Jewel of Kahana - Great Room

I was lucky enough to get invited to come to Maui and stay with Jeff and Patty Aubery at a property the built called the Jewel of Kahana. It’s a huge house on a half acre oceanfront lot, outfitted with the latest technology, and absolutely stunning. Two floors with lower walls that retract completely, leaving the entire house open.

And location? Right on the bay of Napili, just north of Lahina.

Quad Falls on the way up to Waimoku Falls

I got to spend a week there with great friends, and met a bunch of people that I believe I was destined to meet at some point in my life. There were way too many coincidences in our stories.

It was a great, relaxing trip, except for the last day when I decided to take the camera and drive around the whole island. I did skip the northern loop because I wanted to see the Iao Needle by the airport, but then I headed to Hana, the Sacred Pools, and came around the south-west side of the island. It was about a 14 hour photography day.

After the break below, I’ve included about 50 pictures from the many hundreds I shot. I may add some others later, but in the interest of getting something up on the web, I ‘m posting some samples.

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Tags: hana,jewel of kahana,kahana,maui,sacred pools,waterfalls
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SB Sunset #22

I happened to be working in Santa Barbara during the last week, and caught a couple nights of stunning sunsets. I didn’t go out the first night with the camera, we just sat on Patty and Jeff’s deck and watched it. But tonight, I couldn’t “not go”. I drove down to Shoreline Park (on the Mesa) along with a few thousand other appreciative souls, and took the pictures below.

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Steamboat Barn, painted with light

Gregg and I tried an experiment “painting” the Steamboat Barn with light tonight. It was 15 degrees out there, about a half hour after sundown. Gregg brought a halogen spotlight and “painted” the barn while we shot exposures about 30 seconds in length. Gregg’s shots on his D90 turned out WAY better than mine, for reasons we haven’t determined yet.

I did get a couple that are acceptable (the third one showing stars and constellations is pretty nice), but not quite what I wanted…. See below.

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The Wedding Party

I was asked to help out a friend and shoot pictures for her wedding (a few pics appear after the break). Little did I know it would be 102 in San Jose that weekend, but I did it anyway. Luckily it was not a suit-type wedding, or we would have had to turn on the sprinklers to prevent heat stroke.

Congratulations to Shawn and Michele Mouser!!!

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Title: The Year that Chip Wasn’t
When: February 6-9, 2009
Who: Chip, Jamie, Steve, Mark M, and Drew
Where: Summit County, Colorado (Copper Mountain and Breckenridge).

PreFlight:

This year was quite unplanned compared to our usual trips. With both Chip and I wondering what the job market would bring us, we didn’t really want to go too far.

So… Summit county it was. We rented a nice condo in the “Bill’s Ranch” area of Frisco, that would allow us get to many different ski areas, and bring Drew (Chip’s son) with us this year.

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Tags: Breckenridge,Colorado,Copper Mountain,Frisco,Skiapalooza,Skiing
Categories: Skiapalooza
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Way back in April or May, Chip and Joanne sent out a note saying to reserve the weekend of July 12th and 13th for a camping trip to Winfield Colorado. As a group, we’ve stayed in this location a number of times before. There’s a number of large places to set up group camping, an outhouse for the people who prefer not to use the great outdoors. My only complaint: I’m going to have to buy a camper. I’m getting too old (and/or lazy?) to have to crawl in and out of a tent!!!  I’ll use the excuse of “I hate setting up a tent in the rain”… Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

The best thing about this place is that it has everything any kid needs for camping. There’s a river/water, rocks to throw, and plenty of campfire rings with large sticks to play in the fire with!

The whole group headed up to Lake Ann for what we thought would be a 2 hour trip, but it turned out to be a whole lot longer than that. You’d think that with all the climbers and general “outdoor types” that were in our group that we’d have planned/researched a little better. When we were about 3 1/2 hours into the walk and were just getting close to the lake, we knew we didn’t plan well. While we had brought water, we really didn’t bring much for food. Everybody was starving when we got back to the parking lot. So hungry, in fact,  that Luke actually made a mustard sandwich, as I didn’t bring the cooler with the lunchmeats, etc. That lack of planning won’t happen again.

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Tags: Camping,Furlong,Lake Ann,Schumann,Winfield
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Here are Gregg Lowrimore’s pictures and PhotoBlog, and Lori Stone’s Pictures from the same trip.

Pre-sunrise at the Tower of Babel

Up again at 5:15 to head for the Courthouse Towers and sunrise. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going, went a little too far, and ended up at the northern base of “The Organ” looking at “The Tower of Babel” for sunrise.

The only clouds in the entire sky were sitting just to the south of the La Salle Mountains, and it took an additional 30 minutes for the sun to clear those and start lighting up the area around us. The moment it broke, however, the Three Gossips threw some really beautiful shadows.

