Nature's Colors

The colors out in the natural world have seemed especially beautiful to me recently. This morning, Shyla and I made it out into the hills before the sun's first rays had touched our forest. We gazed at the mountains, already alight with the soft reddish color of the rising sun - alpenglow.

The same rays made Shyla glow in red.

Then, I tried backlighting Shyla with the sun. The sun was directly behind her head. Look at the golden fringe the sun gave her! It's a silhouette in gold.

Last, but not least, I've been going through more star photos from our trip to Utah. I spent more time with my camera pointed away from the North Star than ever before. It made some cool patterns. In this case, the butte was directly south of our campsite so the stars arced across the sky over more than two hours.

I love the desert. We had hoped to get back there over the holidays but it didn't work out. I can't wait for springtime when we can be desert rats again! Happy Sunday!

Summer's Bounty

I love riding my mountain bike in mid-summer's glory on high alpine trails.

It never gets old, even after years of exploring.

While I'm out there, I sometimes see marmots. This one seemed so tame that I wondered if people had fed him. I talked with him for a while - and I named him Marvin. Do you see his two buck teeth? He's a huge rodent with the teeth to prove it.

Every year, I feel like the bottomless wildflowers are a gift, and I love playing with the Duo in them.

We play and play and play.

And then, some days, sunset is glorious. Do you see the almost full moon above the mountain?

This particular sunset, viewed from 11,300' in the mountains, got more intense by the moment. The mountain in the photo is almost 14,000' tall.

That almost full moon made the sky bright blue as the stars streaked across it over the course of almost an hour.

The bounty of summer is endless!

Our beautiful country

On this Memorial Day, I find myself thankful for the beauty of our country that so many have fought to preserve. During our time in the desert, the song "America, the beautiful" wafted through my mind many times.

You may notice that we often stop at K's Rock first when we go to the Utah desert. The reason is that we love it there, and it's the closest great campsite that we know of. It makes a peaceful and beautiful place for me to recover from the spine pain that traveling always evokes. This past trip was especially hard because the disc just below my lumbar spinal fusion is getting worse and worse. Sitting in a car seat was agonizing.

Movement is key to controlling the pain so Shyla and I mountain biked to a favorite overlook while we stayed at K's Rock.

One of the best parts is being able to share the mountain bike ride and the view with Shyla. I shared it many times with K, but not over the last couple of years of her life. It had become too hard for her to run up to this viewpoint by then. That fact makes me appreciate this phase of Shyla's life even more.

After we girls mountain biked and the boys ran, all of us hung around camp, reclining in our super comfortable La Fuma chairs. We watched a pair of bluebirds working hard raising a brood that seemed to be stashed in a crevice in K's rock. It was warm, sunny, and so quiet.

Each day, clouds rolled in at sunset so I never got true "sunset golden light" while we were there but Shyla and I had fun with mini-photoshoots anyway. In this photo, she was just about to wave at the camera!

After darkness fell, the clouds sometimes cleared out so that I could photograph the stars. The second night at K's Rock was very special because my time lapse photos showed both the stars spinning around Polaris and moonrise. At the start of the series of photo, K's rock was completely dark because the moon hadn't risen yet. By the end of the series of photos, K's Rock glowed red, bathed by moonlight.

Here's a very short time lapse video of the stars spinning and the moon rising that night. You can watch it at Youtube if you have trouble with the embedded version here.

And here was the final photo after an hour and twenty minutes of photos. The moonlight made it look almost like daytime.

The beauty of our natural world astounds me.

Sunny and Starry Sunday

It was intensely sunny while we visited the desert. The dogs often just shut their eyes to keep the sun out, leading to lots of photos like this one!

So, I loaned them some old sunglasses.

Secret Agent Shyla...

And, her partner, Secret Agent R!

Not only was the sun bright during the day but the moonlight was intense at night. The cliff in the next photo was lit by the half moon that was setting behind my camera. I love how time lapse photography shows how the stars spin around Polaris, making beautiful art in the sky.

