Driggs, Idaho

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The Tetons are perhaps North America’s most iconic mountain range on account of the lack of foothills on the east side, which makes for a dramatically vertical vista as seen from the plains north of Jackson. The west side is less immediately spectacular, but it’s also much less busy and the starting point for several great hikes that access the “back” side of the range. Driggs, Idaho makes for a good base, there are various motels (much more reasonably priced than those in Jackson) and even a surprisingly good Thai restaurant (Teton Thai). Returning from a long day hike at sunset, scenes that strike me as pretty quintessentially Idaho were easy to come by…

Idaho cow road

Along the backroads of Idaho

Driggs Idaho sunset

Sunset, Driggs, Idaho

Stars at the Scala dei Turchi

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Scala dei Turchi, Sicily

A star trail panorama shot at the Scala dei Turchi (literally the “staircase of the Turks”) in southern Sicily this summer. During the day this is an unusual, and unusually popular, white limestone formation, but after sunset it was very peaceful and beautiful. There can’t be much air traffic over this part of the Mediterranean at night as for once no plane lights intruded into the shot.

Fall in the Tetons

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Tetons sunrise

I’m back from what is always one of the highlights of the year – a trip with my brother hiking, photographing and viewing wildlife in the wild areas of North America. After several years seeking out bears in Alaska, this time we stayed closer to home and visited the Tetons in time for the Fall color. I’ll be posting more about the trip as time permits over the next few weeks, but for now a teaser

Mount Ida

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In one of the early issues of the magazine National Geographic Adventure (that I must have read maybe 15 years ago, before I moved to Colorado) there was a story of a hiker who’d gotten hopelessly lost in an ill-advised attempt to hike to the Gorge Lakes via the summit of Mount Ida, in Rocky Mountain National Park. The story – which ended happily with the guy getting rescued – is a reminder that, however touristy Bear Lake and Glacier Gorge may appear on a summer’s day, my local park also has its share of difficult and remote country. Hiking to Mount Ida gives a glimpse of these less trafficked wilds from a lofty perch close to 13,000 feet on the Continental Divide. Needless to say, unless you want to feature in a future magazine article, descending into Forest Canyon and the Gorge Lakes is an altogether more serious endeavor for the experienced only!.

The hike starts at Millner Pass, on the west side of Trail Ridge Road. After about a mile you break through the tree line, and the rest of the hike is a glorious ramble across the tundra, with great views out toward the west. Almost from the start Mount Ida is visible, initially as an indistinct high point along the Continental Divide.

Stitched Panorama

In total it’s 4.75 miles, with a net elevation gain of 2,000 feet, from the trailhead to the summit of Mount Ida. From the top, you look straight down on to the highest of the Gorge Lakes in Forest Canyon. It’s easy to see why people want to visit them. Unfortunately getting to them via the summit of Ida is difficult (even if you don’t get lost), while getting there via the seemingly easier but trail-less route through Forest Canyon is harder still!

Stitched Panorama

This hike is almost entirely above the trees, and you’d want to avoid it on a day when storms threatened. On a good weather day though, which ours was, it’s a hike I highly recommend

A long hot summer

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I spent my summer in Europe, with stays variously for work and pleasure in Liverpool, Kent and Cornwall in the UK, Chamonix, Sicily and Copenhagen. It will take some time to process the images, but in the meantime here’s a summer sampler…

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Tourists at the Valley of the Temples, Sicily

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Sunset in the fields, Cornwall

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The Mer de Glace, French Alps

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Poppies in the Darenth Valley, Kent

Shooting star trail panoramas with multiple cameras

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Over the Christmas holidays the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to try shooting some wide star trail panoramas – wide enough perhaps that the stars could be seen rising on one horizon and setting over the other. A minute with google was enough to demonstrate that this was not a new idea – Vincent Brady has been shooting what he calls “planetary panoramas” with four cameras bolted to a custom rig. Nonetheless I haven’t seen that many star trail panoramas, no doubt because it requires multiple cameras and lenses, and it seemed that there might be some interesting images to be made with this technique in Colorado.

Star trails from Trail Ridge Road

Having now tried a few it’s time to collect some tips and lessons learned. There are two parts to creating a stitched star trail image, the image capture and the post processing, and although both are pretty straightforward as always there are things to keep in mind.

