Thanksgiving in Prague

A couple of great days in Prague, whose old city, castle and restaurants proved to be a delight. We stayed at the Unitas hotel, which was excellent and surprisingly inexpensive. I went light photographically with the Sony RX100 II and that did not disappoint either; I continue to be impressed by the dynamic range you can pull out of the raw files (see for example the cathedral interior below). My sole gripe continues to be the lack of a viewfinder (get the mark three version for that reason alone) but in the absence of sun composing on the LCD wasn’t as painful as normal.

Charles Bridge at night, Prague

Charles Bridge, Prague

Street performers in Prague

Street performers in the main square

Prague at night

Where the gulls go to roost

St Vitus Cathedral Prague

St Vitus cathedral

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The Escher-like interior of the town hall tower

Onion Creek hike, Moab

If you’ve hiked the popular (and excellent) Fisher Towers trail, off Highway 128 near Moab, you may have wondered where the canyons that descend steeply to the right of the trail go. The answer is that they’re tributaries of Onion Creek, which can be explored along with its side canyons for the better part of a day. Onion Creek is definitely one of the lesser-known hikes in the Moab area (hiking on a lovely Sunday in November, we saw no other hikers), but it has plenty going for it – some interesting narrow sections, solitude, and great views of the towering walls of the Fisher Towers. Dogs are allowed too, unlike on most of the more popular Moab hikes.

The hike starts from the Onion Creek road, which is clearly signed off Highway 128 a short distance south (toward Moab) of the Fisher Towers turn off. To make things easy, zero your odometer on leaving the pavement; it’s 3.0-3.2 miles from the turn off to the point where the hike starts. When we did this hike the dirt road was in great shape, but be aware that it fords the creek multiple times. In November this was no problem at all for my small SUV, and perfectly fine for a compact car, but things might be different if there had been heavy rain or runoff recently. You might want to pick a different hike if you drive a treasured BMW. The hike starts where the Narrows of Onion Creek begin, just before the road climbs quite steeply above the creek on the left-hand-side. Parking is quite limited – there’s space for maybe 3 or 4 vehicles and no marked trail head.

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Hiking the Onion Creek Narrows, in the main canyon

The first mile of the hike follows Onion Creek through the narrows. This is not one of Utah’s jaw dropping canyons, but it’s pleasant and scenic hiking up along the stream. In November the water was only a few inches deep, and the creek eminently leap-able, so it was easy hiking throughout the narrows. The road parallels the creek – at one point crossing it on a small bridge high above – but apart from a few ATVs we heard little traffic. At the end of the narrows the road descends again to the water, and for a really short hike you could be picked up there.

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Short section of narrows in the second side canyon

To extend the hike you can either continue up canyon (we didn’t try that), or start investigating the side canyons that lead off to the left toward the Fisher Towers. The side canyons are to be found immediately before the road crossing, and are obvious on the ground. The first can be explored for only a short distance before it dead ends in a substantial pour off that is well beyond the ability of non-climbers to ascend. The second is more inviting. There’s one obstacle a moderate distance in which requires a bit of scrambling (we found a rope here, though it wasn’t essential), but once that’s surmounted the canyon can be hiked for quite some distance upstream. Various side-side-canyons appear, and you can take your pick which way to go. We took another left at the first of these junctions, and proceeded on past a couple more before reaching a spot where more substantial scrambling would have been needed. Retracing our steps from there, we were back at the car after maybe three hours of hiking. But there were plenty more branches we didn’t explore, and it would be easy to spend a half day or more seeing it all.

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Looking toward the Fisher towers from the canyons off Onion Creek

Highly recommended!

