Bear Skull Falls
The Ozarks got a goodly dose of rain from Tropical Storm Hermine last week, but the weather report for the weekend looked like a bust for waterfall shooting – mostly sunny skies. So I was taken aback when I was awakened by a workman on the roof Saturday morning and found the sky completely overcast. Because it was my birthday, Gina said I could do anything I wanted and she wouldn’t protest, so I headed out for the hills to see if the waterfalls were still running. I drove up to Russellville, turned left onto Highway 7 and pulled over to consult the waterfall guidebook. Bear Skull Falls in northern Johnson County looked doable. I threaded my way along a couple of twisty state highways and then onto a dirt road until I hit the Ozark Highlands Trail. The waterfall was about a mile and half down the trail. It was a nice level hike for about three-quarters of mile and then the trail headed down, down, down to the bottom of the drainage. There wasn’t much photo worthy material until I hit the waterfall, which you can’t miss. It’s right next to the trail.
Good Old Golden Rule Days
Abby started prekindergarten today. Miss Selma’s doesn’t allow parents to get out of their cars, so I couldn’t get any first-day action shots. I had to settle for a session in the ghetto studio after I picked her up. (That mark on her arm is the remnants of a temporary pirate tattoo she got in Branson 10 days ago.) She was pretty shook up by having to change buildings and teachers and the fact that many of her classmates for the last 1.5 years were defecting for public pre-K. She didn’t go to sleep until about 12:30 a.m. the night before. But most of the kids in her class were also in her 2- and 3-year-old classes so she felt good about the whole thing. “I’m not anxious about pre-K anymore,” she said when I picked her up.
Strobist: SB-600 in shoot-through umbrella directly above and another SB-600 in a shoot-through umbrella propped up on the floor at her feet. SB-26 hair light in homemade snoot at camera left behind subject. I was going for the clam shell effect.
The Bend! Day 4: Crossing The Rubicon
I’ll admit that I’m not much of camper. I love going out into the wilderness and rambling around and I’ll camp out if that’s the only way I’ll be able to visit some places, but I don’t like it. The whole camping thing is just such a hassle. Screwing with ice chests and camp stoves and flashlights and cooking outdoors and not bathing and participating in different bathroom routines is all bothersome but not really that big a deal. The thing that gets me is the tent. First you have to put the damn thing up and arrange some kind of bedding. Then you have to hope it doesn’t rain (admittedly not a great danger in the desert). Then to get up to pee in the middle of the night you have to use to the preternaturally loud zipper, which wakes up your tentmate(s) and possibly other nearby campers. And, if you’re in a campground, to pee in the night you have to put on pants and shoes and walk to the restroom. In addition, there’s the dish washing in cold water and the constant not being able to find things. Eventually you have to take down the tent and put up the bedding. It just sucks.
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The Bend! Day 3: ¡Viva Terlingua!
We got all rested up on Day 2 and we were ready to tackle some more desert hiking on Day 3 (or at least I was). We planned to meet Dale and Amber at 8 a.m. at the Pine Canyon trail head, but we got off to a late start after another rough night in the tent. A gale blew up and pummeled our cheapo Wal-Mart tent for hours. If you’ve never slept in a tent with a 35 mph wind blowing then you haven’t lived, my friend. I finally went to sleep around 1 a.m. and Gina was awake until the wind calmed down sometime around 3. Plus we had to take down our tent and pack up because checkout of the campsite was at noon. So we showed up at the trail a little over an hour late. Luckily Dale and Amber got there only about 30 minutes before we did and were inclined to wait for us. There’s very little cellular reception in the park, so we couldn’t communicate with each other. We were all going on plans we’d made the last time we saw each other two days earlier.
The Bend! Day 2: Chasing The Sunset
I had another long hike planned for the second day at Big Bend National Park, but the hike the afternoon before wore Gina and me out pretty good. Plus we had some inconsiderate campers in the site next to ours and they were whooping it up late into the night. At about 11 p.m. they were talking loudly about the cobbler they were cooking in a Dutch oven. Only about 15 yards separated them from the nearest other campers – us, and several other campsite were close by, but they acted as if they were 100 miles from other people. A little bit of excitement ensued earlier in the evening when a skunk invaded their campsite. To top it all off, they started being loud at about daylight. So they were the last thing we heard before going to sleep and the first thing we heard upon waking up.
