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Archive for the ‘National Park’ Category

Yoho National Park in British Colombia, Canada lies just West of the more famous Banff National Park. Emerald Lake is the largest of the lakes found in that area and, as you can see, is breathtakingly beautiful.

A friend and I had some time to spend there whilst on our way to Edmonton. We saw some awesome scenery.

In the summer months you can rent canoes here, but in the winter the lake is frozen solid and becomes a popular cross country ski destination.

This area is high on my list of places to return to. Not only to spend more time (we only had one day here), but I’d love to see it in other seasons as well. We chatted to the folk in the boathouse who told us that in fall, when the sun sets lower, many evenings put on a spectacular alpenglow display that sees the tips of the mountains light up in the most fantastic colors. Having seen this scenery, I can imagine what that must look like and makes me want to go back.

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Today’s post is also from Joshua Tree National Park, but this one actually has a Joshua Tree in it!

As you can see, Joshua Trees are strange looking things. It is a plant from the Yucca family and is also known by the name of Yucca Palm, Tree Yucca or Palm Tree Yucca. When you touch the tree, you will be surprised at how “solid” it feels. It is a very “dense” and heavy wood and you can tell when you touch it.

The tree seems to only grow in the Mohave Desert parts of the park, in the higher (northern) elevations.

The other thing that stands out in Joshua Tree National Park are the large number of rocks and boulders. This picture shows a typical cluster. Those rocky cluster make excellent rock-climbing areas and when my son and I were there we saw a large number of rock climbing groups throughout the park.

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At the end of the Salton View Road in Joshua Tree National Park is a lookout called Keys View. No it has nothing to do with the Florida Keys, they are clear across the country no where near here. In fact there is barely any water here as Joshua Tree National Park is desert. There are two types of desert actually: Mohave Desert in the northern, higher elevation part of the park and Colorado Desert, in the southern, lower elevation parts.

The only body of water in the neighborhood is the Salton Sea, which you can see in this pictures just beyond those mountains. Like Mono Lake, it has a high salinity level. The Salton Sea lies directly on the San Andreas Fault and, like Death Valley, lies below sea level.

Joshua Tree National Park is quite beautiful although hot. My son and I visited here to go do some hikes and take photos and went in May thinking we’d beat the real heat. Well no such luck, it turned out to be the hottest May in years and we got temperatures around 100F (37.8C). It is a dry heat which I find infinitely more bearable than humid heat, but one sure ends up drinking a lot of water!

This shot is my usual HDR shot with 3 bracketed shots and processed in Dynamic Photo HDR followed by some tweaking in Lightroom.

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Isn’t flowing water fascinating?

I remember as a kid, growing up in the Netherlands, I loved to go visit places like Scotland where creeks and “bubbling brooks” were a must see for me. I could waste away considerable time mesmerized by the flowing water.

Now, living in California, with a wealth of rivers and creeks, I still love visiting places like that. As a photographer, catching the sense of movement is an easily accomplished trick. By slowing down the shutter speed, the movement of water creates blur which gives us that “look”. Often, in forested areas or in deep canyons, this is really easily achieved as the amount of light will be less so selecting a slower shutter-speed will be not be hard. In bright sunlight though, it can be a bit more of a challenge simply because there is so much light, you cannot slow down the shutter enough to get the look without over exposing the shot.

This is where a grey filter can be indispensable as it simply darkens the scene without affecting the colors.

In the following two shots I was lucky enough to be get the look without the need of such a filter.

The first shot is of the Yuba River, just a few miles north of Nevada City in California. After spending a few hours exploring Nevada City, a photographer friend, Ken, and I were all hot and bothered (it was a 105 degree day, or 40 degrees Celsius) and decided to continue going North on the North Bloomfield Rd and see if we could find some relief near the Yuba River.

We got some great shots of the water rushing by, as you can see in this picture. There was a quite a lot of light, but by stopping down to f/22 I could slow the shutter to 1/8 of a second, just slow enough to get that feeling of “flow” in the water.

This second shot is of the Merced river. It was taken late in the day so light was already fading. The metering was 1/3 of a second at f/6.3 – a lot less light!

So which is the better shot?

Personally, I like both, but for different reasons. I believe the top picture conveys a sense of “speed” while the bottom pictures gives me sense of “volume”. Both work.

