Getting through airline security

I've realized that with all my discussion of what I was shooting in the southwest, I completely forgot the one thing that had me concerned in the time leading up to my trip- how to get my gear out there safely!

I started off with a hard side Hardigg case I got from my boss for pretty much nothing, but would I would need to make new inserts for (It looks like it once held a formula car transmission- clean, but the liner will not work for me).

The more I thought about it, the more I had issues. Originally, I was looking to ship my gear to myself at the hotel, because there is no way I was going to let airline baggage handlers anywhere near it. In talking to the shipping guy at work, the normal carriers' insurance rates are pretty high (something on the range of $5 USD/$100 value), and they have a cap which would not even come close to the total value of what I was bringing. They would only cover up to the retail value of my rentals- the D800 and the (beautiful) 14-24mm f2.8 lens I brought with me. Along with that, the case has no way for me to lock it, and is pretty damned big at 32.5' wide, 16" high, by 18" deep. Basically, two trains of thought were killed in one shot.

The next idea was to bring it as carry on luggage. One of the main reasons I was originally trying to avoid this was the idea of getting searched by our wonderful Transportation Safety Officers. But the more I thought about it, the more this seemed to be the way to go.

So I bit the bullet, and ordered a Pelican 1514 case (1510 case with foam dividers) and a matching lid organizer. I have another Pelican case I picked up for my speedlights and pocket wizard triggers, so I know the suckers are strong. I ended up having to drill a couple holes on the inside of the lid to mount the organizer, but I'll leave that for another time. As it turns out, I could fit almost everything I was bringing with me in it, with the exception of my tripod which I checked in my suitcase.

D800 and 14-24 f2.8 missing from photo

In the main case, I loaded both camera bodies (D300, D800), 85mm f1.4, 14-24 f2.8, memory cards, batteries, vertical viewfinder, battery grip for the D300, 50mm f1.8, 24mm f1.8, 80-200 f2.8, 100 f2.0 macro, and a couple expodiscs. The lid held a storm jacket (in case of inclement weather), Lee Filters Base Kit with mounting rings, Lee ND grad kits, tripod plates, compass, remote shutter trigger, and a couple other odds and ends.

My next concern was TSA. I should mention now that my experience was a good one, but you should still allow plenty of time just in case your trip doesn't go as smoothly as mine. I had heard about a few things that can hold up passage through security checkpoints, so I was reasonably well prepared, save for one minor hiccup.

I knew not to have anything that could be considered a weapon on my person, so I checked my pocket knife in my luggage. I also knew that I would need to remove my shoes at the checkpoint, so before I got there, I untied my shoes and tucked the laces into them so I wouldn't be tripping on them. Once I got through to the scanning area (I also forgot to remove my sunglasses at the stand where they check ID to boarding passes- no big deal), I grabbed a gray bin, put my shoes and jacket into it, took my laptop and iPad out of my shoulder bag, and stacked them on top of each other. This was the hiccup. A Transportation safety officer saw me do this, and came over grabbing two more bins and put my electronics in their own bins... my bad. While he was there, I told him what was in my carry on, since I was still expecting for them to search it. I passed through the metal detector, collected my gear, and continued on without any further delay. Awesome! The bugger was that I was then left with another 2.5 hrs to chill out at the airport. Plenty of time to go grab a beer.

On the way back out of Albuquerque, the experience was similar... didn't even tell the TSO about the contents of the case, and not a word was said. Again, these results may not be typical. As a matter of fact, before the trip, I was talking to a friend who works at TSA about the trip, and he's the one who told me to let them know what was in the case, and what to say when they wanted to open it- basically that it was expensive, delicate equipment, and that if they had any questions, please ask; and to let them know that I would be more than happy to re pack it. Primarily, DO NOT be argumentative of defensive. That would only make matters worse.

Some basic adjustments in Lightroom 4

In a previous post, I showed a before and after test shot of the canyon at Tent Rocks National Monument. The new tools in the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 [LR4] develop module made the corrections incredibly easy.

In Lightroom 3.6, the basic panel looked like this:

These controls gave a great change to making adjustments to photos from Photoshop where several adjustment layers used to be needed for most corrections.