Happy Springtime on this glorious Sunday!

The Beauty of the Desert

I love the darkness of the desert at night, with zillions of stars twinkling overhead. Gazing into the desert sky is another way that the desert makes me feel small - it puts me in my place.

Since we arrived in the evening, I set up a tripod almost right away and pointed it toward the North Star. There wasn't time for creativity - just a simple time lapse series of the stars spinning around Polaris. The series comprised about two and a half hours. No planes went overhead during that time and one shooting star appeared - a small one to the left of the North Star.

We slept while my camera took tons of sky photos, and we were up fairly early the next morning to explore the canyon.

First the view from above. It's easy to climb up the slickrock that comprises the canyon walls and peek over the edge at the canyon. My bike stayed back from the edge.

I tip toed to the edge, and peeked at the canyon. You can barely see the narrow dirt road that runs along the canyon floor. That's where Shyla and I rode.

We were both overjoyed to be in a new environment that was warm and sunny.

Shyla explored the sides of the canyon, climbing among the rocks.

We passed the most well known part of the canyon, a huge wall adorned with pictographs, drawn by ancient people.

It's hard to get a sense of scale from the photo above, except if you look at the fence that is near the bottom of the wall. In fact, there's even a person just to the left of center looking at the pictographs. He is tiny compared to the wall (and almost impossible to pick out).

Here, I zoomed in on him. You can also see the red pictographs that are life-sized depictions of people.

It was a wonderful first day in the desert with the promise of many more canyons to explore!

Starry Sunday

A flashback - at K's Rock in Utah in November, it was a mostly clear night with just a wisp of a cloud above us. I'd set up my camera to shoot the stars when I saw a shooting star zip above the tallest part of K's Rock. I hoped that my camera had captured it.

After I arrived home and started wading through my photos, I discovered that the camera did capture it.

After the shooting star, I left the camera going for hours, and this was the final photo. So many stars...

The thought of warm sun and clear night skies seemed almost surreal in our blustery winter world today. The fierce wind was whipping the fresh snow horizontally.

Quite a contrast...

Happy Starry Winter Solstice!

Happy Winter Solstice. It feels like such a symbolic milestone every year. Now, minute by minute, our days will get longer. The "evening" hike that I take every day with the Duo will get closer to actually being in the "evening"!

While we were in the desert in late November, I took a lot of star photos, partly because the nights were so long. The sky was dark enough to photograph the stars starting at about 6:30 PM!

One of my favorite places to gaze at the sky is K's Rock. Its distinctive shape and red color make a wonderful foreground for the stars. To visualize the stars' movement, I took a series of exposures over more than 2 hours. I made a time lapse video, if you'd like to see how the stars spun over time (actually, the Earth was spinning, but that's not how it looks when you are on Earth!). 

You can watch either here or at Youtube.

This was the final photo, after I stacked together all of the exposures. I love how the North Star barely peeks over K's Rock.

Happy Starry Sunday and Winter Solstice to you!

Not as planned...

Today didn't go as planned but that's okay because our "veterinary situation" turned out to be minor.

Late yesterday afternoon, Shyla started squinting with her left eye. Shyla was also doing this odd one-eyed rapid blinking. If I didn't know better, I would've thought that she was winking at me. Of course, she waited to show these symptoms until after our regular vet had closed for the day.

I did the usual home-first-aid. I examined her eye for foreign bodies and saw none. Then, I irrigated her eye profusely with eye wash. That didn't help. So, then I moved onto putting a drop of an eye antibiotic into her eye. When we woke up this morning, her eye didn't look much better. You can see it in this photo.

That's in contrast to her right eye which looked clear and as beautiful as ever.

I put in another antibiotic drop early this morning. (I was confident in the steps that I took because I had a dog, years ago, who had really serious chronic eye problems - so I know the ophthalmology "drill").

