We spent most of the day in the car today, driving from Montreal to (near) Toronto. We did take a few minutes to visit Lake Ontario. This is my second Great Lake.
There will be more pictures to come at some later date. For now I’m really tirezzzz zzzz zzzz zzzz
They were called the Von Trapp family before they came to the United States. Pretty much everything else in the Sound of Music is fiction, including the kids’ names, but the family did open up a hotel in Vermont, and the hotel is still there, although the family members depicted in the movie are all gone now. We were heading toward Burlington last night and Jen started looking for hotels. She found a link to the Trapp Family Lodge and we started heading that way. I would go back there in a heartbeat. It was a really nice place.
I took a few pics of the view from our tiny little balcony.
The morning mist in the valley was pretty cool.
COWS!
When we came back from breakfast the mist was gone.
The mist was gone, but the cows were still there.
The mist was gone, but the spider in the next door balcony was still there. Morning, Boris!
I took my camera along when we picked up the kids at summer camp the other night. Here are a few (kid free) pics.
It was getting dark, so don’t expect anything too wonderful.
There weren’t a lot of clouds in the sky, but this one looked cool.
My poor attempt at getting water and clouds together while still avoiding any human faces.
I enjoy a good camp fire pic.
This huge bird buzzed us. Is it a heron?
The best flame pic of the night.
Did you know Flickr was bringing out yet another new layout? I didn’t, but I’m pleased.
I really liked the initial redesign. Then the second redesign rolled out and… I liked it, but not as much. I still preferred it to the “old” Flickr, but there were a few things that bothered me.
I’ve spent all of 3 minutes looking at this third new design and I like it 1000 times more than version #2. I think it’s close to redesign #1, but I’d still like to see the film strip style display for groups and albums (not sets anymore, albums). It’s still better than the last update which showed the film strip but not the image you were looking at within the film strip. I think it defaulted to the most recent pics.
Thanks Flickr!
Here are the pics from the second waterfall we visited on our mountain get away. Why take my word for it when you can let the site itself give you the info…
It says it’s a 600 foot walk. It was. They didn’t tell us it was vertical. It was almost all stairs. It was so worth it though. The river alone was worth it.
This is not what we came to see.
I want to go back with my tripod and take long exposures all day long.
This is a bad shot, but you get the idea. This place is awesome.
Again, this is not the main attraction.
This is the waterfall itself as seen from the top. I totally need a wide angle lens for stuff like this. I also need to be able to hover so I can actually look down on the scene instead of just leaning over with the camera strap still around my neck.
We were at the base of the falls here but I need a wide angle lens. I couldn’t get the whole thing into the shot. Not even close.
This is a little more like it.
And there you have it. The highlights from our stop at the Glen Ellis Falls. I would go back there in a heartbeat. Preferably with a wide angle lens and my tripod. This place was fantastic.
This is so cool. I have an actual backlog of pics to post here! Time to get caught up a little bit.
These are from our trip to the mountains a couple of weeks ago and will focus on the coolness that is Jackson Falls.
This was where we stayed. We got there a little too early to check in so we decided to just drive around the block. Little did we know that the waterfall we were hoping to check out while in town was on the same street!
It wasn’t a sheer drop (we checked out one of those the next day) but more like a steep slope with lots of small drops. We parked in two places along the road.
I love the mountains where the rivers look gold… apart from the spots that are white because they are violently getting hurled off of a small cliff.
I thought about using the downed tree limb to make a raft to skirt the rapids, but then I remembered we had an SUV in the parking lot, so I could use that for my traveling needs instead.
We drove a little further upstream and the view improved greatly.
I had the polarizing filter on to cut out the reflections on the water.
That bridge needed a sidewalk so you could view the river from above.
The best views for us were upstream, but I have since read that if we’d gone further downstream they might have been even better.
I never messed with the shutter speed. I didn’t go for long exposures because I didn’t want to bother using the tripod (next time though) and I didn’t go for shorter exposures to try and get the falling water sharper. I just stuck with the auto setting because it was more fun being a tourist than a wannabe photographer.
I was leaning my elbows on one of the big rocks. Can you see it on the bottom of the image?
The polarizer cuts down on reflections, but it doesn’t help with shadows. Noted.
So there you have it. The first of two waterfall posts from our get away weekend. I’m not sure when the second post will happen, but it should be soon.
