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Dead Horse Point Panorama

Apr
17
2010
April 17, 2010
By 31 Comments

Here is the promised panoramic version of the Dead Horse Point at sunrise. The full version is comprised of 8 vertical images, measuring approximately 32 megapixels with an aspect ratio of 2:1.

Dead Horse Point Panorama at Sunrise

All 8 shots were taken in Manual mode at f/8 and 1/10th of a second, ISO 200. Whenever you shoot panoramic images, always remember to switch to full manual mode to get identical exposure. You do not want your shutter speed or your aperture to change when you move from one point to another and shooting in manual will always yield consistent results for stitching software. Do not forget to disable Auto ISO as well – you want to keep your ISO at the lowest value for the best image quality. I will explain all of the above in a detailed “howto” that I’m currently working on.

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Back from Utah again

Apr
15
2010
April 15, 2010
By 7 Comments

Well, technically, it was Grand Junction, not Utah. I had a very busy four day business trip to Grand Junction, CO and after spending countless hours taking care of a problem at work, I had a pleasure of visiting Moab, UT on the last day for a few hours. Woke up very early in the morning at around 3:45 AM and headed out to Dead Horse Point to make it there right before the sunrise. As I was driving the last 10 miles to get to the park, I saw seven cars slowly driving through the steep turns of Canyonlands. Who else would be driving that early? A group of photographers, of course! I was first following them, but then they were too slow and I was hurrying to get to the right spot at least 30 minutes before sunrise. So I stepped on gas and passed all seven cars at 90 miles an hour. I could tell they were pissed! Oh well, I wasn’t going to miss sunrise after 2+ hours of driving.

Arrived at the spot at about 6:20 AM and the sun came out at 6:42. Although the clouds were not as pretty, seems like I managed to capture a couple of shots that I like. I have not yet finished importing the files into Lightroom, but I will be working on some of those this weekend.

Meanwhile, here is me standing on the edge of the cliff:

Nasim Mansurov

And here is how it looks down there, with the nearest rock at approximately 300-400 feet below:

[Read more...]

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Sunrise and Delicate Arch Wallpapers

Apr
1
2010
April 1, 2010
By 15 Comments

Our readers kindly asked us to provide high resolution versions of Delicate Arch and Sunrise shots from my last trip to Utah, to be used as desktop wallpapers. Here are the two images in 2560×1600 resolution for widescreen monitors:

Delicate Arch

1) Delicate Arch 2560×1600 Widescreen Wallpaper

Sunrise

2) Sunrise 2560×1600 Widescreen Wallpaper

Enjoy! :)

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Trip to Utah – Part 2

Mar
28
2010
March 28, 2010
By 16 Comments

This is the second part of my trip log to Utah.

As we wrapped up Arches, we headed up to Canyonlands National Park while the weather was still OK. Afternoon at Canyonlands turned out to be rather productive and the sky got filled up with some gorgeous multi-layered clouds:

Canyonlands #3

Love those clouds! We snapped a few pictures with the clouds on the way up:

Canyonlands #1

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Trip to Utah – Part 1

Mar
27
2010
March 27, 2010
By 17 Comments

I have been putting off working the Utah images for a while and I have finally decided to finish working on them this weekend. I decided to divide the photos to two parts – the first part is primarily Arches National Park and the second part is Canyonlands National Park. Although we spent about three full days in Utah, the weather did not cooperate half of the time, so we tried to shoot as much as we could while it lasted. On top of that, as I have indicated before, I lost about 8 gigs of photos from the last two days. Hope you enjoy these!

I was initially planning to go through I-70 directly to Grand Junction and stay overnight. After a rock fell on the highway and destroyed a portion of it, we detoured through highway 287. On the way to Grand Junction, we stopped at a local farm to take some pictures of the cows early in the morning:

Cows

This one looked at me, wondering what I was up to:

Cow Looking

Next, we headed straight to Arches. The park was flooded with rain from a couple of days before, so there were plenty of interesting pools in the area:

Pool

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Delicate Arch at Sunset

Mar
25
2010
March 25, 2010
By 4 Comments

To be honest, I have not even had a chance to review all images from my Utah trip yet. One of the reasons is probably my frustration over the lost 8 GB of photographs, because of my own stupidity. I was so tired on the day we came back from the trip, that I completely forgot that I had photos from the last two days of the trip stored on one of the 8 GB flash cards that I had in my bag. I copied everything but that one card and never checked all of the images, assuming that I had everything.

Last Sunday we photographed a wedding and I happened to format and use that exact same card that contained the last two days of the Utah trip. I found out about it after we came home from the wedding and it was very painful to realize that those images are gone forever. I had plenty of great pictures on that card, including some sunrise pictures of the Dead Horse Point.

Oh well, next time I will know better!

Anyway, just wanted to show you a sunset image of the popular Delicate Arch that is proudly displayed on all license tags of Utah cars:

Delicate Arch at Sunset

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Back from Utah

Mar
15
2010
March 15, 2010
By 10 Comments

I’m finally back from Utah after a 7 hour drive from Moab. To get home before midnight, Sergey and I left a little early and missed the last sunset. The weather sucked during the last two days (we had 3.5 days total), so we only had a day and a half of good shooting. Nevertheless, I managed to snap 25 gigs of images, but I already know that most photos are going to be deleted. This was the first time when I tried shooting HDR panoramas in three rows and processing those images is going to be a very long and painful process. We only had time to check out some good spots at Arches and Canyonlands, although we did visit a couple of good spots for photography in the area.

Looking down

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More Arches

Mar
30
2009
March 30, 2009
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More photos from Arches National Park:

Arches National Park #3

Arches National Park #4

Arches National Park #5

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Horseshoe Bend

Mar
29
2009
March 29, 2009
By 1 Comment

The “Horseshoe Bend” is located several miles away from the Antelope Canyon. Geologically, it was created the same way as the “Goose Neck” – fast-moving Colorado River currents carved out the rock and created this natural beauty.

Horseshoe Bend

Technical details: Shot aperture priority @ f/10 with a circular polarizer in 3 shot brackets, then HDR’d using Photomatix Pro.

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Bryce Canyon Panorama

Mar
25
2009
March 25, 2009
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This is a very large panorama that I had to resize to fit on the screen (it is approximately 25,000 pixels wide):

Bryce Canyon Panorama

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