Embedded Panoramas.

Finally there appears to be a way to embed 360 degree panoramas on web pages. I found the method detailed here. The premise of the article is over the top but if this works at least I'll have a platform independent way of embedding panoramas. There are some java based tools out there, but java is a security nightmare and there is a quicktime plugin method but this doesn't work on iPhones and Android. This might work everywhere although you have to apparently host the image on Google Plus which has the weird problem of lowering the resolution automatically. Perhaps it will work fine hosted somewhere else

This Panorama was taken on the tip of White Crack in Canyonlands National Park.

Dead Horse Point sunrise

Last February I went on a little trip to photograph the Moab area with some old and new friends. I've posted some pictures from a sunset in Arches already as well as Colorado National Monument. Interestingly, both those sets of images were taken when I had not yet met up with the group. Here I will post a set of pictures from after I met up with them, but rather ironically from me on my own again. This morning, I went out on my own as the others had thought that it would only be ugly and cloudy at our planned location - Dead Horse Point. However, I got out at 4 am to look at the sky and actually saw stars and so decided to go anyway and had a glorious morning.

Some links to start: Gallery and prints on smugmug. Gallery on flickr. On Facebook. On Google+.

Dead Horse Point Sunrise. Buy a print.
High resolution composite from 9 images. Nikon D600, Nikkor 24-85 mm f/3.5-4.5 at 45 mm, f/22, 0.4s, ISO 100.
This high resolution composite has over 100MP of resolution and will print wall sized with impeccable detail. I aimed it to have the curve in the tree trunk mirror the bend in the river as well as potash road which you can see just below the river.

Thelma and Louise. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Nikkon 70-200 mm f/4.0 at 70mm, f/5.6, 1/80s, ISO 100.
A detail showing the island in the sky region in Canyonlands National Park. The title is a reference to the fact that the movie had Thelma and Louise drive into the "Grand Canyon" in this spot.

Dead Horse Point Sunrise Panorama. Buy a print. You definitely should see this larger as the blog format is not very wide.
Stitched from 7 images. Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/10s, ISO 100.

Swoop. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.
A horizontal framing of the top image on this post.

Cradled. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 24 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.
There are many nice compositions to be found along the rim as you can see.

Red Dawn. Buy a print. Another image you really should see large.
Stitched from 9 images. Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 16 mm, f/16, 1/20s, ISO 100.
This is a little later in the morning and taken from the very edge point of DHP. The tree on the far right of the image is the same tree as on the first image above. Standing on this tip you feel really exposed as just over the edge is a looooong way down.

Green River overlook

On my Arches/Canyonlands/Moab trip this February, I visited False Kiva by myself on the last day (more on that later). After the hike there and back I found myself driving back down around lunchtime and decided to have something to eat at the Green River Overlook, which is itself close to the Willow Flats campground. I couldn't resist taking pictures as the light was quite nice for midday because of the milky clouds and the snow all around. Here is a quick handheld shot panorama focusing on the river basin and Turks head.

Canyon Country. Buy a print. On flickr. On facebook. On Google+.
Stitched from 8 images. Nikon D600, Nikkor 70-200 mm f/4 at 70mm, f/8.0, 1/400s, ISO 100.

You can very clearly see the White Rim road down there which I biked several times. It looks very different down there. I also never noticed the remains of a landing strip (click on the image for a bigger view which clearly shows it) on the finger of the white rim that points towards Turks head. It's not marked on the topo maps, so I am curious what its function was. There was some Uranium mining in this area decades ago. Here is a zoomed in image of the landing strip. Click for 1:1. People on retina screens already get the 1:1 served in line.

On the right bottom you can see the white rim road snaking along and it crosses the end of the landing strip. Probably the strip is invisible from the road.

Let the light be right

In browsing through my images from last week's Moab trip I came across a set of images that are almost exactly 1 day apart but are framed almost identically. One taken several hours into the day in relatively harsh daylight and the other shortly after sunrise in soft light. Both were taken looking out from Dead Horse Point towards Canyonlands National Park. In the first, we visited it with the group to scout it out. The next day, I was the only one to rise in time and drive over to catch the sunrise. It had looked like it would snow that morning and be cloudy all around so everybody had more or less decided to stay in. However, I could see stars when around 4 am I stepped outside the hotel, so I set off by myself and had an awesome morning.

On the left, the daylight image. On the right, the sunrise image softened even more by the presence of clouds. The moral of this story of course is that getting up early pays...

I'll blog about the Dead Horse Point sunrise sometime later. In the mean time, here is a link to the above sunrise image in it's full glory.