We decided to scrap any plans for strenuous hiking for the day and instead went for drive on the west side of the park to see what we could see.
The Bend!
It only took 14 years, but I finally talked Gina into returning to Big Bend National Park for a camping trip. Her first trip, in 1996, got off to a shaky start when we rolled into the campground and the thermometer at the little store showed 114 degrees. In hindsight, it’s clear that visiting the desert during the last week of May is a bad idea if you’re not a big fan of heat. Then there was the fact that we went there in my little Ford Ranger that didn’t have air conditioning. Then there was the late-night incident with the javelina. Then there was the sandstorm that blew in and drove tiny grains of sand through the tent fabric, coating us in grit. We cut the trip short after three days and fled back to comparatively mild Little Rock.
This time, with a March trip planned, the weather promised to be much more reasonable and it was. It was even pretty chilly during the nights. Granted, I haven’t been many places in my life, but Big Bend is the most beautiful, scenic and downright neatest place I’ve ever been. This trip was my third to the park. I shot about 500 pictures and have picked out about 40 to put on the blog, so I’m going to dole them out over the next few days as I find time to get the photos processed. If you want to stretch you’re imagination, you can pretend I’m doing these entries in real time even though the trip was actually last week. I recommend you do that.
Dailey Family Christmas Card
Time for the annual family Christmas portrait. Merry Christmas to you and yourn.
Strobist info: Last year I used a single reflective umbrella and another flash for a hair light and I had weird shadow issues. This year I used the reflective umbrella on camera right with an SB-600 at 1/4 power and my ghetto foam-core softbox on camera left with an SB-26 also at 1/4. I wanted to keep the light ratio very close. Even though both flashes were on 1/4 power, the different modifiers put out different light levels. The softbox was a little brighter than the umbrella.
High On A Mountaintop
Abby’s been gone all week and school’s over until next semester, which has been nice because I got a bunch of stuff done. But by Thursday I’d done everything that needed doing and I found myself at loose ends. I headed west into the Ouachita National Forest to see what I could see. After wandering around on the back roads for a couple of hours I found myself about halfway up Grindstone Mountain in extreme northwest Saline County. I decided to get out of the truck and walk the rest of the way up the mountain. I thought maybe a nice sunset would be in offing, but the overcast sky just took on a kind of pale yellowish glow while the evening haze clinging to the ridges took on a blue-grayish hue. The landscape kinda looked like what you always see in movies featuring dinosaurs. I guess we tend to think the sky and air looked weird a few million years ago. I shot the photo on cloudy white balance to pump up the yellow in the sky.
That big rock sticking up in the middle of the top photo is Forked Mountain.
While I was up there one of those big C-130s from Little Rock Air Force Base flew by, circled Forked Mountain and headed back to the east. Those things always fly very low. This one was at about the same altitude I was.
Land Of Ahs
The state of Kansas once called itself “The Land of Ahs” in its promotional materials. Get it, Land of Ahs=Land of Oz. Yeah, I know. This church sits near my parents’ little farm near Parsons, Kansas. We visited last weekend to enjoy an early Thanksgiving feast. (Cheese grits live on!) The farm is out in the sticks, closest town is six miles away, so it’s a great place to see the stars. For this shot I stacked 97 photos, each of which had a 30 second exposure. The advantage is that when the photos are combined, you don’t get the sensor noise that shows up on a single long exposure. It was the first time I’ve tried this particular star trails technique and it didn’t turn out as I expected. To do this right, you need an intervalometer to automatically make the exposures. Higher-end cameras have the intervalometer built in and you can buy inexpensive small intervalometers that plug into the camera. I had to use some computer software that has intervalometer capabilities and shoot the frames with the camera tethered to my laptop.
It’s a cumbersome arrangement and it didn’t work quite right. I let the camera sit clicking on the tripod while I went back to the house for an hour. When I came back, the software informed me it had attempted 160 shots or so but could only process 97 of them. No idea why that happened. Then I loaded all the photos into Photoshop and ran an action I found on the Internets that combines all those exposures into one shot. Some of the star trails are kinda jaggedy and I don’t know what caused that exactly. Was it the software? Was it camera movement from the slight breeze blowing that night? Who knows. Also the trails near the North Star are really faint. I suspect that was because I had the aperture stopped down to f/8. I needed to have it a little wider for such short exposures. The stacking did work well to get the exposure on the front of the church. Several cars passed by and swept their lights across the church when they turned the corner. I’m going to get a real intervalometer and try this shot again.
