Great Falls in Winter
Mukhsim and I spent the second day of my trip in Great Falls National Park (Maryland side). Although the falls are magnificent, the scene does not look so pretty in winter. Leafless trees, dirty snow and pale rocks, in addition to a windy and cloudy day did not present good opportunities for photography. We hiked for about a mile back and forth and finally went back, because I just could not see anything worth taking a picture of. Mukhsim said that the Virginia side looked prettier, but I bet it looks about the same at this time of the year...
Here are a couple of pictures from the day:
Dunes and Snow – Wallpaper
I have been really wanting to go back to sand dunes and take some more pictures in the winter, but it has been extremely cold out there and driving for three and a half hours one way to freeze myself and my equipment to death is not something I wanted to do. Hopefully it will start getting warmer soon (at least on the weekends) so that I could go back and take some more pictures of this amazing place!
Here is one of the images from my last trip to the park:
It is very odd to see when sand and snow mix together...
And here is the 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper for you to enjoy :)
Yellowstone Pools and Streams
I seriously cannot wait to go back to Yellowstone this year (hopefully it won't blow up before then, like in the movie "2012" :)). Jokes aside, Yellowstone is one of the most magical places on Earth and I truly fell in love with it. Here are some of my favorites pictures of pools and streams from the park in large resolution.
- Deep Pool 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Hot Stream 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Mammoth Hot Springs
- Colorful Springs
Best of 2009 – Landscapes (Part 3)
This is part three of the "Best of 2009 Landscapes" series. A couple of things that I wanted to mention here:
- The "Double Rainbow" image is a little soft, because it was still raining when I took the picture
- Although the composition is pretty much absent, I still went ahead and decided to post the "Fall" photograph as one of the best of 2009, because it has a special value to me. I took the image with a very long lens after an unsuccessful attempt to chase a bird and fired about 8 horizontal shots hand-held. I was sure that those images would end up in being deleted, but after I came home, I tried to stitch them together for the heck of it and ended up having this picture :)
And here are the images:
- Aged Colors 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Arches 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Crystallized Leaf 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Curved River 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Double Rainbow 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Fall 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Frozen Dunes 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Indian Writings 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Mammoth Hot Springs 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Water Explosion 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
Thumbnails:
Best of 2009 – Landscapes (Part 2)
This is part two of the "Best of 2009 Landscapes" series. Although I'm not an expert on building panoramic shots by any means, I believe these ones came out all right from what I shot last year. One thing for sure - I need to get a good panoramic head, because I enjoyed the process of shooting, then stitching panoramas. The largest panorama I have done so far is composed of over 250 images and it was so darn big, that I had to downsize it to 25,000 pixels. Not sure if I want to do that again, since it took forever to stitch the damn thing, but I think up to fifteen vertical images on a panorama is quite workable :)
Oh by the way, all of the shots below with the exception of "Zabriskie Point" were shot hand-held.
- Dune Sunset 1920x948 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Zabriskie Point 1920x675 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Golden Dunes 1920x687 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Snow, Dunes and Water 1920x638 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Cloudy Day in Mountains 1920x773 Panoramic Wallpaper
Dune Sunset
Best of 2009 – Landscapes (Part 1)
Looks like I will be posting the "Best of 2009" pictures till the end of the year! Kidding :) In all seriousness though, it did take me a long time to go through all of the pictures, pick the ones I liked the most, then have Lola look at them and give her opinion, after which I would repeat the process multiple times until I got to a reasonable number of pictures.
This year has been a landscape year for me, since I do not have as many wildlife photos. Landscape photography is very different than wildlife photography in many ways (I will write an article about it within the next few days) and I've learned a great deal while taking pictures of landscapes. I have also learned quite a bit about panorama and HDR photography, which are not that hard to understand, but quite complex to master.
Anyway, I do not want to bore you with all of this - here are my picks for the best of 2009 in landscape category. This is also the "Part 1", because I have many more landscape pictures to share :)
- Antelope Canyon 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Badwater 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Lone Tree 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Maroon Bells 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Reflection 1920x945 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Sand Dunes Rising 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Sand Dunes 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Sunset 1920x825 Panoramic Wallpaper
- Trees 1920x1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
- Yosemite 1920x1131 Panoramic Wallpaper
Thumbnails:
Sunset
Too bad the kite surfer got mixed up with the black horizon - otherwise it would have been an OK picture.
I waited for the kite surfer to jump up, but he never did and it seemed like he spent more time in the water, trying to get back on. The sunset though, was beautiful!
Shot with Nikon D700 and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G lens.
Tree and Truck
Not sure which one I like better. The vertical shot has more white flowers in it, while the horizontal one seems to be more balanced?
Florida Sunset
While going through some of the pictures I took in 2009, I found this one:
I remembered how I took it. I was driving back from a bird watching trip and saw this beautiful sunset. I knew that I didn't have any time left, so as soon as I saw an open area, I jumped out of the car and ran towards the ocean. I looked for interesting objects around me, but couldn't find anything. So I just snapped a few pictures and went back into the car. It's not a good photo by any means, but there is something interesting here - the picture was taken in Florida, where the sun sets on the opposite side of the ocean. That's why there is a thin layer of black in the middle :)
Working on the best of 2009
I'm going through thousands of pictures from this year, trying to pick my favorites. I'm planning to pick about 10-15 pictures and then post them here in higher resolution for you to enjoy and use as wallpapers.
I decided to post the pictures under three categories:
- Sunrises/Sunsets
- Landscapes
- Black and White
- Wildlife - Birds
- Wildlife - Animals
Stay tuned!