Remember last summer how I kept saying I was going to get up super early and go to Salisbury Beach and take pics of the sunrise? Remember how it wasn’t until mid-September that I actually did it? This year I thought I’d go to Hampton Beach and do the same thing. I even started with the whole telling people I was going to go and then not waking up early enough to go thing.
Last night we went to bed pretty early. Neither of us slept well on Friday night and we were both pretty wiped out. My poor love has a really bad cold and she was needing sleep. I was just tired. I told my beloved that if I found myself awake around 4am I was going to go to the beach. She said okay and probably assumed I was just an idiot.
I woke up at 2am. Why? I don’t know. I do know that I couldn’t get back to sleep. By 2:30 I was lying in bed reading twitter. By 3:00 I was sitting on the couch watching youtube videos of death metal bands some acquaintances of mine were in back in high school. By 4:00 I was dressed with Waze set to bring me to the ocean. By 6:00 I was back home with a crap load of new pics to bore everyone with.
Here you go…
I pulled into the main beach area parking lot only to find that there was a little peninsula that was between me and the spot the sun appeared to be heading for. Crap! I drove further down and found this little spot between a couple of piles of rocks. The tide seemed to be very much in so I had to climb over an obstacle course of rocks (the ones you see in this pic) to get to it. And the sand flies. Holy crap, the sand flies! They were there in Salisbury last year but they left me alone. Not today. I was bitten a whole bunch of times.
That spot where the sky is starting to get brighter? That’s the spot that I couldn’t see from the main beach.
While waiting for the sun to appear I had to amuse myself somehow. Splash.
There it is, just starting to poke over the horizon.
Meathead continues to amuse himself.
Good morning!
Zoom.
And the nitwit continues to amuse himself.
I put the ND filter on for these, just to see how they’d look.
The land you see here is part of what was blocking the view from the main beach.
And one to grow on.
So last year I went to Salisbury Beach in Massachusetts. This time I went to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. Does that mean next time I have to go to Old Orchard Beach in Maine? The time after that should be Cadillac Mountain, the first spot on the East coast that sees the sunrise. After that I’ll have to go South to Rhode Island, I guess.
Happy Sunday morning sunrise, everyone.
I snuck off to Hampton Beach this morning and took some sunrise pics. I took the tripod and the neutral density filter and shot a few long, or longish, exposures.
To me “long exposure” and “30 second exposure” are sort of synonymous in a weird way. When I set up I set the shutter speed to 30 seconds without giving it any thought.
The first few are from before the sun actually came up. It was light enough to read by, but the sun wasn’t over the horizon yet.
This one might be my favorite of the bunch.
Now it gets weird. You put the ND filter on so that you can take long exposures in the daylight. What if the daylight itself is what you’re trying to shoot? Well, if you leave the shutter open too long you get crap like this. (although I still like the rocks in the bottom left)
After seeing that image in my tiny little display I thought, I guess it’s time to shorten the exposure. I then began to experiment. Duck and cover.
13 seconds, without the sun, and apparently the Earth has begun to tilt out of control (sorry).
10 seconds, with the sun. A little better, but still a sloppy mess.
2 seconds. I kinda like this one.
1 second. Not as dramatic an effect, but still kinda nice.
I’ll post some of the non-long exposure pics shortly.
I got a polarizing filter for Christmas this year. I hadn’t even screwed it onto the lens before this week. Why? I don’t know, don’t pick on me. Sheesh.
Anyway I did a few tests while in the mountains. I’d turn it until the sky looked washed out, take a pic, then turn it until the sky was as dark as it could get, take a pic. And so on. Here are a few results.
This one…
…compared to this one.
And another test, this one…
…compared to this one.
I also did a test of how it handles reflections on water. I turned it so that I could see as much sunlight reflecting off the water as possible, took a pic, turned it so there was as little reflection as possible, took a pic.
This one…
…compared to this one.
Did I do it right? As with all things photography, I haven’t a clue. I’m just pushing buttons and turning dials and seeing what happens. Should I do anything different when using the polarizing filter?
Let me know.
I took three videos with my D90 at the Glen Ellis Falls. They all kinda look like crap, but I cut them together in iMovie and uploaded them to Vimeo anyway.
Enjoy(ish)
Inside the Red Head's Head 