Big Bend National Park – August 2016

Yes! Another excellent adventure to my favorite place on the planet – Big Bend National Park.

Although, this adventure started out with a bone-headed move on my part. Kathy Clark and I intended to leave an hour earlier than usual for our 10 to 11 hour drive, but I set my alarm an hour later than I should have. Eeeek. I didn’t even figure it out until I was on the road. But, the traffic gods and the weather gods were kind. We still managed to leave a bit early and arrive earlier than usual.

Why go to Big Bend in August in triple digit heat? Because that’s when the Perseid meteors peak and the Milky Way gas cloud is stunningly gorgeous. The emphasis on this trip would be night photography for certain… Well, have I ever mentioned how temperamental Big Bend can be? She just gives you what she wants to give you, so the sooner you accept that little fact of life, the better off you will be. Luckily, we had a great photography leader in Kathy Clark. She can always make lemonade out of lemons, so we did do some night photography, but it was more about lightning than meteors and stars. And we did do a bit of light painting instruction with a nice old windmill as our model.

The Lightning

This image is a composite of 8 different images – picking and choosing which parts I wanted from each image.

And some of the gung-ho participants did manage to get some early morning photos of the Milky Way, the meteors and star trails. We had a wonderful group of photographers who were enthusiastic, ready to learn and very understanding when the weather didn’t exactly make photography easy. Me, I slept. Yeah, me, the one that always says, “Oh heck, I can always sleep at home. This is Big Bend. Stay up all night.” I slept. Sigh.

The Landscapes

We still managed to get some nice light so did have an opportunity for some landscape photography. There were a couple of fairly good sunrises, an okay sunset and I grabbed a couple of shots at times I would not normally shoot. The one at the Rio Grande was to show what you can do when the light is not right and the water is muddy. Take photos of the ripples in the sand! The one of The Window is normally taken at sunset, but I thought the shadows on the terrain behind the iconic formation were nicely lit, so why not!

The Birdies

I love to photograph birds at Big Bend, but this time I decided to leave the bird lens behind and concentrate on night photography… Not a good decision. I did borrow a 70 to 200 lens and got a few distant photos of birds, but it just wasn’t the same. So, a “bird in habitat” shot and also some bird food that one of our eagle eye participants spotted are here. The bird is a cactus wren and I think the caterpillars are from one of the Datana moths.

Plants

I did have a good time photographing plants this time. The sky was usually a big soft box of diffuse light – great for birds and flowers. And, many of the plants had nice drops of water on them from the intermittent rains. The red flower is Bouvardia ternifolia or Scarlet Trumpet. The pink one with the honey bee visitor is Leucophyllum frutescens or Texas Silver-Leaf or Cenizo.

The Silly Stuff

I still consider my fisheye lens photos to be a little on the silly side. It is not a practical lens, but it sure is fun. I tried it out on starbursts this time. It has a fairly nice burst quality.

Ocotillo Burst, Santa Elena and The Tunnel

I also consider my fumbling attempts at fine art to be mostly silly. As you can see here, I took two perfectly good plant images and twisted their poor little pixels into knots…

To see the before and after effects, click your mouse in the middle of the circle and drag the “curtain” left and right to reveal the original and the final images.

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The drive home was uneventful – well, except for the small backup due to rubberneckers checking out a shed fire, some serious downpours and the incessant construction slowdowns. Luckily my co-captain is an excellent navigator, so with her skills, iPhone maps and Flag Dude (a whole ‘nother story) we managed to sneak around the worst of the traffic jams. And we found a really cool place to take some photos of an old bridge trestle… maybe the subject of my next post?? We’ll see.