Tripod – Doesn't Fit In

Moonlight over Spruce Hole, originally uploaded by gregjsmith.

I completed my third yurt trip and it was by far the best. The basic concept here is that we cross country ski to a Yurt and spend a few days away from the world. The Spruce Hole yurt is nice because it has bedding and is fairly large. The yurt itself is located in Colorado just across the boarder from Chama, NM. All we really need to carry is food, drink, clothes and personal hygiene items. There were four other people besides my self on this trip and we stayed for three nights.

This is usually the only cross country skiing I do, I’m mostly a down hill guy. Plus I’m not in any great shape and I therefore tend to be the slow one of the group. Caring a 30 to 40 pound pack doesn’t help. The first several hundred yards of the trail are all up hill. It is grueling work getting there but worth it once we finally arrive.

This particular trip was planned around the full moon. The highlight was our moonlight ski in the nearby Spruce Hole meadow. The moon was incredibly bright and blue. It was an incredible experience that I can’t begin to describe with my pathetic words and pictures. Speaking of which, taking pictures in moonlight requires a tripod which I didn’t have. Yet I managed to take a few decent pictures. You can find all the pictures I took on my Flickr set. They are all geotagged so you can view them on a map.

Last weekend I went on an overnight hike with two friends to the Pecos. Pecos is located east of Santa Fe, about 2 hours away from Albuquerque. Actually, the hike itself was to the Hamilton Mesa which is north of Pecos.

The original plan was to hike 7 miles in but when we were 2.5 miles in and found some good campsite, why keep hiking? During the day the weather was perfect and in the middle of the night it was piss-ass cold. A good sleeping bag helps with that.

This was an opportunity for me to get geotagging down with my SG-289 data logger and and to take some HDR photographs. The geotagging didn’t work out because the stupid SG-289 didn’t record more than a few dozen points. I swear I read 609 points on it at one time.

HDR photography was much more successfully. I took nearly every picture with auto bracketing on and about a quarter of the landscape photos made good HDR. The two problems with the pictures were moving objects such as wind blowing trees around and most of the photos were taken free hand without a tripod. Photomatix Pro did a pretty good job of aligning images but it can’t do much about the moving objects, at least in this case.

You can view all the pictures in my Flickr set: Sept 2008 Pecos Hike. Note that pictures of people have privacy set so you have to be a friend or family to view them.

Here’s an example of a non HDR and a HDR photo.

Tag: Tripod

Moonlight Over Spruce Hole

Pecos Hiking Trip