“National Park” is a term that Australians appear to throw about fairly freely – there must be nearly a dozen such designated areas within an hour’s drive of Sydney. Haven’t quite worked out the meaning of the designation, but it appears not to have the cachet that America’s NP system enjoys.

Luna Park

2009-04-28T12:18:16Z

Ah, the grotesquerie of the fun-fair. This is Luna Park on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, nestled at the foot of the harbour bridge, cocking a snook at the Opera House, opposite.

I’ve always liked best the photos of Luna Park which suggest “no, this isn’t really a place for the children, dear”. Here’s an attempt at one in that vein.

In Sydney [1]

2009-04-26T22:08:37Z

So, roughly 20 hours after leaving Denver, we made it to Sydney. Flights were bearable and I managed some sleep (especially given the 50 yard dash that Alice made to relocate to an empty row just before push-back out of SFO).

Sydney is a peculiar blend of the English and American city styles, with tall buildings and broad fast moving streets (as opposed to London where pedestrians overtake the traffic) alongside grand 19th-century style architecture.

However, on balance, it’s definitely more reminiscent of England than anything else – see the image above. This was Museum station where we arrived into town (thanks to the D700’s amazing high ISO capabilities). However, you see it more broadly than in retro-styled/preserved underground stations: the materials and styles of construction have far more in common with Europe than the US. For example, modern trains and train stations make liberal use of plastics in stark contrast to the steel of US-built transportation.

With no hotel room to crash straight into, we went for the calories-and-caffeine approach to keep us going, having breakfast at the Rocks, browsing the market and then hopping on the ferry to Watson’s Bay for some lunch at Doyle’s.

It was a windy day yesterday (and is forecast to be again today), but that doesn’t stop Sydney putting on a splendid scenic show, as in the city skyline as seen from a small beach on the north side of Watson’s Bay, above.

More food and photography today.

Headed down under... [2]

2009-04-24T03:45:35Z

We’re headed off to Australia tomorrow for a couple of week to see Alice’s family, something that has become pretty much an annual trip in recent years, and one to which I always very much look forward.

Our itinerary: three days in Sydney followed by nine days up around Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, and finally a short couple of days in Canberra. All of this topped and tailed by 18 hours of hell in “steerage” (as Christopher always termed it). Ah well.

It’ll be a very pleasant change to be by the sea again and breathing moist air at full pressure for a while.

TPE in the blogosphere

2009-04-21T01:36:25Z

Nice to see TPE getting some pick up in the blogosphere, and on some forums too. Here are links to some of the sites that have covered it:

What’s next?

TPE is currently described as being in Beta and is at version 0.8.1 – hopefully that’s clue enough that development is not done yet. Indeed, there’s a long list of improvements I’d like to make.

Here’s what’s in my mind:

Fix the known issues – see here
Resizable/maximizable window – wouldn’t it be great to make that map bigger?
Adjust bearings for local magnetic declination (compass north, not true north)
Add transit times to the Details section
Extend Locations to allow for ‘Occasions’ – locations at a particular time and date
Extend Occasions to allow for ‘Expeditions’ – plan your multi-day shoot and compose a full itinerary
Printable layouts – you probably want all this info on a sheet of paper to carry with you into the wilds
KML support so you can copy and paste, import and export to/from Google Earth
Offline mode – get the times and angles for your saved locations when offline, even if you can’t get the map (that’s part of the reason for doing this as an Adobe AIR app, rather than as a web-site)
Search capabilities – you probably want answers to questions such as “when is full moon at Delicate Arch in October?”
Potentially some more astronomical phenomena (lunar eclipses?) depending on just how much more maths I can take

A few folks have commented that it would be great to have this integrated into Google Earth. I’m personally not so sure – I often find the level of detail in Google Earth for out-of-the-way places to be inferior to the topographic map view of Google Maps. Additionally, there are a few issues with the lighting in the 3D model than could serve to confuse (noted here). However, if there looks like being a good way through this, then I’ll look again for sure.

In the meantime, what other features would you find useful? Let me know by e-mailing or leaving a comment.

Arches, Day 2 [1]

2009-04-20T04:42:11Z

Day 2 at Arches National Park was somewhat more successful than Day 1. We started out at The Organ near Park Avenue – partly because its location makes it about the closest (and therefore sleep-maximizing) world-class shooting location to Moab for a dawn shoot. The sun took a while to struggle clear of some remant clouds from the passing storm system, but eventually broke through. Before long, every last cloud had dissipated – sadly.

We moved on next to Double Arch in the Windows section of the park. The sun was not yet fully on the arch (all the better), just catching the top. Some fresh growth on the desert plants provided some decent foreground material.

On next to Landscape Arch, where we had the pleasure of speaking awhile with Oregon photographer, Jim Altengarten of Exposure 36, who very kindly reminded me of a very useful function on the D700 – the ability to assign the viewfinder Virtual Horizon to a function button (or as I chose, the AE/AF-L button). The Virtual Horizon is basically an electronic spirit level that can be used to make sure the camera is properly aligned – harder than you’d think to do by eye alone. Since programming it in there and then when Jim told me, I’ve been using it all weekend – so thanks!

The main excursion of the day was another of the great photographic rituals of the Southwest – sunset at Delicate Arch. I had not been there before, although we did walk up to Delicate Arch Viewpoint last year.

