Follow me
Pages
- Home
- Classes
- Portfolio
- New Hampshire
- Vermont
- Maine
- Published Photos
- People
- Birds
- Panoramas
- Annapurna Circuit in Panorama
- Bicknell Brook Panoramas
- Flights of Fancy
- Jiri to Everest Base Camp and Kala Patthar 2012
- Moose River in Winter
- Nepal in Panorama
- Nulhegan Basin from Lewis Overlook
- SRK Greenway 10 in Winter
- Star Lake Farm on Snowshoes
- Sunapee in Winter
- Early Snow on Smarts Mountain
- Lake Sunapee
- Lower Cascades
- Dartmouth in Winter
- Hardy Hill Brook
- Grafton Pond
- Mormon Barns
- Moose Mountain on Snow Shoes
- Baker Bush
- Mount Moosilauke
- Baker Bush Wetland
- Henniker Bagel Break
- Millstone
- Mount Kearsarge
- Central NH in Fall
- Willoughby Ski New Years 2010-11
- Mink Brook
- Gillingham Store
- Great North Woods Panoramas
- The Prouty 2011
- View from French’s Ledges
- Cardinal Flowers near Adder Pond
- Mount Cardigan
- Chapel at the Kingdom
- Minister’s Brook
- Skinner Brook
- River Road
- Bob’s Barber Shop
- Glacial Erratics Trail
- Nepal
- Annapurna Circuit Trek
- Arrival in Nepal
- Kathmandu and Patan
- Trip to Besi Shar
- Besi Shar to Bahundanda
- Bahundanda to Jagat
- Jagat to Dharapani
- Dharapani to Chame
- Chame acclimatisation day
- Chame to Pisang
- Pisang to Manang
- Manang acclimatisation day
- Manang to Yak Kharka
- Yak Kharka to Thorung Phedi
- Thorung La
- Muktinath to Jomson via Kagbeni
- Jomson and Marpha
- Fly to Pokhara
- Pokhara & Kathmandu
- Bhaktapur
- Kathmandu
- Faces of Bhaktapur
- Faces of Kathmandu
- Faces of Nepal
- Distributing Jackets
- Annapurna Circuit Trek
- Special Subjects
- Created
- Weddings & Portraits
- Details
- Contact Jim
- Trails
- Blog
Images on this site
Get the Flash Player to see the slideshow.Blog Topics
Archives
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
Category Archives: Photography Tips
Mascoma River Slalom
The 50th Annual Mascoma River Slalom was held yesterday in Lebanon, NH. It was a cool day with occasional sleet. But the river was running strong and various types of craft made it through the gates.
The Mascoma Slalom has been held every year since 1963. It is the oldest consecutively run slalom race in the country. Dartmouth College’s Ledyard Canoe Club hangs temporary gates on the Mascoma River near the Packard Covered Bridge.
I enjoy photographing many active sports using a variety of shutter speeds. A fast (short duration) speed will freeze the action rendering the athlete sharp as in the photo below taken at 1/1600 sec.

But I like the effect of blurred motion, particularly when water is involved, which can come from relatively slow shutter speeds like the photo below taken at 1/13 sec. The trick is to get the athlete relatively sharp.

Getting a kayaker relatively sharp with nicely blurred water can be accomplished by panning with the moving boat or photographing the kayaker as he or she paddles through an upstream gate. It also helps to get lucky. Your luck increases as the number of photos taken increases.
In the slide show that follows, 21 of the photos were shot between 1/10 and 1/40 sec, 16 between 1/80 and 1/320 sec, and 10 between 1/400 and 1/1600 sec. All where shot aperture priority. I use my aperture, ISO, and sometimes a polarizer to control my shutter speed.
Also posted in Kayak
Tagged Dartmouth, kayak, kayak race, Lebanon, Ledyard Canoe Club, Mascoma River, New Hampshire, slalom
Comments Off
Great Gray Owl encounter

Great Gray Owl
Only a Great Gray Owl and I enjoyed the early morning light in the frozen marsh along the AT on the trail to Velvet Rocks in Hanover this morning. I was privileged to spend from 7:54 to 8:32 AM alone with this magnificent owl. The sun was at its back pretty much the whole time, and while I love photographing with back light, I generally prefer birds with front light. But I sure wasn’t complaining. This was going to be better than the 7 seconds I spent with the owl Sunday morning.
I bushwhacked in to the marsh taking the shorter but more challenging route. As I emerged from the woods there it was right in front of me. I shot this at ISO 1600 with EC=+2.67 for those of you who understand what these numbers mean. Since the owl was strongly backlit I needed to add light to keep it from being a silhouette. This is a full-frame image—no cropping applied.

To the right is the tree where I first found it, photographed three days earlier. There were a number of photographers and birders hoping to catch sight of the owl that day.

Meanwhile out on Trescott Road the cars were piling up Monday morning.


The owl mainly ignored me while seemingly scanning for game. It eventually moved to a snag and then to another snag making its way to the boardwalk. From there it flew into a small corner of the wetland to the east of the boardwalk. Below is an uncropped photo taken with a 300mm lens with a “1.5 magnification” camera.

The pair of photos below may give you a feel for the scene. You can see the boardwalk with the owl in the tree nearby. And you can see where it stopped to the east of the boardwalk before leaving the wetland.


