Big Bend National Park – July 2015

Another photography workshop with Kathy Adams Clark at one of my favorite places on the planet – Big Bend National Park – was fun and as always educational for me. The participants on this trip were a fantastic group. They all studied the handouts ahead of time and asked great questions.

This trip, I concentrated on choosing one lens for each location and not just any lens, but a lens that I would not normally use at that location. Yeah, go ahead. Ask me. “And, how did that work out for you?” That’s where the educational part comes in. Lens selection really is important…duh. Don’t try this on one of your vacations. Do it in your backyard.

I did manage to get a few images I liked though.

This is on our last morning at Green Gulch – a car heading away from the Chisos Basin.

Just before that pesky car came down the road, I was able to get a wide angle image of the twilight sky down the road. It is a composite of three varied exposure images, processed in Nik HDR Efex Pro. Then I zoomed in to the telephoto end of my lens and got the second image from the same vantage point.

A little silliness – Light painting with a Pixel Stick is so much fun! What a really cool gadget. And, then there’s RT. He always manages to get in trouble on every trip.

Kathy took this shot with my camera – Me perched on a rock at Sotol Vista.

Next is a close-up at Castolon. I used the 100mm macro lens here. This is my favorite of all of the macros I shot…

Our last evening was in the Chisos Basin, photographing the sunset.

Cloud pretending to be a mountain peak …

The moon, Venus and Jupiter along with the iconic Window view. Sure wish I had a telephoto to get those heavenly bodies up close… but that wasn’t my lens choice…sigh.

Lastly, a few shots for an image that Kathy and I tried to get on an evening before the workshop began. Kathy’s idea was to capture the tail lights of my car as I drove toward the mountains, through a pass out of sight and then to get the headlights as I drove back. The spot we chose was a good one, but we couldn’t really get high enough for the shot that Kathy pre-visualized. We gave it a try anyway and learned quite a bit about how to perfect this idea.

Since it would take me a while to make the drive, we knew we would have to take several shots, layer them together and blend them on lighten mode, similar to processing a star trail.

When there was still some light, Kathy took both of our cameras, tripods and intervalometers and climbed up to the top of a peak near the road. She got everything all set up and when we were at the start of twilight, she signaled me to start the drive. I had no idea of how fast to go, but I went a moderate speed up to the pass and turned around out of sight. On the way back, I drove a little faster since headlights are so much brighter than tail lights. When I got back, it was pretty dark and Kathy had to find her way back down that hill with only a flashlight while carrying all our gear. It took her a while and I was getting worried. But, she managed to get back safely.

This is what one of the tail light images looked like …

And this is a composite of all of the images. Originally, I intended to mask out the sky on all but one image leaving a sky with only pinpoint stars, but all of the exposures were too long and each one had quite a bit of star trailing. So, I stacked them and blended them without masking out the sky – exactly as for a star trail.

As you can see, we had some large gaps between shots. Not a problem. I have a nifty little program called Star Tracer (check it out) that will fix those gaps. This is after applying the Star Tracer program – very close to Kathy’s vision.

But, now we know the perfect place to do this again. Wait for it. It will be amazing!