Shooting

  • You don’t need identical cameras and lenses. I’m sure it would be better if you had duplicate equipment, but I’ve gotten by fine with a combo of a Canon 5D3 / Zeiss 18mm and Canon 7D / Canon 10-22mm (shot at the wide end, i.e. at 16mm equivalent focal length). Modern stitching software can handle it.
  • The cameras need to be mounted as close together as possible, especially if you have any foreground. I’m using a Novoflex QPL 350 rail to mount both cameras to an Arca-Swiss mount on my ballhead. It’s a reasonably solid arrangement, though in high winds I’m seeing a little bit of flex visible as slightly wiggly trails viewed at 100%.
  • Having two cameras bolted to a single rail is optimal if the image you’re after (like the one above) has the horizon midway through the frame. Often you’ll instead be canting the cameras skyward to capture more sky and less foreground. In this case I think the rail is not optimal – it would be better to have each camera independently leveled against the horizon. This would need a rail and two heads, which I haven’t tried yet.
  • The simplest approach is to start shooting continuously as soon as it gets dark enough to see stars, but while there’s still enough light to capture the foreground. At Colorado’s latitude, with exposures of 30s, f/3.5 at ISO 1600, that works out to be about an hour after sunset. It’s pretty gloomy by then, so you’ll want to set up well in advance.
  • Check how good the edge resolution of your lenses is when shooting stars. My Zeiss 18mm is very nicely sharp at the edges wide open, the Canon 10-22mm (also a good lens) less so. It may be advantageous to stop down one stop or so for optimum quality of trails.
  • The basic concept is that the stacking software chooses the brightest pixel across the stack of images, so if you start as the light is fading the first frame will provide all of the image apart from the stars and any moving elements such as bright clouds. It’s fine then to change exposure parameters between the first frame and subsequent ones. For example, if you need plenty of depth of field, you could start with a single f/16 frame, then wait till it gets dark enough that a wide open image is darker and continue from there.
  • Long exposure noise reduction (dark frame subtraction) needs to be off.
  • I use lockable wired shutter releases and my fastest cards to keep the cameras shooting with as little gap as possible between frames. Over an hour or two, you’ll find that one camera is a little slower and a noticeable lag develops. This is fine, but to make the stitching as accurate as possible try to end the total exposure at the same moment (I put a lens cap on the “slow” camera just as the quicker one finishes its last frame).

    • Post-processing

    The basic workflow here is (1) process individual frames for white balance and noise reduction, (2) stack left and right images independently, (3) stitch together, (4) adjust final image. This is going to involve quite a bit of destructive editing and reprojection of the image, and since you’re starting with long exposures that haven’t had the benefit of dark frame subtraction a bit of care is needed. The good news is that you’ll be ending up with a lot of pixels in the final panorama, so even if it’s not perfect at 100% a large print (never mind a version to stand tall on Facebook) can still look good.

  • I start by applying a consistent white balance to all the images, along with a first pass at global adjustments (shadows, highlights, saturation etc). It may be helpful to brighten the foreground an extra stop, this makes stitching later easier and you can take that stop back in a final process of the image. Don’t overdo sharpening at this stage (I export from Lightroom with sharpening set to “low”) – there will be time for that later. Correct for vignetting but leave the distortion as is

    • Trail Ridge Road

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    Trail Ridge Road, which reaches more than 12,000 feet en route between the east and west sides of Rocky Mountain National Park, has just opened for the season (it usually opens on Memorial Day). There’s still too much snow high up for easy hiking, but I thought it would be interesting to take some photos from the road while the mountains still have their wintery appearance. With various roadworks (US36 from Lyons to Estes Park is being rebuilt this summer after last Fall’s devastating floods) I just made it to the Forest Canyon overlook (elevation 11,700 feet) in time for the sunset.

    Trail Ridge Road sunset

    And then stayed on for an hour of shooting the stars. As usual, this is a two frame panorama of stacked 30s frames, here shot at f/8 and ISO 1600. Stopping down – which was here necessary for depth of field – has the additional benefit of substantially sharpening up the edges of the 10-22mm lens I have mounted on the Canon 7D (the Zeiss 18mm I have on the 5D3, on the other hand, is sharp even wide open). The light on the far left, behind Longs Peak, comes from Denver.

    Star trails from Trail Ridge Road

    Night in Taipei

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    A few images of Taipei at night…

    taipei_night_101_1200

    Taipei 101. Taipei is not, for the most part, a city of skyscrapers, and as a result Taipei 101 – the world’s second highest building – looms particularly impressively over the streets from many angles. I shot this from an elevated location at the end of a metro platform

    A fisheye in Taiwan

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    Back when the internet was young, and photo.net was the place to learn about photography, I saw a great fisheye image by Daniel Bayer of climbers traversing Capitol Peak’s famous knife-edge ridge. I haven’t seen many since. Fisheyes – especially the circular variety that project a full hemisphere onto a circular image – are mostly deployed for novelty effect (think comically distorted kid with nose close to the front element), or in pretty well-defined shooting situations (I’m sure we’ll see some for the opening ceremony of the World Cup). That said, I’ve always wanted to try one. As explained in this excellent article a fisheye is not merely a really wide lens but rather a completely different way of projecting the three dimensional world onto a two dimensional plane. The occasion of a work trip to Taipei prompted me to rent one (from LensRentals.com, whose service I highly recommend) and give it a try

    Roxborough State Park

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    Roxborough State Park

    Even after a decade in Colorado there are plenty of local parks and wildlife reserves that I haven’t been to. Roxborough State Park, west of Denver, turns out to be a very pleasant spot for some easy early-season hiking, with scenery reminiscent of the Garden of the Gods. There are probably some good images to be made here at sunrise.