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.

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.

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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.

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.

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!

Mountainbiking White Rim

I spent last weekend Mountain biking with good friends around the White Rim trail in Canyonlands National Park. Highly recommended. We had two days with a good distance (>40 miles) and one morning with a short but good uphill out of the Canyon. The two campgrounds we stayed at were White Crack and Taylor. Both single-site campgrounds in crazy settings. The presence of a support vehicle made it possible for me to take most of my photogear. While I did not take many pictures during the riding (I have no pictures of people on bikes funnily enough!) I was able to get up before sunrise each day (Brrr cold!) and shoot some, I think, awesome images and panoramas. Here is one for example:

See more in my Canyonlands set on flickr, or in this temporary gallery. I am also trying to sell a few of these images as prints on ImageKind.