Here we have a more traditional star trails shot I made later that night. I just put the camera on bulb and opened the shutter and let it sit for about 50 minutes. I had some technical difficulties on this one, too. When I came back, the camera had shut itself off. I thought maybe the batteries had run out, but there was plenty of battery left. Maybe it got too hot and tripped some kind of breaker. The metadata on the frame said the exposure was 30 minutes exactly. Maybe the shutter will only stay open for 30 minutes, but I know I’ve taken longer exposures than that a couple of times.
The thing sticking up in the middle is an old grain silo on the farm. It’s green from a big yard light shining on it about 200 yards away.
Abby and Gramps got in a little fishing. They couldn’t find any worms, so they used dog food. They didn’t catch anything.
Another Map
I got so excited about MapFlickr that I made another map. This one shows all the photos in my Flickr account tagged with “Arkansas” and geocoded. If you click the little flags, you can see the picture taken there.
Click to see the map.
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The Cartographer
I found this site called MapFlickr that will make a map from your geotagged Flickr photos. I found it to be quite cool, so I made a map of all the waterfall photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. Some of the pins aren’t exactly accurate. I’ve zoomed in on some of them and noticed some are a few hundred yards to a half-mile off. But that could’ve been my fault when I placed them on the map in Flickr.
Click to see the map.
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Dawn Patrol
My Dad and I made our second-annual day-before-the-end-of-daylight-savings-time-sunrise pilgrimage on Saturday. The first annual DBTEODSTP was so successful, we decided to do it again. This year we went to Petit Jean State Park and caught the sunrise from Stout’s Point near the gravesite of Petit Jean herself. Several photographers had already assembled by the time we got there. The sunrise wasn’t all that great photographically, but it was pretty neat to hang out up there with my Dad.
Face-To-Fish
I didn’t have classes on Thursday, so Abby stayed home from school, too. We went out exploring just like in the old days when I was a full-on stay-at-home dad or STAHD. We headed down to the river market to see how the fish were getting along at the Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center.
Cedar Falls At Dawn
If I never accomplish anything else in life I can always say that I was the first person at Cedar Falls in Petit Jean State Park on October 10, 2009. It rained heavily across the Ozarks and Central Arkansas on Thursday night and Friday, so I knew the waterfalls would be running for a few days. The trouble was that Saturday was supposed to dawn with clear skies, and bright sun is no good for waterfall pictures. You need the muted light of cloudy skies to get good photos. I figured if I got out there before the sun got very high, I could do some shooting before things got too bright. Problem number two was that I’d have to go somewhere close by if I was going to be there at sunrise. The only real waterfall close enough for me to get to that early is Cedar Falls. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and got to the trail head a little after 7. And as luck would have it, it stayed cloudy, dark and gloomy all day. The top photo is a panorama made from six blended and merged photos.
Mobile Graffiti
When did train cars become graffiti canvasses? I can remember when train cars had no graffiti at all and now there’s not a car on rails without the artwork. Some of it is interesting. Like this executioner I found on a car sitting on a siding near our summer home in Northwest Arkansas.
Just Looking For A Hit
I found myself with a little free time Saturday and since I haven’t gotten a lot of chances to use my ultra-wide-angle lens, I went looking for something to shoot. I eventually ended up at the old bridge over the Maumelle River on an abandoned stretch of Arkansas Highway 300 in Pinnacle Mountain State Park. This bridge is popular with local photographers and rightly so. It’s old and rusty and corroded and interesting.
Saturday Drive
Arkansas has a split personality. High country and forest lie in the north and west and to the south and east it’s as flat as Kansas. Little Rock sits right on the dividing line. You can drive 30 minutes in one direction and climb a mountain; or drive 30 minutes in the opposite direction and see the curvature of the earth. On Saturday, Abby, Gina, Aunt Jodie and I loaded up and headed to the flat lands, where row-crop agriculture dominates.
