Pictures & Words
Utah Trip–Tuesday Afternoon, Kolob Canyon and Kolob Terrace Road
So, as I mentioned in the previous post, there was no rooms in Death Valley for us to do Rick’s itinerary. We made our way from Las Vegas to Zion, and after a brief delay of overshooting the turn (I was driving…), we headed into our first destination for the afternoon, the Kolob Canyon Visitor Center (1).. This was my first time here. Rick and I had done a bit of shooting in Zion in 2010, but it was off of route 9 on the way to Bryce. We got in around 1:30 pm, so clearly the sun was going to be challenging for creating keepers; however, we did have a bunch of puffy-fluffy clouds (the non-technical term for cumulus) that would give us some nice light.
The parking lot at Kolob Canyons. See the beautiful sandstone in the background.
After driving down a windy road for a bit, we got out and did some photography. Rick says this valley was made famous by some photographer, but I couldn’t find it with my exhaustive 45 second search of the inter webs. It is a beautiful spot!
This tree was taken with my 85mm lens. It does great portraiture, although the subject is a bit wooden...
At this point, we were getting some nice shadows from the fluffy-puffy clouds.
A little ‘hanging valley’. I doubt many people have gotten there—it would require some extensive climbing (or ropes to drop in from the top, and then drop down below). Note the coloring of this lens (70-200) versus the coloring of the 50 macro (below).
50 macro. Note the cooler tones than the warm 70-200 above.
Rick Decker using a rail as a stabilizer.
So, from Kolob Canyon, we drove south on Rt 9 to Virgin, and hung a left on Kolob Terrace Road. This road goes in and out of the park, and eventually leads to the fairly high altitude Kolob Reservoir (at 8100 feet). We didn’t go that far today—we got to the Kolob gate of Zion and took some scenic photos of outhouses and other interesting landmarks.
Gotta love these clouds!
One noticeable thing about the gain in elevation—trees were not close to leafing out at this 8000 foot elevation. In the valleys, everything was beautifully green. It’s my guess that this area has had a cold and wet spring.
After doing that site seeing, we turned around and headed south to a place that Rick wanted to check out. This area is just south of Cave Valley, and is actually outside of the park. We parked off the road (at 1), and headed north (along the wash) to get over a steep, brushy little area. Rick said that there was a shack there—but I didn’t believe him and we didn’t find it. But 2 marks the spot on Google Maps, so we’ll have to go back so he can tell me that he told me so! We did hike across the open area (east), spotted a narrow and deep canyon (3), and then Rick headed off to photograph in area 4, while went south to play on the sandstone of area 5.
This is the view of the area that we’re hiking towards.
This yucca reminds me of cousin It.
I just love the texture and erosion of the sandstone in this area. It’s amazing, and this stuff is relatively sturdy to climb on, so I don’t feel so bad. South Coyote Butte (2010 trip) was very fragile in spots; you had to be really careful about not damaging the stone.
There were a lot of flowers around here!
This is a shot taken through the north end of that valley (canyon), with the rest of the southern park exposed in the sunlight.
Once we got up on top of the sandstone ridge, we had a delightful look into Lee Valley. I used to order stuff from Lee Valley, but I don’t think the fulfillment center lives here!
The northeastern view. There’s a waterfall in that mess of stuff in the middle!
Taking out the 70-200 to isolate that big ridge in the background of the previous photo (far right side).
This sandstone was meant for scrambling!
Rick on his perch. The drop down to the bottom of this ridge is about 800’, from what I can tell with the topo map.
Hiking around these formations (south and east for me) gave me some nice views...
You can see the falls just left of the center of the photo. Great light coming through these clouds.
This is a section that I actually had to climb. Not scary, but had to throw the camera in the backpack.
A cute mini-arch.
Looking south through the valley. The big peak in the center is South Guardian Angel. I’m loving Google Maps for identifying this stuff.
South (and closer to where I am), Tabernacle Dome
Light is starting to get good. The sun started to move across Lee Valley
Pointing northeast. Nice lighting!
Rick and I were scrambling to follow lighting opportunities. And speaking of opportunity, we had lots of dead tree opportunities during this adventure!
I waited in this spot for the light to hit the sandstone formation in the middle. The sun was a bit too low, and then a big cloud wiped this out. I had about 20 seconds to get this photo...
and then the light moved. This is basically the same shot! It looks quite different with the foreground lit.
At this point, Rick and I were satisfied that we had exhausted the possibilities and light up on this ridge, and packed it in to get a room at Zion. This was a great start to the trip; we got to explore some uncharted territory! We’d end up doing quite a bit of that over the course of the seven days!
Utah Trip—Camera Notes
So, one of my goals on this trip was to get to know my new Sigma sd Quattro camera. I had taken it out to the beach last summer and had gotten some nice shots, but I didn’t do any hardcore landscape work (I preferred to float on the water). Starting out this trip, I was shooting mainly handheld, and using ‘normal’ exposure techniques. I was manually focusing most of the lenses without the magnification aid. By the end of the trip many of the shots were on a tripod, I was using the SFD mode of the camera—which takes seven consecutive exposures bracketed by a stop of exposure, and I was making good use of the focus magnification to focus the lenses.
