DC Morning

So I've been TDY in the Washington DC area for the past month and a half and finally got the chance to take off a morning to take a look at DC through the camera.  Getting up at 0500 is not fun, but you beat the tourists, get great lighting, and are able to catch a lot of the sites without any distractors between you and the lens.

When you Epically Fail at Planning

So, my hiking buddies and I decided to hike in Chiricahua National Monument to close out our last weekend in south-east Arizona.  Normally, I over-plan and over-pack, but after destroying my body with two consecutive weekends of over-16 mile hikes with at least 3,500 feet elevation change, I deliberately played it chill this time… too chill.  I forgot my camera and realized it a good fifteen miles into our 100 mile drive taking us east on I-10 and about 45 minutes south of Wilcox, AZ (so in the middle of nowhere southeastern Arizona, you would never get to Chiricahua unless you knew where to find it in the first place).

Great.  Epic Fail.  The one time I wanted to concentrate on photography and not on my crazy acts of physical and manly prowess.  So, I was stuck with taking photos with my iPhone.  Now, granted, the iPhone is a marvelous camera… for a phone.  But it was no replacement especially in the horrible back-lighting in which most of the rocks were situated that Saturday afternoon.  I really needed good exposure control so I didn’t silhouette all my subjects.

Anyway, I had a few successes… not great by any stretch of the imagination but stuff I can remember for years later of a truly gorgeous place.  Chiricahua is a magnificent bowl (think of a giant volcano crater about ten miles across and one thousand feet of gentle slopes, filled with the most awesome rock formations outside of Utah.  It was commonplace to find massive 100-ton plus boulders perched precariously atop one square-foot of a rock pillars.

So, we took it easy and only hiked a little over 8 miles… and had some fun bouldering.

Adventure Photography

The Colorado River in the Grand Canyon

When doing adventure photography, unless you are freelancing for a particular project and have to deliver results, concentrate on your adventure just as much, if not more, than your photography.  You are doing it to have a good time and get some great pictures in the process.  Getting wrapped around the handle in getting the perfect shots will leave you only exhausted and frustrated.

trudging back up to the top

Even before I got into photography, I would devour the awesome photography contained in magazines like National Geographic.  I grew up hiking and camping in California (Yosemite in particular, where I hiked Half Dome, 16 mi round trip, 4,000 vertical feet as a twelve-year old).  But it’s only recently where the bug for extreme adventuring bit me again, coinciding perfectly with my renewed interest in photography.  So, I recently had a free, four-day weekend and I convinced two of my buddies to go spend an incredibly awesome and bromantic time camping on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon… in the winter.

Staving off the Cold

Braving 14 degree nights and one morning snow-storm, we took the place down in less than 48 hours.  In planning the trip (I used the National Park Service web site which is a fabulous resource for planning!), I wanted to schedule at least one amazing hike down into the Canyon.  I chose the Bright Angel trail due to its popularity.

The Grand Canyon from the Bright Angel Trailhead

My main desire in going out was to take breath-taking photographs of the canyon, but I also wanted to just do something plain manly and prove my toughness, so our hike devolved into a brutal trek to the very bottom of the canyon, with no plans on spending the night.  Treating each warning sign as a challenge (of which there had to be at least five) imploring us to not go to the bottom and back in one day, or we would die; we made it all 8.2 miles and 4,460 feet down to the Colorado River in under 3 hours.

The Colorado River 8.2 miles, and 4,460 vertical feet from the top

That was the easy part.  I managed to get some pretty amazing (in my opinion) photos on the way down.  That all went out the window as we made our way back up.  We had about five hours of daylight to make it to the top again, but with testosterone and ego coursing through our veins, we blazed a trail back up the first four miles and 1,500 feet faster than we went down.  Finally, we were left with the major task of climbing the remaining four miles and almost 3,000 feet straight up the switchbacks snaking along the South Rim face.  Upon hitting the snow line with three miles still to go, my legs started cramping due to dehydration and my ridiculously high metabolism.  Popping a few granola bars helped, but those last three miles were the toughest of my life.  Photography was right out.

Almost there

Concentrating on simply one foot in front of he other, we managed to trudge our way through the packed snow, past the tourists, dipping their heads underneath the Rim to see what the place was all about; risking damage to their Marc Ecko and Tommy Hilfiger ‘adventure’ sports-wear.  We wondered if we would see the idiot twenty-somethings we nicknamed Lugz and Uggs (on their chosen footwear) who made fun of our chosen wardrobe on the way down.  Sorry, there’s a reason why the pros use Merrils, Columbia, North Face, and Mountain Hardwear.

So, we reached the top.  I am happy with the results photographically.  Of course, there could have been other great photos along the way had I been more deliberate in my photography.  But I used the confidence I had with my eye for good opportunities and confidence in my equipment (only a Nikon D80 with stock 17-105DX 3.5-5.6 lens) to snap shots as they occurred to me.

This left me with a slew of pretty good shots from the top, all the way to the bottom, a chance to triple-punch my man-card with some friends, once-in-a-lifetime memories and sense of accomplishment, and calves that feel like they were beat with baseball bats by Verne Troyer.  Now, time to elevate my legs and descend back into my coma.

30-second exposure with a commercial airliner creating the meteor effect