Landscape, Nature And Travel Photography

The more I travel the more I see people taking photos with mobile devices (cell phones, tablet computers, etc.) Case in point while in Glacier National Park I spied a tourist photographing Logan Pass from a turnout on the Road to the Sun with an iPad 2. It’s very common to see people taking photos with their mobile phones, but the difference in this case is that the iPad 2 has a very weak camera by modern standards. The iPad 2 rear camera has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, which adds up to 0.92 megapixel. By comparison most mobile phones now have resolutions on the order of 3-5 megapixels. I’m not sure this photographer will be very happy with his images when he realizes this. Bummer too as he was from Europe and I’m sure it will be a while before he’s back in Glacier National Park.

Are you seeing an increase in this trend on your trips?

Tourist Photographs Mount Clements with an iPad 2 - Glacier National Park, Montana

Technorati Tags: photography, iPad 2, stock photo, Glacier National Park, Montana, tablet

After departing Glacier National Park last week I made a one night stop in Yellowstone National Park. What do you photograph at night in Yellowstone? If you’re me, Old Faithful erupting at night with the Big Dipper in the background.

I was fortunate that the weather was clear on this particular night as it allowed for the moon to illuminate the scene evenly and it made it easy to capture the starry sky above. On the other hand my timing could have been better. I missed the 10:15pm eruption and had to wait approximately 80 minutes for the next one. For nearly 80 minutes it was just me and the Big Dipper passing time. While I was hoping to avoid a long wait, it was a relaxing evening none-the-less.

Old Faithful Night Eruption with Big Dipper - Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Photo Details:
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM, f/4, 20 seconds at ISO 2500

Technorati Tags: photography, landscape, nature, Old Faithful, Wyoming, Yellowstone, National Park, stock photo, stock picture, Big Dipper, Ursa Major

Logan Pass in Glacier National Park is a truly special place and a gem of the U.S. National Park system. It is for this reason it is one of the most popular locations to visit in Glacier National Park. Adding to the allure is a very short season that the pass is open. At an altitude of 6646 feet (2026 m) it is often one of the last portions of the park to open. In fact this year the Road to the Sun, the road leading to Logan Pass, opened on July 13th… the latest the road has ever opened to date. As you’d imagine it was well worth the wait. Photographed just last week (see below) is Clements Mountain, a small waterfall and colorful wildflowers.

I’ve been back 3 days and I already can’t wait to return to Logan Pass at the soonest opportunity.

Wildflowers and waterfalls in front of Clements Mountain in Glacier National Park, Montana

Photo Details:
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon TS-E24mm f/3.5L III (via BorrowLenses, 1/320 sec, f/16 at ISO 320

Technorati Tags: photography, nature, landscape, Glacier National Park, Logan Pass, waterfall, national park, Montana, Clements Mountain, wildflowers, stock photo, stock picture

One thing I’ve come to terms with over the years is that when in the field no matter how psyched or enthused I am, I end up having a comical internal conversation with myself to wake up for a sunrise photo. Mind you this isn’t all the time, but the frequency is greater when I’ve been putting in long hours the day before. Case and point was my recent trip to Montana and Wyoming where I was frequently putting in 20-22 hour days that included driving, research, hiking, setup, shoots, file transfers and file backups.

Logically I know the time, place and gear to use for sunrise photo shoots, but that doesn’t make getting up any easier. For your entertainment here is a window into one mental conversation I had with myself for the following subject/goal:

Subject
Wild Goose Island, Glacier National Park

Goal
Photograph sunrise for single still images and time-lapse. If circumstances permit shoot short video sequences.

Gear
(2) tripods with tripod heads, (2) Canon 5D Mark II cameras, (2) cable release/intervelometers, Zeiss f/2.8 21mm lens & Canon f/2.8 24mm tilt- shift lenses via Borrowlenses.com, Singh-Ray polarizer and my camera bag with a few other spare lenses just in case.

How the Inner Conversation Unfolded
Alarm clock goes off at 4:30 and I quickly turn it off.
(Note: I set my alarm at 3 different times 15 min apart just in case. I do this to make sure I get up if I’m tired from consecutive long days.)
My eyes open and I instantly get a view of the pitch black sky to see what the weather conditions are so as to evaluate whether the days photo shoot is a wash or not. This always prefaces my inner morning conversations.