Speaking of lenses, I brought the following:
10-20 mm (older version, f4-f5.6)
30 mm DC EX (older version… pretty crappy)
50 mm f2.8 Macro (focus drive broken)
85 mm f1.4 EX (older version, great lens)
70-200 mm f2.8 EX zoom (older version, no OS)
So as you can see, I don’t have any lens that is in the current Sigma lineup. The 10-20 mm is soft on the left side (maybe decentered, maybe a curvature in the focal plane). The 30 has always been on the soft side for me and prone to CA. I thought about stocking up on lenses, but figured it would be better to get back out and shoot, and then see what I wish I had. Rick had brought a 18-35 and a 50 f1.4 that I tried out, and Kendall lent me a new version of the 30 mm ART (the kit lens for the sd Quattro, which sadly wasn’t available last summer when I ordered the camera). I’m going to update this page with notes as I go along and process the images.
The camera: sd Quattro (‘C’ version vs ‘H’). This camera has turned out to be my favorite Sigma camera by far. I loved my SD10, but the battery thing was a PITA. The SD14 was great, but a struggle to white-balance at times, and the shutter error bit my camera twice. The SD15 was a super-solid camera; fast, easier on batteries, big buffer—but the unrecoverable overexposure thing in high dynamic range situations used to drive me nuts. The sd Q is much nicer. The electronic viewfinder is very solid for focusing (manually), and I’ve gotten a much higher hit rate out of it. It autofocuses reasonably well. It’s overexposure latitude is better. The controls are super nice, my only current request would be to add SFD mode to the QS menu. Battery life is reasonable; I brought five but could have done with just two for all day shooting (approximately 150-200 shots/charge). The files have the best color (IMO) of any Sigma camera yet. The Quattro sensor is different than the previous generations of sensors, and there’s much moaning on the inter webs about it not being as crisp, having too much ‘sandy’ noise, etc. It’s different, but I’m liking it. And from what I’ve seen, you can crank 6 x 9 prints from it relatively easily. And that’s 6 foot by 9 foot… I have a 17” wide printer—I’m not going to be challenged, and I’ll have plenty of pixels to crop.
Only issue that I’ve had is that on turning the camera on, the viewfinder is saturated white, and will not adjust to the scene. A quick off-on with the switch seems to rectify this situation, and it’s pretty rare. I haven’t figured out what’s causing it yet.
Utah Trip—Spring 2017
So, we’re all returned from a fabulous 8-day trek around the southern Utah parks and monuments, and I’m going to do a blow-by-blow write up along with photos and maps. Let me thank Rick Decker up front for organizing the trip, as well as being a great traveling companion. And Kendall Gelner as well, who joined us in Utah and brought along his wife’s Jeep Cherokee to help shuttle us into areas that would have been relatively inaccessible by car (although mountain bikes would have been great!).
Rick and I flew into Las Vegas and met at the car rental area. We grabbed a car, headed to a local Starbucks, and then went over a couple of different itineraries that Rick had written up. One thing I want to mention is how great it is to have a guide with local knowledge. Rick was driving around this entire area like it was his backyard (knowing stores, coffee shops, etc)—and he’s from Hawaii. He does come out west often though, and it shows with his ability to navigate pretty much anywhere we needed to go. So—the itineraries were ambitious, and had us starting out at Death Valley and areas west shooting some dunes (which is awesome). Sadly for us, the southern California deserts are in beautiful bloom this year, and we couldn’t get a room. This pretty much destroyed the itineraries, so we began to improvise immediately. We decided on spending a day or two (or three, as it ended up) in Zion, and we would work our way to Moab to meet Kendall on Sunday. We had no reservations, so we’d play it by ear as we ambled from town to town.
So, we jumped in the car and drove to Springdale (1 on the map)(, which is right south of Zion National Park. It’s a really cute resort town. We got a place to stay for three nights, and settled in for some shooting. From Zion we travelled to Escalante (2) to spend an afternoon and morning shooting in that area. From there, we drove through Bryce (no stops) to Torrey, (3) to spend a night. There we shot areas in Capitol Reef—an awesome place that I had not been to. We left Sunday morning to head to Moab (4), meeting up with Kendall, and shooting outside of Arches and inside of Canyonlands. The reason we didn’t do more Arches? The main road was under construction, and they had a 7am-7pm limitation on the hours you could be in the park. For photographers who want to do sunrise and sunset, this didn’t work particularly well. Canyonlands is just a few miles farther from Moab—it lived up to it’s name—it was the first time I’ve seen that area.
So, with that introduction, I’ll start to build the posts that illustrate the trip! Stay tuned!! And be patient, I’ve got a lot of images to process. I’m going to write this more as a chronological travelog with photography liberally sprinkled in; if you follow along you’ll get a sense of what we saw, in the order we saw it...
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