I called the vet at opening time. As I expected, we needed to go have Shyla's eye examined to make sure that there wasn't an injury to the cornea. That wasn't how I was planning to spend my afternoon but eyes are important. At least there was good news - it appears to be simply a tough infection that will take a couple of days to respond to antibiotics.

I've devoted this week to being my "anti-migraine" week, and a long drive to the vet wasn't part of the plan. I'm trying to do everything in my power to slow down the train of these awful migraines that I've been having. So, I'm not going to try to write the post that I had planned for today because my head has a hint of that "pre-migraine buzz" that I know so well.

Instead, I'll share a few star photos from our desert trip. This is one of those intricately carved buttes that make the red rock desert so beautiful. The moon had already set so the sky was dark, showing off billions and billions of stars.

Even though I had to point my camera to the south (so the North Star was behind me), I decided to experiment with star trails over the butte. I did a long series of photos. This one was after 33 minutes of camera exposures. It looks mystical to me.

And this one was after 2.5 hours of the world spinning under the stars.

Even though these photos are not the "classic" star trail photos with concentric circles around the North Star, I was pleasantly surprised by pattern that emerged with the beautiful red rock of the butte glowing in the foreground.

Several of you have mentioned wanting to try star photography. When I first started, I simply experimented with almost no guidance - and I didn't learn very fast. Then, I bought a book about Night Sky Photography that has helped me immensely. I highly recommend it (and no one is paying me to do so!). I still refer to it regularly.

Tomorrow, if my head is okay, I hope to be able to tell you about an amazing sunset hike we took in the desert.

Starry Sunday

I love taking star photos when we're in the desert. The sky is so dark and the stars shine brilliantly. Often, there are unique rock formations to use as the backdrop for the stars.

At one of our campsites, I desperately wished that the view toward these cliff walls would yield good star photos. Alas, the cliff walls are to the west, and I've never managed to get good night photos that include the distinctively sculpted cliff walls.

To the north of the campsite, there is an active earthquake fault. Over eons, the fault has thrust "stuff" up above the ground to make a wall of unique-looking rock. It's reddish, and its shape is pleasing for photos.

So, I set up my camera there on several nights, with the rocks over the fault in the foreground and the North Star in the background. I tried different camera settings each night. One tough part of our camping trips, as a photographer, is that I cannot look closely at my photos or process them until I get home (because we have no access to electricity sources and no laptop with us).

That means that I try different settings for my star photos each night, hoping to learn later which one was best. For this site, I believe that nailed the settings best on our second night there. This photo is a composite of 4 hours and 15 minutes of 4 minute exposures with 5 seconds between exposures to let the camera store the files. I have an "intervalometer" to control my camera, opening and closing the shutter at pre-programmed times, so I can sleep while it does its work.

The camera kept taking photos through moonrise, and the reddish hue of the rocks is from the moon that has just risen off to the right of the frame. I used a computer program to superimpose all the exposures so we can see the star trails.

After a couple of years of experimenting with star trail photos, I have to say that this one is my favorite so far. If you look very very carefully, you can see a faint shooting star that streaked from the top of the photo, just to the left of the North Star.

R agrees! He gave this photo two dew claws up!

Happy Starry Sunday!

Desert Fun

Since it's Friday, I'll keep this post simple. I want to show you a few more photos from our desert trip.

This was K's rock on our second night camping there. The moon was still almost full - so not many stars were visible over the 2 hours and 15 minutes that my camera took star trail photos. But, I love how the moon made K's rock glow and also made the sky a deep blue rather than black. The streaks of clouds add to the surreal feeling.

I'll also share a photo taken at sunset near K's Rock. This one truly shows what an alien landscape the red rock desert is. The light at sunset in the desert is incredible!

 And Shyla waved bye-bye to the sun as it set on the distant horizon. What a happy dog she is!

Happy Friday!

Wordless Wednesday: Springtime

In the desert...

In the mountains...