Desert sunrise

This is an older image that I have not worked up until now. The image was taken at sunrise near Airport Tower along the White Rim road in Canyonlands National Park. This was early November and so the flowers you see are actually not very much alive but they do provide a nice counterweight to the sunlight Airport Tower. Nights are quite cold out in the desert around this time of year and I remember frost on my tent in the morning (which was pitched right behind where this picture was taken). Hopefully I will be out photographing in the Moab area again next week with some friends. I'll be hunting for more unconventional (and less unconventional ones ;-) ) desert images again. As always, click the image for bigger versions.


Airport Sunrise. Buy a Print. On flickr, On facebook, on Google+.
Composite of 9 images from Nikon D300, Nikon 18-55mm at 35mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 200.

Canyonlands sunrise

Taken from Gooseberry on the White Rim.

Dish. Buy a print.
On Flickr. On Facebook. On G+

Portal

Portal. Buy a print. See on flickr. See large.
Assembled high resolution composite from 10 images. Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55mm at 34mm, ISO 200, f/8.0, 1/30s.

This is the same puddle as seen in an image I posted before about but looking towards the East instead of the West. The mountains lit by the last sunrays are the La Sal mountains.

Canyonlands images

I have been going through my Canyonlands images recently as I have Gigabytes of images I created over the years that I have never put online yet mostly due to lack of time. There are some really nice images in there and I am only scratching the surface yet.


Sunrise at White Crack. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
Assembled from 5 images. Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16mm at 14mm, f/8.0, 1/125s, ISO 200

White Crack is the southernmost tip of the white rim. There is a small campsite here that you have to reserve almost a year in advance with the park service to get on. There is also a trail that goes from here all the way down to the confluence of the Green and the Colorado river. I hiked most of it with one of my companions on this trip (the rest of the group spent the day drinking cocktails at the campsite or with their legs dangling over the rim ;-) ) as we were at White Crack for two nights.


White Crack sunset. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
Assembled from 8 images. Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55mm at 18mm, f/8.0, 1/60s, ISO 200

This panorama looks towards the Green river and shows the area where the White Crack trail (you won't find it on any map) goes down from White Rim.


The tree. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
High resolution image assembled from 12 images. Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55mm at 34mm, f/16, 1/30s, ISO 200.

This tree is one I photographed years before and that is hidden in the area just south of the campground. I photographed it at sunset.


Dusk falls over the La Sals. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
High resolution image assembled from 9 shots. Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55mm at 48mm, f/8, 1/13s, ISO 200.
This is at dusk looking towards the La Sal mountains that still have a small amount of snow on them. I love the deep colors in the canyon.


Moses and Zeus at dawn. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
Single shot Nikon D50, Nikkor 18-55mm at 18mm, f/8.0, 1/160s.

This is am image I took in 2007 that I never shared. I interpreted this in Lightroom 4 which allowed me to pull the drama out of it that I experienced at the moment that I was there but that I never was able to shine through in the image before. Moses and Zeus are two popular climbing destinations in Taylor Canyon at the west side of Canyonlands.


Tortured. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.


Tortured in B&W. Buy a print. See it large.
Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16mm at 11mm, f/11, 1/125s.

This is a tree I found along the Gooseberry trail that leads from the Gooeseberry campground up to the Island in the Sky. I like both the color and black and white interpretations, so I left them both up. I remember I spent considerable time around this tree to get a nice composition.


Last Rays. Buy a print. See large. See on flickr.
Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16 mm at 11.5 mm, f/11, 1/30s, graduated ND filter

This was taken at White crack again looking towards the sunset.


Ticklish. Buy a print. See it large. See it on flickr.
Nikon D300, Nikkor 18-55mm at 24 mm, f/11, 1/160s

This is along Gooseberry trail. One of many dead Junipers.

Much more to follow.

Sunrise at the tip

Sunrise at the southernmost tip of the white rim called white crack. From here it is still a day's walk to the confluence of the Green and the Colorado.


The tip. Buy a print.
Technical: high resolution composite assembled from 9 images each from D300, Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 at 35mm, f/16, 1/8s, ISO 200
Enlarge on my main site. Flickr image. Google+ post.

The red is far out of sRGB color space and so you will not see what I experienced but this is a general limitation of the web.

Ephemeral pool sunrise

Continuing on yesterday's theme, here is one of the ephemeral pothole pools on the White Rim at dawn. These potholes are very interesting in that they harbor extremely hardy life such as brine shrimp that can survive long periods of drought and resprout to life when there is some rain.


The eye - ephemeral pool in Canyonlands NP. Buy a print.
Assembled into ultrahigh resolution (50 MP) from 2 sets of 9 images each from a D300 with Nikkor 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 at 34 mm, f/16, 1/5s (exposed for the sky) and 2.5s (exposed for foreground)
Smugmug enlarge. Flickr page. Google+.

