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 :)
Site Reorganization
I'm working on reorganizing the website and the photo gallery. Whatever we currently have in the gallery will be wiped out and I will start putting only good shots in there. It will take me some time to go back and edit the older posts so that the image links are still valid, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. It will be a good way to clean up the website and kind of start over.
I will also be putting up some of the best shots of 2009 in wallpaper format for you to download and enjoy, hopefully within next week.
Snowy Mountains
It was below -20F when I shot this picture at 14 thousand feet two weeks ago:
Looks like we have another snow storm coming up tomorrow!
Frozen Falls
This frozen waterfall almost cost a tripod to my bro Sergey. We had to walk on a somewhat of a thin layer of ice upwards to get to these falls. On our way there, a spot on a stream was only partially frozen, with water rapidly flowing through it. Don't ask how, but Sergey managed to drop his tripod into the water. We could barely walk on the ice and he insisted on trying to recover it. At first, I told him to forget it, but when we returned, I realized that I could use my tripod as a hook and fish it out of the cold water. After a couple of tries, we managed to save the tripod! It was so darn cold that the water that got inside the tripod legs froze immediately and it melted in the car by the time we returned home. Thankfully, I had plenty of paper towels in my trunk that absorbed all the water :)
Anyway, here is a shot of the frozen falls from that adventurous day:
Frozen Falls
Dunes in winter
I haven't yet had a chance to go through the pictures from my second trip to Sand Dunes with Sergey. The sky was cloudless on that day and we didn't capture as many good photos as we were hoping for. Here is one of the first photos from that day:
Unbelievably Cold!
Crazy December - it is freaking minus 10 Fahrenheit (-23C) outside right now! Weather.com says that it will get better by the end of the week and I very much hope it does!
If it is so cold now, I wonder what we'll see in January...
The Black Canyon
I was going through some of my images from last year and found this photograph of the Black Canyon that I really liked:
If you look closely, you will see a rainbow on the left side of the image. The whole scene was spectacular and I was able to get some really nice shots of the rainbow that day.
Sand Dune Panoramas
After many hours of stitching and tweaking panoramas, I'm finally able to post some of the best ones from the Great Sand Dunes National Park. I had to resize and cut the below images, because some of the panoramas were too long.
Once the thumbnails fully load, click on the first image and it will bring up a separate window with a full version of the panorama. Then click on the next button on the right hand side of the image to view the rest of the panoramas. The images are 1200 pixels wide and they might not fit on your monitor - in that case, you can scroll left and right using your scroll-bar on the bottom of your browser.
I captured this first panorama on a small stream that was running alongside the dunes. The stream was very shallow and I simply stood on it, capturing the stream, the dunes and the mountains in the back:
Transformation
Experimented a little bit in Photoshop today and came up with this:
I had no idea that I photographed the same trees twice in different seasons. It would have been great if they were taken from the same spot, but oh well, this one ain't bad either! :)