There are new tools in LR4:

This gives even greater control over the light and dark sections of a photograph, like the one I shot to test.

I shot the frame above to test both the tonal response of the new Nikon D800, and the recently released LR4. Due to the depth of the canyon, and the bright sunlight at mid afternoon, both the highlights and shadows are nearly completely blown out, as indicated by the histogram.

This shows that almost all of the tonality is at either end of the spectrum, with almost nothing in the middle.

The first thing I did was bring up the dark areas a bit with the shadows slider.

Which yielded this:

OK, I've gotten a lot of detail back in the bottom end, but the highlights are still too much, so I naturally went for the highlights slider.

Now we're getting somewhere... the details in the rock just right of center at the top of the frame are back. Unfortunately it brought down some of the detail in the shadows... so lets hit the blacks (clipping) slider...

Which gave me the end result:

To look at the histogram, the tonality is much closer to the middle of the range (OK, it's not dead center, but it's not clipped out anymore- and heck, it WAS really dark in there!)

Total time for the adjustments was about two minutes, and no layers were needed. I absolutely love Lightroom for how much easier post-processing has become.

Desert wildlife...

The other day, I was showing a friend some of my photos from my trip to the southwest and she asked me an unexpected question... "how did you find so much wildlife in the desert?"

The easy answer is that I was looking. The longer one is that I remembered something I was taught back when I was in the boy scouts- be quiet.

The general concept is easy- the more noise you make, the more the locals will hear and be scared off.

I did explain that it wasn't so much that the animals were coming up to me as they weren't necessarily running away.

Another benefit to being quiet is you're less likely to wake up creatures that you don't want to upset.

admittedly out of focus, but I had a compelling urge to not be there

On my first hike (actually, all hikes), I was carefully checking the pockets under and between boulders for snakes, and sure enough I found one. I quickly snapped a shot and moved away; since I was miles from any assistance, I didn't want to take a chance of being bitten.

These birds really do move like the cartoon. It's really funny to watch.

When I reached the turn-around point on the same hike, my memory card was nearing full when I saw a road runner. Since the trail out went right through the center of the "canyon," I figured I wouldn't see anything else but sagebrush, so decided to top off the card with a couple shots of the bird and head out. Just as I topped off the card, I was joking to myself, "where's Wile E.?" No sooner did I think that, and turn, then I saw a coyote not 40 yards away. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my card swapped out before he ran away.

My buddy LeRoi hanging out on a boulder.

The following day, I started on the west end of Petroglyph National Monument at the Volcanoes Day Use Area. I kept hearing rattlers in the distance, but didn't see any. What I did see was a lot of lizards, like the collared lizard above that was just hanging out in the sun. I decided to move sideways and kind of around him to get a better vantage point, in case heading straight for him might freak him out- I was originally directly in front of him. I popped off a couple shots, thanked him, and went on my way.

About half an hour later, I found this guy hanging out in the shadow side of one of the volcanoes hanging on the vertical face of a boulder.

Finally, much later that afternoon, this guy and several family members were all running around apparently trying to scrounge up some food. I couldn't believe how big they are. The guy above was likely a little over two feet tall.

Being from the east coast, I never would have imagined that there was so much diversified life in the desert.

Never believe the display on the back of the camera.

I'm still going through the photos from my trip.

Before I went out there, I had several ideas for what I wanted to try to shoot that I can't do at home. One of the main ideas was to try to get a nice star field shot. At home, since I'm in the middle of what William Gibson once called the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, it's difficult for me to get away from light pollution. If you see a night shot of the United States from orbit, the entire east coast is lit up. Once you combine that with the depth of the atmosphere and the general humidity, it's a really bad mix.