Delicate Arch is truly an icon of the Southwest and Utah. After the Maroon Bells, it appears also to be one of the most popular photography spots in the region. There must have been around 50 photographers present for sunset. I took 78 exposures, and I reckon that was below average. (The gentleman next to me was bracketing seven exposures at 9fps on his D3.) That means there are likely at least 4,000 images of this particular sunset at Delicate Arch out there somewhere…

As you can see above, the sun did come through. The image above is from the final sixty second burst of light before the sun finally dropped below the horizon.

Arches, Day 1

2009-04-18T05:37:21Z

So we made it through the late winter storm that is battering the Denver area last night. We were amongst the last couple dozen of cars to get over Vail pass westbound before it was closed for a while. Multiple accidents in the usual spots (the left hand bends on the way down into Vail). We still sat in traffic for an hour or so.

Spent last night in Glenwood Springs (one of our normal stopping off points for the trek over to Utah), then drove down to Moab this morning, taking in the scenic 128 via the Fisher Towers and Castle Valley.

After a brief afternoon rest, the day remained largely overcast. Heading up to Arches for late afternoon, Park Avenue was windy and in rather drab light, with few flowers yet in evidence.

The day was looking like rather a write-off, photographically. However, we spied a break in the clouds on the western horizon and so decided to drive up to the Windows area and wait to see what might happen.

Settling on Balanced Rock, we got literally around 90 seconds of direct light (as shown above) before the sun dipped below the horizon and was gone.

A grand total of 10 exposures on day 1. Hoping for better tomorrow…

Off to Arches National Park with a D700 [3]

2009-04-16T04:35:42Z

Alice and I are heading off back to southern Utah for a long weekend tomorrow evening. As usual, we’re staying the first night in Glenwood Springs (around 180 miles from Boulder) to break the journey (won’t be leaving until late afternoon), then on to Moab for the weekend.

The plan is to visit Arches National Park – we’ve both been there before, but not long enough to really do it full justice.

For extra excitement, it’ll be the first real photographic outing for my new Nikon D700 (which arrived just last week). It, coupled with the Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 I picked up from B&H on Feb 1st, just before the yen-dollar exchange rate-induced price hikes, should hopefully prove a real step up from the D200 + 12-24 f/4 combination I’ve been shooting with to date (although I’ve been very pleased with what that setup has delivered, such as the Three Gossips above from February 2008).

The internal schizoid debate in which I indulged for several months as to whether I should go 14-24 or 17-35 is probably worth a separate post, but I’ll postpone until I have really tried out the 17-35 in the field (it hasn’t had much of an outing to date).

The other promising aspect of this trip is the timing: a late winter storm blowing through tomorrow, clearing through Friday and Saturday and with clear weather forecast all day Sunday – should give us a high chance of some interesting light and cloud formations.

All that, plus, April-May is – I read – the time for flowers in the desert. The National Park Service has some fantastic documents on the Arches National Park site detailing the bloom dates by species.

If you’re inspired by Tom Till’s Mule Ear Flowers and Courthouse Towers (and yes, I am) – then this information might prove invaluable.

TPE 0.8.0 released [4]

2009-04-15T06:10:02Z

The Photographer’s Ephemeris Beta 0.8.0 is now available.

This version adds some useful capabilities for the photographer planning a shot that isn’t quite right at sunrise or sunset. Clicking the new Details button gives access to the positions of the sun and moon for the full 24 hour period for the selected date and location:

You can drag the slider to an arbitrary time and view the azimuth and elevation angle of sun and moon both numerically and graphically. Azimuth is shown on the map (when the sun or moon is above the horizon only) and elevation angle is shown in the lower details panel.

As an alternative to dragging, click through the various celestial events of the day using the buttons in the lower right corner of the upper panel.

You now also have the opportunity to select your own psychedelic colours for sun/moon rise/set.

And finally, an improved map legend, especially for Jim Goldstein :-)

TPE 0.7.5 released [4]

2009-04-05T03:44:18Z

The Photographer’s Ephemeris is now at Beta version 0.7.5, a few days later than planned, but finally done.

The new version doesn’t look radically different to the last, but has a few nice enhancements under the hood.

Primary amongst those is automatic time zone management: previous versions of TPE would set the time zone offset for the selected map location, but were not aware of daylight savings policies, meaning you had to set this yourself manually.

Given that landscape photographers, as a group, have a propensity to plan their travels well ahead and go to great lengths to get the shots they need in remote and hard to reach locations, it seemed important to minimize the chances of anyone getting the time of a critical shot wrong by an hour, just because they did not know the daylight savings policy of Patagonia in 2011, or similar.

TPE 0.7.5 takes care of this for you.

Also added is optional correction for observer altitide. The sun rises sooner and sets later when you’re in the mountains. I saw this first hand up at Dream Lake the other week, where the sun struck the top of the Flattop mountain a good 10 minutes or so before the calculated time of sunrise.

Of course, actual on-the-ground sunrise/sunset times are impacted by multiple factors that cannot be determined in advance by a computer, including barometric pressure and temperature which change refraction. So, take the times as a guide, and as always, leave sufficient time to get to your shooting location!

Various other fixes and tweaks included too. Have fun and let me know how it goes.

The Photographer’s Ephemeris Beta 0.7.5

UPDATE: 0.7.6 released today – a few refinements and minor fixes. If you have 0.7.2 or later already installed, you’ll be prompted to update.