Below them I present a slide show of some of the photos I took this morning.
Lyme Hill Conservation Area

I paid my first visit to the UVLT Lyme Hill Conservation Area yesterday afternoon. I wasn’t expecting to see much so I just carried a camera with a “walk-around” lens—no tripod. I mostly wanted to take a quick look at this relatively new area that I knew connected to the wonderful trails along Grant Brook near the Connecticut River.
I studied the trail map at the kiosk and decided I only had time to hike to the wetland area. Lyme Hill itself and the trails to Grant Brook would have to wait for another visit. A short distance down the trail I could see a small brook well below me. It obviously drained with wetland and was a tributary of Grant Brook. I made a mental note to come back with a tripod when the slope wasn’t so slippery—there were some nice small falls that needed their picture taken.
Entering the woods I crossed the brook on a well-built bridge and climbed a hill. As I headed down the trail to the wetland, still slippery with the remains of the snow that our extensive January thaw hadn’t fully melted, a group of polypody ferns were glowing backlit on top of a large rock. These are one of the few ferns that grow in thin soil on rocks. In summer their spores are fun to photograph with a macro lens.
I love shooting into the sun, and these ferns were is an ideal situation. The background was far away and dark. Thus contrast was naturally very high, and shooting wide open the background would be blurred. Plus there was a handy young tree just to the left behind the ferns that I could use to keep the sun from hitting my lens and causing flare if I positioned my lens just right. When I see such a situation I grab the opportunity that is presented to me.

Farther down the trail a pair of large rocks (glacial erratics?) caught my attention. One glistened white while its neighbor was dark with interesting textures. I photographed the front one and then used it to brace my camera for a photo of the darker boulder.


I finally reached the wetland and surveyed the scene quickly. Nothing was moving. I made a few photos of the reflections in the water that had pooled on the rapidly softening ice.

I scanned with my camera. A beaver lodge on the far shore. Then a very long beaver dam. Then a “beaver” sitting on the ice looking at me! My first thought was actually “otter”, but with the lodge and dam I figured beaver. I squeezed off quite a few shots in 8 seconds before it slid out of sight though a small hole in the ice right in front of it. I figured it swam for the lodge because I never saw it again. It took a while but after getting some ID help I now realize I was fooled by its surroundings and I actually photographed a river otter.

The photos below show the otter with the beaver dam in the background and the beaver lodge.


I plan to go back many more times. Hopefully winter will return and snowshoes or xc-skis will be my mode of travel. I need to make it to the top of Lyme Hill and down to Grant Brook sometime soon. In spring the brook with its series of small falls should definitely be worth exploring.
Editing a View from Kari La
After a great morning hiking mostly uphill from 6,600 ft, we spent a very long time having lunch and waiting for it to start raining so we could experience trekking in the rain.
And we did just that most of the afternoon. We didn’t make it to our destination of Paiya for the night stopping instead at Kari La, a pass at 9,600 ft. We had been 2,000 ft higher a week earlier and in another week we would be at around 18,000 ft crossing the first of two high passes on our way to Kala Patthar and Everest Base Camp.
After checking into the lodge I wandered around with my camera. The rain had stopped and the Khumbu valley was opening up. It was going to be an interesting sunset after all—one of the first of the trip. I took a 3-shot panorama and then another peeking through the amazing trees at the distant mountain, Thamserku, and the colorful clouds. I’m using the single photo here as an example of how one can edit a photo to more closely resemble what the eye sees. One key here is the camera only records a limited dynamic range, around 5-8 stops of light (factors of two in brightness) depending on whether one is shooting JPEG or raw. Yet the eye can see 16 or more stops. We have a wonderful ability to squint at the bright parts of a scene and also see detail in the shadows.
The photo on the left is what my camera would have recorded if I was shooting JPEG. I shot this contrasty scene at f/16 (I wanted a lot of depth of field), 1/40 sec, ISO 800, and 36mm. I did not take the time to unpack the lightweight tripod I was carrying. I did take a few minutes to hang a few wet clothes on a line above a wood stove in the dinning room. In these lodges, it is important a claim a little bit of drying space as soon as one can.


You can see the JPEG capture produces a rather bland scene with the colors washed out and the tree mostly a silhouette. However, since I was shooting raw, I could significantly improve the image in the raw processing. I used Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) in Bridge which is the same processing engine found in Lightroom. The photo on the right is after the raw processing. I could have used ACR to process a JPEG version, as many people do mistakenly thinking they are getting the advantages of shooting in raw. That would have improved the photo somewhat, but not given me the detail and tonal range that I was able to get, and later utilize, by using the raw capture. And I could have worked harder processing the raw version and perhaps gotten to a slightly better place than the right hand photo. But this is really a job for Photoshop and layer masks, not the “fake” masks of the Adjustment Brush in ACR.
For the version below I started with the right hand image above and finished job in Photoshop (CS6). The master image I produced has 8 layers, 5 of them Curves Adjustment Layers with masks. One mask was hand painted, the others used the tonal information in the image to mask the adjustment itself. The purpose of the post is not to explain in detail the steps, rather to show what can be done when the original capture contains all the tonal information and the processing makes good use of what is available. In producing the final image which I believe is a fair representation of what I saw, I did not add anything that was not present when I took the photo.

Thamserku from Kari La
Incidentally, many “advanced” photographers would make multiple exposures of this scene planning to blend them later using High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques. There is nothing wrong with this; I might have done it myself if I wasn’t so cold, wet, and tired. But many people apply HDR software to images that already have a full tonal range and hence can be successfully, and often better, optimized using more standard and less “automatic” techniques.