One day (actually it was the middle of the night) while I was out there, I was sitting at the desk in my hotel room, and decided to give it a shot. I pulled out my iPad and started up Sky Safari to see where the Milky Way was. I looked down at the compass that I had on the desk and got an idea, so I headed out to the Volcanos Day Use area of Petroglyph National Monument. The park closes at 7PM, but the gate closes at 5, so there's an outer parking lot to use if you're going to be there later. About 15 minutes before I got there, these clouds (truth be told, it could have been smoke from a wildfire in the SW corner of the state) started moving in. Since the park was closed, I was not going to go in, just stay in the parking lot, and try to get the Milky way trailing down onto one of the volcanoes. I popped off a couple shots, chimping the entire time, which I usually try not to do (chimping- def.: constantly looking at the LCD on your camera, saying ooh ooh ooh.). I was basically disappointed by what I saw, but know better than to believe it until the shots get loaded onto the computer and I can view them on a better display.

When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised.

On the back of the camera, the glow from the city was overwhelming. When I opened it up on my real display, I really did say ooooh. I'm glad I didn't delete it out of hand.

Home from New Mexico

I got back two weeks ago tomorrow, and am still going through my photos.

First, I have to say that the Nikon D800 is an amazing piece of tech, and I've decided that I need to save up to get one. I was actually debating on the D800e, until I got to look at the files when I got home... even just looking at the RAW files in Lightroom, it almost looks like I've over sharpened them; the resolution is that good. I'm almost thinking that the lack of the anti-aliasing filter would possibly be too much.

I do LOVE the built-in three axis level, which can be programmed to turn on with one of the two programmable soft buttons on the front of the body right near the lens mount that are reachable with your right hand. Also, the M-UP (formerly tripod mode) availability on the mode dial is incredibly useful. No more rooting through menus. The low light response is incredible, as is the tonal response through the entire range of the sensor. I read somewhere that it's pushing 14 EV (nearing that of slide film), and I tend to believe it...

Slot Canyon at Kasha-Katuwe as shot

Just as an experiment (for both the camera and Lightroom 4), I shot this on one of my hikes with the meter set for full matrix metering, trying to get the shadows and highlights to just about start clipping out because the scene was so extreme. I wanted to see if anything would be salvageable at the high and low ends of the exposure without having to resort to HDR. After some minor tweaking with some of the new controls in Lightroom's Develop Module, I got this:

Same frame after some minor adjustments.

I then started thinking about 13 years ago when I got my first digital camera, a Nikon E950, this kind of image recovery would have been nearly impossible; but then again, this camera has nearly 20 times the resolution of the E950.

A couple posts ago, I mentioned that I was debating which camera body/lens combination I wanted to use for the eclipse- either my D300 with my 300mm lens, or the rented D800 with my 80-200. I decided on the latter for a couple reasons. First, the lens is much higher quality. The second was that while the native crop factor of the D300 makes the lens effectively 1.5 times longer, with the D800 I could crop 50% of the frame away, and still have more data in the file.

2012 Annular Eclipse

The eclipse was definitely something to see, and I'm absolutely thrilled I decided to go. The Bugger is that I filled an 8GB memory card with just this at varying stages.

Horizon at full annularity.

The part that I found amazing about the eclipse was how much light was still available. The above two photos were taken within a minute of each other.

Due to where I was, the moon's shadow was still present on the sun at sunset.

The line across the bottom of the sun is the horizon, and you can just about make out the corner of one of the volcanoes in Petroglyph (the high points in the horizon shot above).

Hello again! Once again, I'll edit at a later date with photos.

After three full days in the high desert of New Mexico, i have some strong recommendations. Firstly, HYDRATE. Back home in the Philadelphia suburbs, I thought I drink a reasonable amount of water- 1.5-2 liters a day. I've discovered that's not enough. Keeping in mind I haven't just been wandering around town (yesterday was day one at Petroglyph National Monument), yesterday I put down over three liters, and this morning I'm still a little dehydrated. The air is so dry, a Philly boy like me tends to not notice that it's (1) a lot warmer than I think it is, and (2) that sweat is actually evaporating like it's supposed to, as opposed to clinging like it tends to in the humidity of the east coast. Also, I'm not sure if it's the altitude or what, but my legs are really taking a pounding. I thought That I'm in pretty good shape for what I'm doing, since my day job has me walking six miles a day, but my quads are jello.