On an earlier jaunt I had discovered a country road lined on either side with huge walnut trees that formed a leafy tunnel for a mile or so. We headed back there because I wanted to get a photo looking down the road in some nice afternoon light. That photo idea was a bust. It was still too early in the afternoon and the light was too harsh. We stopped near what looked like an old sharecropper shack to let Abby get out and play in the dirt. A man in a snazzy BMW showed up directly and told us we were on the end of his crop-duster landing strip and needed to move along. So we did.
Heat + Humidity = Sweetness
Some pretty wicked thunderstorms have kicked up the last two days. Abby and I went out looking for some on Tuesday. We found this one booming across the river at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Lightning was flashing but it’s impossible to hit the shutter button quick enough to catch it. On our drive home another one caught up with us and put on a light and sound show as we drove down Chenal Parkway. Click on the photos to fill the screen with scary storm goodness.
New Gear
The UPS man dropped by on Tuesday in his magical brown truck and brought me a new photographic toy, an ultra-wide-angle lens. Right off the bat I gave Abby the wide-angle-lens-to-the-face treatment.
The lens is a Tokina AT-X Pro SD 11-16mm (IF) DX. I sold my Nikon D40 camera and couple of lenses back in April to fund the purchase of this baby. The damn thing is hard to get. It’s been out of stock at all the reasonable outlets for the last four months. Many of your more sketchy camera dealers have been offering it for $100 to $500 over the regular price, but I knew if I waited long enough I could get the non-gouging deal eventually. I could have gotten one mail order from Hong Kong, but that didn’t seem wise. I finally caught it in-stock at B&H Photo in New York last week. I guess I got my order in soon after their Web site was updated because they were out-of-stock the next day. The lens is supposed to be one of the best ultra-wide-angle lenses for the smaller sensor DSLRs, especially when you factor in the price compared to similar lenses offered by the major camera companies. But apparently the quality varies from copy to copy, which is apparently de rigueur for the off-brand manufacturers. I haven’t given mine the brick-wall test or anything, but it seems to work just fine.
Things Are Starting To Gel
When I was a young’n, just about every weekend I would go with my Dad to my Grandma’s place in DeQueen, where I would be made to do all sorts of slave labor. One of the main things I would slave away at was mowing the vast lawns on her 3 acres during the summer. I actually kind of enjoyed the mowing. Grandma had a lawn tractor, so it wasn’t particularly strenuous, and I’d do a lot of good thinking while mowing. It sure beat the hell out of cutting firewood, the other main chore I was forced to participate in. You can’t think well and load firewood at the same time.
The best part of mowing, however, took place for only a few weeks during June when the wild plums were ripe. Grandma had a couple of wild-plum thickets on her place and few free-standing plum bushes. Every time I’d pass a thicket or a bush, I’d get a big handful of plums and eat them while I mowed. Grandma would also make jelly out of those plums. The best jelly I’ve ever had.
Summiting Mt. Pinnacle
I had a great idea for photo of the rising full moon from the top of Pinnacle Mountain, so on Friday I set out to complete the first part of my idea, which was to get to the top of the mountain. The trail is only .75 of a mile long, but it’s uphill all the way. Pinnacle Mountain State Park is only a few miles west of Little Rock and it’s a very popular place. The trail traverses great expanses of huge rocks and so many people have been over the trail the rocks are worn slick in most places. Slick enough to slip on even when dry. The mountain is about 1,000 in elevation (the highest hill around) and provides a commanding view of the Arkansas River, Lake Maumelle and other lesser mountains to the south and west.
I got to the top about an hour before the moonrise and about two hours before sunset, so I had some time to kill. In wandering around the peak looking for something to shoot, I was drawn to the ubiquitous graffiti. I decided to make a little photographic study of the marred rocks.
The Creek Was Angry That Day, My Friends …
… like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.
I had been to Longpool Falls in Pope County north of Russellville back in January, but I didn’t get any photos worth looking at. So when a huge deluge hit that part of the state on Friday I decided to go back and see it when it had something to show. When I got up at 7:30 a.m. Saturday the rain had made it to Little Rock, but it was still raining in Pope County. I drove through torrential rain all the way there and the rain the didn’t stop. The top photo is a two-frame panorama of Longpool Falls and the ravine downstream.
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