Carlsbad Caverns near Alamogordo New Mexico

One of the most interesting places to visit and the hardest to photograph is Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southeastern New Mexico. It’s 662 miles from Fort Collins and takes about 10 hours to get there, but worth every mile and minute. The cave itself lies tucked in the Guadalupe Mountains and there are more than 100 other caves that have been surveyed inside the boundary of the National Park. Formations within it’s known grottos include dazzling gypsum chandeliers, huge towering columns, sheet-like draperies, domes, millions of stalactites and stalagmites and even a bottomless pit. The BIG ROOM is 370 feet high and 14 acres in size. It’s the largest cave cave chamber in North America and the whole place is so incredible that it has been designated as a World Heritage Site.

You can enter the cavern by way of two self guided routes. The natural entrance is a one and a quarter mile steep trek that descends the equivalent  of a seventy nine story building. I’d highly recommend taking it because it gives you a unique perspective of discovery and allows time to adjust to cave photography. The Big Room can be accessed using an elevator or from the bottom of the natural entrance trail. The climate is cool and stays a constant 56 degrees. I took a jacket, but with all of the hiking and maneuvering while taking pictures it was just to much. Good boots are a must because of the steep and wet trails.

The entire place is beyond any words I could find to serve it justice.  It seems impossible to capture the full grandeur of the place on any but the smallest scale. Flash photography is pretty useless because the light is lost in its deep, ultra indigo vastness. The rooms are dimly lit and do provide enough light to take time exposures and yet that’s difficult too. A good tripod and cable release are the only way I found picture taking to be effective.  The cave lighting works to the photographers advantage and disadvantage.  Without it, there wouldn’t be any pictures to be had and you’d never find your way around the place.  On the other side, exposures necessary to capture the incredible formations are in the 10 to 30 second range.  Even the smallest amount of light in certain areas seem to be magnified and will burn out sections of an image.  I found that I had to stop down my Canon 7D two to three full stops in order counter burnouts. Hit and and miss were the order of the day so taking several exposures using different combinations was always necessary.  It was hard to change the settings on my camera because of the dim surroundings.  As always, practice with your photo gear and know how to make adjustments before taking on a big trek.  All in all, I took almost 1000 pictures in the course of the day with mixed results. There were however, a few keepers. Click

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The Great White Sand Dunes National Monument

White Sand Dunes - tricks to photograph

     Six hundred and twenty six miles south of Fort Collins, there's a place like no other place that I've photographed. The pristine white dunes of gypsum sand have covered about two hundred and seventy five miles of desert and when we arrived at White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico last week to take pictures, we were blown away, sometimes quite literally.

      After a long drive, we arrived at Alamogordo about six in the evening.  Forty mph gusts were stirring up waves of dust for as far as you could see (which wasn't very far) and it looked like brewing thunderstorms on every horizon. Wayne and I decided to sit tight, check into a motel and grab some dinner rather than head out to the dunes for an evening sunset that didn't look very promising.  Although the monument's website said it opened at 8am, I thought it would be good to get there at sun up for some stunning sunrise images.  The alarm was set for 5:30 and the next morning dawned clear and windless.  Off to the dunes, but unlike the other parks I visit, this one locked the front gate.  There we sat for an hour and a half imagining how good another few winks of shut eye  would have felt.  It had rained violently during the night, and the dunes were pock marked with tiny craters that made for interesting pictures. The sky was a deep cerulean blue and the snow white gypsum painted a fairyland of waves against it.  In low lying areas, and occasionally on the dunes themselves, Soap-tree yucca plants grew and when photographed against the starkness of the environment made for incredible, artistic compositions. 

     Being the last of March, you wouldn't think that a desert could be so dry, especially with a hard rain the night before.  About 10 in the morning a light breeze began to stir from the west and the dunes began drying out.  The temperature eventually rose to seventy, but the wind steadily increased until gusts reached 40mph once again. We'd walk across the sand  and within a few minutes our tracks disappeared. I couldn't drink water fast enough and my lips, well let's just say Candi wouldn't have wanted to kiss them.  The place was incredibly hostile, but it was more beautiful than beautiful.  Every few steps seemed to create a new canvas and during the day I shot more than a 1000 images.   My photo hints  for a place like White Sands are to make sure you use a circular polarizing filter for contrast and let the waves in the dunes lead you into the picture.  Try to use interesting patterns of clouds to break up the expanse of sky and look for single plants trying to eke out a living as contrast to a never ending expanse of white.  Empty your hiking boots often, drink lots of water, use sunscreen and visit during the spring or fall when temperatures aren't too severe.  Click