Good Jim: Hmm weather looks good.  It’s clear to the west for morning light to pour into the valley, but there is wind. Looks good albeit not perfect for the shot I envisioned.

Bad Jim: Oh man! It is way too early, dark, cold and I’m exhausted. That wind is going to blow any chance for a glass reflection this morning. Let’s do this tomorrow.

Good Jim: Dude! Weather conditions are going to be dramatic with the weather front coming in, especially seeing that it’s clear to the west. Looks likely clouds are going to be hugging mountain peaks that will glow during the blue and later golden hour. No sunrise is ever exactly the same. Let’s go.

Bad Jim: Let’s see how things look in another 15 minutes.

Good Jim: Dude we have no time to waste.
I run a quick mental calculation run to figure out travel and setup time.
I can’t leave any later than 5am if I’m going to get 1st choice in location and properly setup.

Bad Jim: Seriously I can get this in tomorrow. Just a bit more sleep…

Good Jim: I did not come all this way flying 1000 miles and driving 9 hours yesterday to miss an opportunity to photograph this sunrise or the next at Glacier National Park. Get the lead out. There will be no missed opportunities on this trip!

At this point I snap into gear and quickly get my pre-prepped equipment together, run a double check on gear and clothes and drive out to the lookout point. As it turns out there is one car already at the lookout with a photographer resting inside.

Good Jim: Dude! I could have been here first if I wasn’t wasting time debating with myself first thing this morning.

I quickly collect my gear, locate a spot for the best view, set up, take test shots to fine tune focus and exposure, and wait for the light.

Sunrise at Wild Goose Island, Glacier National Park - via my iPhone
dSLR photos coming soon

As I knew conditions were perfect and sunrise was unbelievably beautiful. Everything went perfectly. I got great stills, a time-lapse and short video sequences.  Thinking back that I’d have opted for sleep rather than being there to photograph this amazing sunrise is beyond me and a reminder that I can be my own worst enemy. The key is not to let that happen with a great deal of discipline.

Sadly I’d like to say this is a one off situation, but it’s not. This type of inner conversation happens more times than I’d like to admit. Fortunately from experience I know that great things happen when you push yourself, get out of your comfort zone and remain disciplined.

Looking back at many of my images I don’t just see the photographed subject, I see the experience and remember back to similar early morning thoughts that I could capture this another day. Nature never shows reruns, every show is one of a kind. I remind myself of that often particularly on cold dark mornings when I’m dead tired and a new sunrise awaits being photographed.

Technorati Tags: photography, philosophy, real-life, inner voice

This coming Saturday I’m honored to be presenting in Utah at the Professional Outdoor Media Association conference on the topic of mobile applications publishing. If you’re a JMG-Galleries blog subscriber and will be there, do say hello. I look forward to meeting you.

After that if all goes well I’ll be aiming to re-explore Montana’s Glacier National Park during a very small window of time. Any chance I can get to visit Glacier I take. It’s one of the most amazing locations and a source of great inspiration.

I’ll blog as I can, but there is a good chance I’ll be off-line for much of next week.

I wanted to thank everyone for taking part in the Moonbow Inspired Giveaway. I’m happy to announce that the winner was John Sweeney.  Have fun with the ThinkTank Hydrophobia SLR rain/dust cover John.

Again thanks to ThinkTank (my affiliate store link) for their great gear and generosity. Also be sure to follow them on Twitter at @thinktankphoto and on Facebook.

Lunar Rainbow (Moonbow) at Lower Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park

Technorati Tags: photography, Yosemite, Moonbow, Lunar Rainbow, landscape, nature, stock photo, stock picture, giveaway, ThinkTank

This is the third image in my series of light painting photos taken on the Racetrack in Death Valley, California. Other photos from this series include Light Lasso and Light Lasso II.

Racetrack Light Lasso III, Death Valley National Park

I’m looking forward to returning to the Racetrack later this year on my next photo tour. This particular photo tour in October is booked, but if you’re interested in joining me to this amazing location via a private tour or on my next Death Valley photo tour email me via my contact form. I’ll be announcing my next Death Valley dates in the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Death Valley, Night Photography, Light Painting, National Park, Racetrack

If you use Adobe Lightroom then let me warn you, the following dialog box is the last thing you want to see when all is configured correctly (permissions are correct and another application is not using the catalog). Why? Because it means that your catalog file is inaccessible and may have big problems. The net result being lost work and time to fix the problem. Alas there is something you can do before this ever appears that will save you from spontaneously cursing late in the evening and/or instantly turning your hair white, but first a short story…