If you're exerting yourself like I am, the obscene food portions you find in many restaurants is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you watch what you're eating. I've been finding that the New Mexican places are not actually that bad for you... lots of beans, lean protein, veg, and of course, CHILE! They're not kidding when they say that the official state question is' "Red or Green." Chile sauce goes on everything. So far, I haven't come across anything too overwhelming, even for people who don't do chiles like I do. I'll get more into food later.

Breakfast burrito from the restaurant at the hotel (Sheraton Uptown Albuquerque).

Clothing: light weight, wicking, and if you go to a place that has clothes labelled with sun protection numbers, pay attention. I haven't seen any clouds worth mentioning, and with the thinner air up here, the sun can be brutal. Also, if you're planning in checking out the natural or ancient man-made wonders around here, solid footwear is a must! Running shoes/open-toed sandals will not cut it.

Really happy I brought the Zamberlans with me.

Watch out for snakes (rattlers), scorpions, et cetera. This is no joke. I saw my first wild rattler yesterday. Just keep an eye out for shadowed pockets under or between rocks, as this is where snakes love to hide out during the day. I was also staying clear of odd holes in the sand (usually an inch to inch and a half in diameter from what I saw) because I really didn't want to know what dug them, and I have to assume that anything that lives in this kind of environment is pretty angry by nature. Just the flies swarming around me by the end of yesterday's hike were acting like they hadn't seen water in years.

Ok, this one is admittedly out of focus, but I did not want to be there long.

Finally, make sure you know where you're going, or at least have GPS with updated maps. I tried to go to the Volcanoes Day use area of Petroglyph National Monument yesterday, and drove right past it, as it wasn't clearly marked [edit- and National Park Service maps leave a lot to be desired]. This left me driving further through the desert than I intended, and left me on the edges of a pert of town I had not yet been to. If not for GPS, it would have taken me A LOT longer to get back to home base. At this point, it's time for me to check out, time to go hiking.

Greetings from New Mexico!

I will be editing this and the next couple posts to include photos... My laptop has decided to stop functioning fully. This is the first time I've tried to post from my iPad, so we'll see how this goes.

As I mentioned before, this Philly boy has left the east coast for the first time in an embarrassingly long time for a photography trip. I spent a good portion of yesterday driving around Albuquerque trying to find a decent view for this evening's annular solar eclipse, and the latter portion of the day catching up with family that live out here.

When I got back to the hotel, I put in for a 3 AM (!!!) wakeup call, to try to get far enough out of town to shoot the particularly bright flyover of the International Space Station. That little trip was a total bust. All I can say is NEVER try to use unfamiliar equipment in total darkness. Due to the short duration of the flyover (roughly 6 minutes), there is very little time to correct any error in composition, exposure, etc. My problem (entirely my own fault) was that in the center of the Nikon MC-36 programmable shutter release cable/intervalometer is a four directional touchpad- think the digital pad on a game console controller- with a button in the center. In my rush to get the shot in total darkness, I didn't realize that the center button is not the shutter release button where I would have put it. It was awesome to watch, though. I'll have to make another attempt at that one at a later date, and also write about how to find out the details of when it will be visible.

This evening's shoot should be interesting. An annular eclipse is much like any other solar eclipse in that the earth's moon falls between the earth and the sun. This type is different from a total eclipse in that while the moon is centered over the sun, it is too far away from the earth to totally block it, leaving an annulus (ring) still visible. I've brought far too many toys with me, leaving a great debate. Do I go with my questionable quality Sigma 300mm lens on my D300, giving me an effective focal length of 450mm; or do I use my 80-200 on the rental D800 with its 36Mp, which will let me crop out a good portion of the field and still have a pretty good size file?

I should also mention that you should NEVER point your camera (much like your own eyes) directly at the sun with no filtration. After a couple hours online, I found a company in Arizona called Thousand Oaks Optical that manufactures astronomical filters of all kinds, including the screw on type needed for your camera.

On a totally separate note, I'm loving the food out here; and the official state question, "red or green." It seems that everything comes smothered in chile "sauce," being some concoction of chopped or pureed red or green chiles. I've even heard that you can get chile burgers at McDonald's, which I may have to check out. I've just discovered that for some reason (lack of flash?) that I can't upload photos using my iPad, so I'll have to post those later.