Big Puddle

A sunset reflection in one of the bigger rain-filled pools at the tip of white crack in Canyonlands National Park. These things are teeming with life that lies dormant for weeks sometimes when the pool dries out.


The big Puddle. Buy a print.
Assembled from 9 images to a 53MP images as rendered using hugin. Individual images from D300, Nikkor 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 at 34mm, f/16, 1/8s, ISO 200
Smugmug enlarge. Flickr image. Google+.


Horizontal pool. Buy a print.
Nikon D300, Tokina 11-16 mm f/2.8 at 11mm, f/11, 1/20s. 1-stop grad ND.
Smugmug enlarge.

Friends under the stars

From Canyonlands

This image was taken on a bike trip along the white rim trail in Canyonlands National Park. This is ISO 200, 11mm, f/2.8 and a 30s exposure. three stop filter lowering the exposure of the bottom half so we can see the milky way at the top. My buddy Craig had built a propane fueled firebox, so that we could have a campfire where we were not allowed to have one. Brought us much attention from the park rangers who could see us from the Island in the sky but didn't realize it was a propane flame instead of a campfire.

Mesa Arch

As I have written before, I visited Canyonlands last year in order to ride the white rim trail on my mountain bike. The bike I rode it unfortunately was stolen, but I digress. Because I got there the evening before (Halloween actually) our ride and was camping out on the campground (nobody there at that time of year), I visited false kiva in the evening and did Mesa Arch the next morning. A great surprise was to meet my buddy Dave at the trailhead. I have written about the gaggle of photographers at Mesa Arch before. This place is extraordinarily popular since it is an ultrashort hike and sunrise is spectacular. Some clouds would have made the scene better (with some gap light preferably) than I captured here but nevertheless I am happy with what I got.


Mesa Arch sunstar. Buy a print.
Assembled from 15 shots (3 rows of 5) at 35mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/5s. This is an ultrahigh resolution image. In large prints, you will notice reflections from puddles of water standing in the little pits that you see all around white rim.


Why it glows. Buy a print.
Single shot, Nikon 18-55mm at 18mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/40s handheld.


Everybody left, still glowing! Buy a print.
Single shot, Tokina 11-16mm at 11mm, ISO 200, f/8, 1/100s


Washerwoman and La Sals framed. Buy a print.
Single shot, ISO 200, 18-55mm Nikon at 48mm, f/9, 1/60s

See the entire gallery at my smugmug site. Many more Canyonlands images are here.

Photographers at Mesa Arch

The Gaggle

Last November, I was in Canyonlands for a ride around White Rim. The first night I arrived there (Hallow's eve) I visited False Kiva, which is an awesome archeological site. After a very frosty night, I got up early enough to break down my tent (frost on it!) and drive over to Mesa Arch trailhead. This is an extremely popular site for photographers to go in the morning as it is a 10 minute hike to a very spectacular view. The rising sun lights the canyon wall below this arch and makes the bottom glow bright red. When I got to the trailhead, a truck pulls up next to me and it turns out to be my buddy Dave. He apparently arrived at the campground very late at night and slept in the back of his truck and heard me drive off, jumped up and followed me. Dave must have been very cold, but he is probably used to it as he is a colonel in the Air Force that spent quite a bit of time in various places around the world. I have had a gallery up on smugmug for a while that I will describe on my blog some time in the future. For now, here are some pictures of the gaggle of photographers that showed up. It can get much worse apparently.


Did we get the shot?


My buddy Dave and my homemade panohead.

Canyonlands tree

I just uploaded an image to flickr to remind myself I need to process and upload my images from last November in this amazing place.



This image was from a dayhike I did together with one of my friends (the rest was drinking cocktails at the campsite - Mimosas at sunrise!) from the White Crack campsite all the way down along an old jeep road that goes down into the white crack. The trail is almost impossible to see in many places and almost nobody ever goes there as it is not marked on maps. At the end of it is the site of an abandoned mining camp. Apparently there are two spring beds still standing there but we didn't get that far as we lost too much time waiting for our friends to decide to go. They turned around halfway down the first downhill when they realized they were already too buzzed. They missed an amazing hike.