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Early December in Yosemite – color was well past it peak, but no snow yet. Clear skies, soft, even light, but cold. Those were the conditions we found in Yosemite. Disappointingly, Glacier Point road had been closed for the season, but we were determined to take advantage of all that Yosemite Valley could offer us.

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Spent the Labor Day long weekend among the Eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada and visited places such as Bodie, a ghost town, Mono Lake with its tufas and the ancient Bristle-cone pine forest, home of the oldest living tree in the world.

All of these places are found along Hwy 395, which is the most spectacular road I have ever driven. The eastern side of the Sierras are much more spectacular then the Western side. The Western side of the Sierras slope up gradually from the San Joaquin valley, while high, the difference in elevation comes gradually. Not so on the Eastern side where the Sierras rise sharply. The result is spectacular.

I’ll be posting some pictures from this trip.

Here is one from Bodie, a famous mining town, once a bustling mining town in the middle of nowhere, now a ghost town. It is kept in “arrested decay” and is managed by the Sierra State Parks Foundation. Bodie was on the list of park to be closed if California legislators had not been able to agree on the budget. One of the reasons I wanted to get there, just in case. . . .

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Another HDR shot from the Sequoia National Park weekend. My son Rens and I were on a hike to check out Tharp’s Cabin. Tharp’s Cabin is a hollowed out log (a giant Sequoia of course) that was used as shelter and later converted into a cabin. It is named after Hale Tharp who has been acknowledged as the first non-native American to enter the Giant Forest.

The hike passed through a burnt out section of forest which was still smoldering. Our natural reaction was one of horror of course, but fires like that are essential for a healthy Sequoia forest so it was actually a good thing.

This meadow was close to the cabin and Tharp used to graze his herd of cattle here. Rens and I were wondering how he got his cattle here as the meadow is pretty far from anything and surrounded by forest. We never did get an answer to that.

This photo was taken with three exposures, 2 stops apart, and blended using Dynamic Photo HDR, saved as a FIFF, re-imported into Lightroom for a little bit of additional processing (mainly contrast) and output as a JPEG.

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My son and I spent a long weekend camping and hiking in the Sequoia National Park in California. It was the first time I had ever been there despite living only 4 hours drive from there. For some reason, I always ended up in Yosemite and not going the extra 100 miles or so to this awesome place.

The park, as the name suggests, is home to a large number of Sequoias. Sequoias are a red wood (a pine tree family member) and grow to enormous proportions. The coastal redwoods, that grow near Mendocino are taller than the Sequoias, but not as thick around the trunk. The Sequoias are huge and majestic. The national park is home to a tree called The General Sherman, allegedly the largest tree in the world, by volume. In other words, there are a few trees taller and there are trees that are thicker, but this is the tallest “thick” tree. It was indeed huge. Apparently, when these trees were first seen in the mid-1800s, nobody back east believed the reports, calling them a hoax. The trees are indeed absolutely huge and their color is distinctly different from the other pines in the forest. They are much redder as seen below.

This is an HDR comprised of 3 shots two stops apart. The HDR process does a marvelous job of accentuating the colors and the textures of these magnificent trees. I’ll be sure to post more soon.

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I have always been fascinated by ancient cultures and the Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado is a great place to visit in order to satisfy that interest. In fact, it is one of my favorite parks, because it offers the historic aspect as well as the beauty of Mother Nature.

The park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including an amazing 600 cliff dwellings or Pueblos.

The park offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300.

This picture is of a Kiva, a round meeting room you enter from the ceiling. I did not have a tripod and used a ledge to support the camera.  I love how the light shines down through the opening, illuminating the ladder and parts of the interior.

Mesa Verde is Spanish for green table.

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Hell’s Half Acre, that’s the name Rudyard Kipling gave to the Midway Geyser Basin when he visited Yellowstone in 1889. Midway has two of the largest (and most colorful) hot springs in the world: Grand Prismatic Spring and Excelsior Geyser, seen in the picture below.

Excelsior Geyser erupted some 300 feet high before the 1900s and was then the largest geyser in the world. It is now dormant and considered a hot spring, discharging more than 4000 gallons of boiling water per minute. The water is 199F (93C)!

You need to walk past this spring to get to the Grand Prismatic, which is perhaps more popular with tourists today. As a result many people hurry by and don’t pay too much attention to this beautiful and colorful spring. The water has this amazing, intense blue color as you can see here. Various vents boil and churn up the water covering it, almost perpetually, in a blanket of steam.

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