Africa with Will

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An old friend of mine who passed away several years ago told me once that "all we are and all that we have are given as a gift of love to be celebrated fully and with absolute joy. Upon our parting from this incredible adventure called life, we'll stand before the old master and he'll ask us how we enjoyed his great gift? Our thankfulness will be in the acknowledgement that we loved and truly lived every second of it"

  A few years back, that old friend, Wayne Morine and I had the chance to visit the countries of Namibia and South Africa and the trip utterly changed my life. One morning, while driving through the backlands of termite hills and thorny scrub, we chanced upon two native women dressed in their finest, slinging babies and packing gathered firewood on their backs so they could cook breakfast. Others made the quarter mile walk to the local well and carried water back to the village in buckets balanced on their heads. Meat, drying in the trees was collected and cooked over open fires as black flies and dust filled the air.  Later, children were whisked away to school in an old wooden cart pulled by a couple of donkeys. There were no electric ranges, refrigerators, dish washers, running water, televisions, cell phones, fresh cleaned clothes, cars or school buses.  At night, we could hear the entire village singing beautiful songs in perfect harmony around the campfires. Of all the sites I saw and tried to take in, the thing that struck me most was that in their simple lives they were genuinely happy.

  Two weeks later, as we traveled down the highway between Cape Town and the airport in our luxury BMW taxi to fly back home; we had the chance to see a South African township. On our right, was a beautiful country club and golf course manicured to perfection. On our left was a slum of one million souls living in abject poverty. Their homes were made of rusted tin and patched up cardboard and every hundred yards or so was one electric light on a high wooden post so they didn't have to live in the dark.  I have no idea how they ate.  The irony of being at the very center of such diversity struck me dumb.

  Over the years I've tried to simplify my life and enjoy the sheer joy of being outdoors and pursuing my passion of taking pictures and sharing them with you. Like the villagers, simple experiences seem to be the most rewarding and seeing so many people struggle has made me realize just how much we have to be thankful for.  I often think of the folks who say "If I just had a little more, then I'd be satisfied". In Africa I found that if you're not fulfilled with what you have you'll never be happy. We can talk all we want about our incredible blessings, but how we live them each and every day is the real measure of what we are thankful for. 

     

Change - The Good, Bad, and Great!

Change - the Good, Bad, and Great!

You've lived in your house for a long, long time.  It is so familiar that when you turn off the lights at night you still know exactly where to find the switches to turn them back on again. You can walk around in the dark and not crash into the furniture and find the bathroom..no problem.  It's the same with your car.  You hop in, the radio has your stations tuned in, the seat is adjusted just the way you like it, the mirrors are exactly in the right spots, and you know how it drives.  In fact, just about everything in our everyday lives works pretty much the same way.  That's why we love familiarity and hate change. It's a hassle and makes us feel really uncomfortable at times. 

     Last week, after much soul searching and a lot of advice from others, I finally decided to make one of those big changes. Several years ago, while moving from  the financial services industry to full time photography, I had to invest  in  a lot of new equipment including cameras, lenses, printers and computers.  Did I say COMPUTERS?  On the advice of several professionals in the know, I bought a PC and with the help of some very good tutors, learned Windows.  All of the operating systems that I've used for the last five years have been in that system and boy did it get comfortable.

     Two weeks ago, late in the evening , Candi called down from her office and said her computer wasn't running.  I tried to get it going but nothing was working and so we called the computer guru to come and see if he could make a repair.  Nothing doing and in the end it was the dreaded news everyone fears..Total crash and burn.  A couple of days later she decided to purchase a new Apple Mac.  It was beautiful, new and exciting and got yours truly thinking about doing the same thing. Dreading a crash myself and on much advice from others in the know, I purchased an Apple too and the familiarity in my photography life ceased the minute it switched on.  I couldn't find the light switch in the dark and the bathroom had moved somewhere else in the house. That uncomfortable feeling of remorse and impending doom was welling up in my gut.  Photoshop was gone.  The little programs I'd developed to help with lighting adjustments, gone.  Mail, internet, windows office, word, gone, gone, vanished!

     Luckily Wayne, my business partner had an Apple and with a lot of patience and persistence helped me through most of it.  We've installed all of the operating systems and except for a few minor glitches are getting back to a bit of normalcy.  I've had to call the Geek Squad a couple of times at two in the morning, but they've done a good job in getting me through a couple of issues as well. Heck, in a few weeks, it will feel just like living my house...familiar.  Click