Lake District

A flying visit – literally – to the Lake District for a weekend exploring the backroads near Keswick and west of Ambleside. This was my first visit to England’s most celebrated national park in something like 30 years, and it was far more beautiful than I remembered. You need a hardy complexion to hike in the Lakes this late in the season, but the intermittent rain, wind and sunny spells made for fun driving and photography. I’d highly recommend the drive over Wrynose and Hardknot passes, which is truly spectacular

Striking out with the Orionids

The Orionid meteor shower last night was predicted to yield 20 or more meteors per hour. That was probably right – I must have seen about that many from the not-so-dark shore of the Boulder reservoir – but they were all way too faint to make an interesting image. I made the best of it with a vertical stitch of trailed stars. Going more than 90 degrees above the horizon makes for some weird looking effects even with a spherical projection!

Boulder reservoir stars

Night in the Tetons

Cunningham Cabin, stars, Grand Teton National Park

Cunningham Cabin, Grand Teton National Park

The Cunningham Cabin north of Jackson, dating (originally) from 1885. It’s easy to imagine what a remote location this must have been back then! According to Wikipedia “the cabin was the scene of a shootout in 1899 between a Montana posse and two horse thieves, who were killed at the scene”.

Star trails Schwabachers Landing Tetons

Schwabachers Landing, Grand Teton National Park

Walking with a dinosaur

For those with long memories, the introduction of the Canon 400mm f/4 DO in 2000 occasioned a lot of excitement. It was the first camera lens to use diffractive optical elements, and seemed to presage a future in which the super-telephotos would be significantly lighter and more compact (if not, alas, any less expensive). Early reviews were very positive. Fast forward 14 years and super-telephotos have indeed gotten significantly lighter, due to the use of new materials, but of diffractive optics we’ve heard scarcely a peep. Canon did introduce a 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO – which sits uneasily in the lineup as neither the lightest nor sharpest 70-300 – but the expected expansion of green rings elsewhere in the high-end hasn’t happened.

Perhaps we should add, yet. If the 400mm f/4.0 DO I rented for the Tetons (from the always excellent LensRentals) seemed like a bit of a lens design dead-end when I placed the order, by the time it arrived at FedEx it was a dinosaur, courtesy of Canon announcing a version 2 of the lens. Unless you already own one, it’s unlikely that you or I will ever shoot with the original again. Diffractive optics is the future, once more.

How did it perform? In one word, outstandingly! The normal complaints one hears about the 400mm DO are that (1) it’s not as contrasty as the other super-telephotos, (2) it flares more easily, and (3) the bokeh is odd. These may well be valid gripes (and indeed Canon implicitly acknowledged the flare issue in their blurb explaining why the version 2 is better), but in practical use I didn’t find them a problem. And the benefit of the lighter weight is undeniable – this is a pretty fast stabilized super-telephoto that can realistically be hand-held for extended periods of time. I enjoyed using it for both landscape and wildlife shots.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone

Tourist at Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone

Yellowstone bison

A bison shaking off the dust

Fog, Grand Teton National Park

An island of trees among the morning fog, Grand Teton National Park

Tetons beaver

A beaver swimming to his dam

Pronghorn antelope

A pronghorn antelope in the grass, Tetons

I’m always slightly amused to read internet commentary that seems to implicitly assume that when you buy one of Canon or Nikon’s most expensive lenses, you have the right to expect it’s the best lens they know how to make. Self-evidently it ain’t so. Better lenses could certainly be designed, but actually realizing them in glass and metal would require some combination of heavier optics, more exotic materials, and better manufacturing tolerances, all of which would mean higher prices. Zeiss’ marketing for the Otus line notwithstanding, even the “best” lenses are compromises between cost, weight, maximum aperture and sharpness, and when weight is an important consideration the 400mm DO (and no doubt its successor) may well be the best choice.

Total lunar eclipse

Total lunar eclipses aren’t nearly as rare as total Solar eclipses (the Earth is a lot larger than the Moon, and casts a much bigger shadow), but they still don’t come around all that often. After considerable planning – and angsting over what would be the best location – I drove up to Brainard Lake in the Indian Peaks wilderness early Wednesday morning. Make that very early, as I left home at 2:30am! I didn’t get quite what I expected, in part because this was my first time shooting an eclipse so I didn’t know what to expect and in part due to intermittent cloud cover, but I’m pleased with the end result.

Total lunar eclipse Colorado