False Kiva

False Kiva is an extraordinary and more or less secret place in Canyonlands National Park. It is nestled in the side of a mesa rim in a just absoluteley amazing setting overlooking the White Rim and Green River. I visited this place last October on Hallow's eve. The next day, I was going to do white rim by bike with a group of friends, so I decided to camp in the one campground in the park the night before and do an evening shoot at False Kiva. The interesting thing about this archeological site is that its location is kept more or less secret by the park service. There are no signs and no designated trail. You can find GPS coordinates on the web, but those are basically useless as they are accurate but are simply lead you to the rim of the island in the sky right above the mesa, but no way of knowing or seeing what's below it, if you don't want to plummet to your death. So ignore the GPS coordinates. There are a few photography books that have instructions but the best way to figure out how to get there is to talk to a photographer that has been there. The hike is short and not very technical but there are some exposed spots. You start at a ditch that is not at all where the GPS coordinates would have you go, after a while, you hit the rim and swing around and go down a rocky path to somewhere below the Kiva and cross over on a bench that looks precarious and then climb up again, all the way not seeing where you are going. You just don't see the kiva from anywhere on the trail. Then you go over a hump and suddenly the Kiva lies before you overseeing a breath taking view. It's smaller than you would expect from some of the famous images taken of it.


Buy a print of this image.
Assembled from 2 sets of 15 images at 35 mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/50s and 1/10 assembled in hugin and stitched in hugin. Exposure blended using enfuse. This image will print wallsize with exquisite detail.

I shot some other viewpoints too of which I liked this vertical view:

Buy a print.
Assembled from 2 exposure sets of 9 images at 35mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/10s and 1/80s.

A tighter horizontal framing is here:

Buy a print.
Assembled from 2 exposure sets of 12 shots each at 35 mm, ISO 200, f/16, 1/6s and 1/40s.

At the site is a little log book and a some explanation of what the archeologists think the site was used for. It certainly has some of the features of a kiva (the depression in the middle for the smoke blocker and such) but is quite different from other real kivas in the southwest. Regardless of what it meant to the people that lived here, this is a very worthwhile site to visit and it was quite an experience to be there all alone on Halloween. The contrast with the throng of photographers at Mesa Arch the next morning couldn't be greater. I will certainly go back to False Kiva and try different light conditions. This would be interesting in winter with a sun setting more in the frame and perhaps some snow on the rock formations. The sunset was great but I left a little before to make sure I could see my trail back. In my images below you can see that it is golden hour light though and the glow is lovely. A few more clouds would have been great but hey I am not going to complain. This was an absolutely fantastic experience in itself. I headed back to the campground where I met a few of the friends with whom I would hit the rim the next day that had been able to find the site I put my tent up in which was easy as the campground was virtually deserted. They had already prepared some excellent tortellinis and it was a good but very cold night with frost on the tent in the morning. I headed out to take pictures of Mesa Arch the next morning before hopping on the bike. I'll post about both those trips soon as I got some excellent images out of it that have been chomping at the bit on my hard drive.

See more pictures of False Kiva here.

Propane campfire!

I am planning to do the white rim (an out and back this time because of the mineral bottom road being destroyed) again in a few weeks with a group of friends. My buddy Craig is one of those guys that loves overengineering everything, and since we are not allowed to have wood fire in Canyonlands (you don't want people to gather the little bit of wood that exists there from dead trees and in summer there is big fire danger), he engineered a propane "camp fire". It's a little much but quite a cool sight! This apparently is revision 2 of this thing.

Rediscovery

I've been rediscovering some old images I shot a while ago. Among these are images I shot in Canyonlands national park on a multiday bike trip. Here is one example,

Here is a shot of a rock in dried out river.

Here is the complete set of the canyonlands images including the older stuff.

There are hundreds of good shots in these archives that just didn't make the cut originally. My eye has developed differently now and I discover new things in these shots that I hadn't seen before. I am working on some interesting stuff with my older panoramas that I'll post on soon.

Manual dynamic range reduction

I played a little with HDR software but wasn't always happy with the results. Often it would look better to just combine exposures (if done, otherwise just one RAW image) and use masks derived from the images. So I tried to play with an older image that had a correctly exposed sky, but several stops underexposed foreground (it was dawn inside a canyon). I simply used a mask generated from one of the color channels with a exposure adjustment layer in PS. Came out quite well I think:

New Panorama from Canyonlands

I finally got around to creating another panorama at Canyonlands. Taken just after the sun had gone down. I needed to combine two sets of images two stops apart to two different panoramas and do some simple HDR-like processing (just a blurred mask based on the lightness) to get detail in the canyons and the color in the sky not blown out. I did some PP in Lightroom. Luckily I had shot three sets of exposures at -2, 0, and +2 stops on the tripod, so I just had to combine the panorama once for one set of exposures and simply use a texteditor on the hugin file and combine the second set of exposures. The only thing I needed to do was to make sure the handheld nadir was correct (which was unfortunately not very sharp because of the long shutter). Anyway, here it is: Click on the photo for a larger version at flickr if you care to see it. This image should only be seen large!