For the future, taking sunrise shots from the southern end of Park Avenue might have been nice, but since you’re not supposed to walk in the desert, you might not be able to get far enough away todo it justice.

Gregg at the base of The Organ

Gregg hiked up to the base of The Organ to shoot from. It was pretty surprising when I got this image back that helps show scale. Gregg is indeed in the picture, right in the middle near the white horizontal stripe. And the wall above him was only half of what was there. If I had shot with the wide angle, you wouldn’t have been able to see him at all… To prove this, see the image on the right side. Gregg is still there, right on the front of the bluff coming towards me. Normally I’d have been running around up there with him, but I spent most of the morning freezing my butt on a rock to take the pressure off my ankle. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. It was beautiful out there.

Delicate Arch

After shooting the sunrise, we drove over to Delicate Arch, but due to the length and climb, there’s no way I could make it, so we went to the Viewpoint. There was a 0.3 mile hike to the upper overlook which took just about everything I had to get there. Going up the walk wasn’t too bad, although I was a little nervous about the steps. But there’s no way I wasn’t going to the viewpoint and it was worth every step. Going down the steps wasn’t all that fun, but I made it back to the truck.

At about 10:30, we drove up to the northern campground, where I dropped off Lori and Gregg, since I wasn’t going to walk that mile-loop. I drove back to the parking area by Sand Arch where I walked the 0.3 miles in just to see what it was all about. Gregg and Lori walked the outer loop under Broken Arch, and met me at the Sand Arch parking lot. I kind of like the shot of them walking across the open meadow, with the tripods over their shoulders.

Resting the ankle at the Visitors Center

From there, we decided to go scout the area around Balanced Rock, Parade of Elephants, Cove of Caves, Turret Arch, and a large number of other “interesting” formations for sunset locations. Then, we headed back down to the Visitors center to get Lori’s National Parks Passport stamped, and to go through the presentations to see what we’re missing, and learn more about the general location we’re playing in.

Pine Tree Arch

Having some time to kill before sunset (OK, a lot of time), we headed back up to the northern edge of the park for lunch, and then to walk into Landscape Arch. Yet another location that I couldn’t walk all the way into. Gregg and Lori took off for that location, and I took the “shorter” trip to Pine Tree Arch and Tunnel Arch.

On the way back to the south, we stopped at Skyline Arch for a few shots. The short trail in was very, very muddy, so we didn’t go all the way. Since I was wearing my left tennis shoe essentially unlaced, I would have lost the shoe in the mud very easily.

La Salle Mountains from the Salt Valley 4x4 road

Skyline Arch from the Salt Valley 4x4 road

On a whim, we drove down the 4×4 road into the Salt Valley towards the Klondike Bluffs. We got some great panorama shots of the La Salle mountains from this valley, and an interesting perspective of Skyline Arch.

Just before 5pm, we headed back down to the Windows Section to take sunset pictures, and after quickly scouting the Turret, North and South arches, we ended up giving up and heading towards the “Cove of Caves” overlook, which proved to be a MUCH better location for sunsets. It’s a little “close” but the rocks really lit up in brilliant colors

FWIW, on the way in, we did notice a couple of photographers scouting the rise just to the north-west and across the road from Balanced Rock. That viewpoint might have been a good place to be too. We shot until dark, and headed back to the townhouse, pretty much exhausted from the two days.

We decided it was a pizza night, had a nice cold beer, and started processing pictures. The baseball sized lump on the outside of my ankle wasn’t there, but the overall size of my foot had increased by at least 30% once I took the tennis shoes off. Iced it for a couple hours, then went to bed.

Originally we had planned on heading back up to Mesa Arch to shoot sunrise again without all the other photographers there, but we were all so tired, we just agreed to sleep in.

Gregg drove all the way back to Denver with me sitting sideways in the backseat.

It’s a couple days later now, and my foot, while swollen and all kinds of interesting colors, doesn’t hurt too much, and I’m able to get around OK, albeit a little slowly.

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The album for Friday night, if you just want to see the pictures (only a couple are linked in this story).
Here are Gregg Lowrimore’s pictures and PhotoBlog, and Lori Stone’s Pictures from the same trip.

We got up at the standard photographers sunrise time of of 5:15am to start driving to Mesa Arch for sunrise.

By the time we got there, it resembled standard weekend combat photography (people standing shoulder to shoulder). , passed on the trail by a rather rude individual running in. About 10 people already there, shoulder to shoulder.

All but one of them were literally taking shot after shot of the same exact thing from the same exact place. Gregg, Lori and I were all over the place, shooting many different angles. I just don’t understand how come people aren’t looking for anything but the one shot

About 10 minutes after sunrise, everybody else left, and we stayed and shot for a good hour or more. The visuals were stunning, the terrain was amazing.