Learn From My Experience
This past Friday night at 11pm I was that guy in a darkened room being warmed by the glow of my monitor and cursing at the dialog box pictured above. Innocently enough I thought I’d work on an image or two before bed and brought up Lightroom 3.4.1, but the Zen-like activity of working on an image or two (cue the sound of water trickling over a cascading slope of river rocks with birds chirping above) was abruptly cut short (cue sound of a needle scratching on a record). Panic didn’t set in right away because I backup my Lightroom library on an external hard drive (see my drive setup) and I also employ Apple’s Timemachine backup function for my primary hard drive that houses my Lightroom catalog.
Note: It’s best practice to not keep your working Adobe catalog on an external drive due to degraded performance.

Remembering that I had these two backup mechanisms in place I thought, “Keep it together Jim. Let’s see if we can retrieve things to make this a quick fix before bed.” Then 30 milliseconds later my inner voice countered, “Shit! You’ve avoided backing up your Lightroom library for a at least 2 weeks so you could shut down your computer more quickly. Good job Jim, considering you just made a bunch of new smart collections and keyworded hundreds of photos.” Sure enough I looked and my last catalog backup via Lightroom was made to my external hard drive over two weeks before all my recent work had been completed. Backup plan #1 was a failure purely because I was lazy and impatient.

I then started sorting through my Timemachine drive to find my Lightroom catalog date stamped Thursday (the day before this mess happened). There were multiple backups for Thursday and Friday so I was starting to feel relieved, but then I noticed the file size was half what it should be.  I loaded the catalog and sure enough it was what my Lightroom catalog looked like not days or weeks ago, but several months ago. I’ll spare you the cuss filled thoughts that were shooting through my brain at this point. I opened backup after back up for the past week or two and Timemachine had not updated my catalog for what seems to be months…seemingly  just duplicating an older copy.

As you can imagine the thought, “Holy shit!” kept repeating in my mind. Instantly I opened a browser window and I started searching on Google “Lightroom cannot use the catalog named” and what I found was limited, very limited in fact. Most of the posts were for version 2 and not version 3. The one thing that was consistent advice was to delete the lrcat.lock file that comes up next to your catalog file ending with lrcat. (Note: Do not delete your catalog file ending in .lrcat that is having problems!!!!) I deleted the lrcat.lock file and reloaded Lighroom but kept getting the same result, seeing that dreaded dialog box. I was resigned to having to eat the loss of a lot of work at this point. At best I’d have to copy and paste metadata from exported files made the past 2 weeks  to get back to where I was before my catalog had problems.

Finally as a last resort I decided to restart my computer. The lrcat.lock file was removed and the catalog file didn’t show any signs of corruption you might visually see on a Mac. After my restart I loaded Lightroom and…

everything came up normal. So with out any hesitation I quit Lightroom and at the prompt backed up my catalog via Lightroom’s backup function. I then made a triple backup by copying the verified working catalog to a thumb-drive I carry on my keychain.

Lessons Learned, Please Take Note:

1. Don’t be lazy and regularly backup your Lightroom catalog especially after completing a lot of work.
2. Have a backup of your backup catalog
3. Don’t rely on Timemachine as a backup for your Lightroom catalog. Period.
4. Verify that your backup catalogs work
5. Seriously don’t be lazy and regularly backup your Lightroom catalog!!!

Left Wondering
Granted I didn’t look at every forum entry when searching for a solution to this problem, but those that came up at the top of the search results were not helpful and dated. I was surprised I couldn’t easily find something in the Adobe Labs forum about this that was relevant to version 3.x either. While things are working again I’m not 100% satisfied and I’m going to be researching further what exactly caused my catalog to become inaccessible. Seeing that my Lightroom catalog now spans content on 4 drives and contains information for 110,000 image I’m not keen to risk losing it all.

Addendum
I should have noted that I do convert all my RAW files to DNG and save my metadata to the DNG file. So worst case in this scenario I would have had to rebuild my catalog recreating smart collections and regular collections.

Note: The reason for DNG use is to save metadata to my files without juggling 2 files (RAW and XMP). This makes it easy to keyword in the field while on my laptop and to transfer the files and my work into my workstation master Lightroom catalog.   For more on why I use DNG read DNG, RAW and JPEG: What I Use & Why

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, backup, error, best practice