Walking back to the parking lot, we got our first look at Cryptobiological soil. Very weird, and everywhere. We also got our first look and the two ravens who would appear to follow us everywhere for the next couple days.

From there, we took a quick, short drive down to Buck Canyon, where I got to stand on my first of quite a few cliff walls. Lori wanted none of this, and tended to walk away when I did this.

From there, we drove all the way south to Grand View Point Overview. Boy, is Grand View Point a misstatement. But I supposed “Staggeringly beautiful vistas from 1000 feet above unbelievable colors and sights” was too hard to fit on the signs!

Curiosity got the best of us as we drove back to see what the heck an Upheaval Dome is. It was a short walk in but, while worth the walk, very hard to convey in pictures. The part I can’t believe is that they still don’t know whether it was caused by an upthrust of a salt deposit from a magma chamber, or a meteor exploding over the area. Really. They still don’t know which of those are the cause.

From the Upheaval Dome, we drove over to the Green River Overlook. It was a serious panorama vista point, and I have some work to do joining some images for the panorama images.

From the Green River Overlook, we drove over to Dead Horse Point State Park, scouting for sunset shooting locations. It was an interesting location, but for a state park, it was pretty small. From the overlook, you’re looking straight down over 2000 feet at the Colorado River.

Unfortunately, while scouting for locations, I stepped on rock the wrong way, and rolled my left ankle (tearing two tendons in the process). The echos of my yelps of pain echoed off the canyon walls while I sat down and quickly tightened up my boot as much as I could bear, knowing that was going to be a necessity to get back to the truck. Thankfully I had the tripod for the camera there to use as a partial crutch. I hobbled back to the truck, and we threw what ice we had in a bag, threw the bag on my ankle and headed back into Moab (which was the plan anyway) rest until sunset (and buy a new ankle brace

Unfortunately we weren’t thinking straight about lighting in a 2000 foot deep canyon with vertical walls, so we got back for sunset about 30 minutes too late. We got a couple good pictures, but not necessarily of the views. This Bonsai tree at the point was beautiful in the fading sunlight, though.

We stopped for dinner on the way home at the Moab Brewery. They had good food (although our waiter left quite a bit to be desired), a great Oatmeal Stout, and a decent musician. Of course, they put us as far from the front door as possible so I’d have to limp my way in to the back corner

We got back to our townhouse, took my boot off, and found half a baseball on my left ankle. I threw more ice on it, started processing pictures, and when I realized that I wasn’t really all with it, took two Advil, crawled up the stairs, and went to bed about 9:30pm

One trip I want to take next time I come up is up Potash Road to look “up” at the bluffs, maybe even on the White Rim Road (a 4×4 trail on the East of the park). I also want to get down into the Needles area, as I’ve heard that’s a fantastic location similar to, but not similar to Bryce. But it was a hundred miles in “the other direction”.

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The album for Friday night, if you just want to see the pictures (only a couple are linked in this story).
Here are Gregg Lowrimore’s pictures and PhotoBlog, and Lori Stone’s Pictures from the same trip.

About a year ago, Gregg mentioned that our photography group needed to do a photo trip to Canyonlands and Arches National Park. Finally, we decided to just pick a weekend, and Presidents Day weekend seemed like a good time since everybody usually skis that weekend. We got very lucky in that it snowed quite a bit the Wednesday before we got there, so we had the combination of red rock, white snow and blue sky. Very patriotic! It would have been great to be there for the full lunar eclipse this week, but maybe in 2010 for the next one…

Lori Stone flew in from Seattle for the trip. I picked up Lori from the airport, came back to the house and picked up Gregg, and headed out about 11:30am. For ths part of the trip, we didn’t really ned the GPS. The directions are basically “Drive 350 miles West on I-70, then 25 miles south on 191.

On our way into Moab, we still had a little sunlight left so we took a right turn and headed up into Canyonlands. We didn’t know much about locations or what to look for, so we we stoped and took pictures of the bluffs, and a set of monoliths called Monitor and Merrimack. They were impressive, but we should have kept going. Live ‘n’ Learn….

We got to the Visitor’s Center, parked the truck, and walked east towards the dropoff. With every step, forward, I kept saying “WOW”, “OH WOW”, “HOLY SMOKES”, “UNBELIEVABLE”. We were on the edge of the cliffs, looking down a thousand feet at the white mesa, and then another thousand feet to where the Colorado River flowed.

We got a few nice pictures, but it would have been great if we got there 30 minutes earlier.

When it got dark, we headed down into Moab, stopping for dinner at Eddie McStiffs Brewery. It was OK, but I’d recommend the place we ate the following night.

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