This morning Parker, Lily, and I went for a hike up into Weehawken Basin, out of Ouray, Colorado. It felt great to get up into the lush, green, forested mountains of the San Juans again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there may be bigger, taller, and more impressive mountains than in Colorado, but nowhere do I know of a paradise like here! In a couple weeks I’d imagine that this scene will be plump full of wildflowers.
Upon reaching the gorgeous Weehawken basin, we felt energized and ready for more hiking, so we decided to go ahead and climb a peak. We headed up the tundra grass towards Mt. Ridgway.
Lily scouts the view, with Potosi Peak (13,786 ft.) behind. By the way, that big couloir on Potosi is #1 on my snowboard descent wish list.
Lily stands on the summit of Mt. Ridgway (13,468 ft.)
There was a plethora of these purple wildflowers on the rocky summit.
I made a quick trip out to San Diego this weekend for an old buddy’s wedding. Being springtime there, everything was green and vibrant and flowering, and my last day there was a gorgeous crystal clear day that made my heart ache for my hometown. I don’t have any photos to show for it, except this snapshot of Mission Beach and Mission Bay from the airplane window.
The weather in Colorado, on the other hand, was up to its usual antics. After being held in a holding pattern over the Front Range for a half hour, we finally started our descent into Denver right under the roof of a dark, ominous thunderhead. As we approached the airport the plane was getting tossed around so badly that the pilot gunned it out of there and we flew another holding pattern for about an hour, circling around the thunderhead and watching the purple lightning bolts flashing through the cloud and zapping the runway. No bueno. My photos unfortunately do not do justice to the scene, but regardless, this is something you normally don’t want to be seeing out of an airplane window.
The thunderhead finally moved away from the runway just far enough for the pilot to make a successful landing, but once we were safely on the runway the entire airport spontaneously combusted into flames – or was that just the trippy refractions of light in raindrops? Perhaps the latter. We then had to wait for another half hour on the runway since the entire ground crew staff had been ordered inside due to the lightning danger, and when we finally got into the airport it was a frantic mess of delayed flights and people running for their connections. Good fun!
I finally made it back to the Montrose airport at 1:30am, only to be almost immediately pulled over and ticketed for doing 50 in a 30 mph zone. Sweet! I swear it was 45 in a 35, but what can you do?
And next on tap: a roadtrip to the Northwest tomorrow for 10 days to hopefully snowboard down some volcanos! My recent life philosophy in tough economic times: when work is slow, play fast! (But don’t drive too fast!) I have a laptop now so perhaps I’ll post some pics during the trip.
In other news, I just realized (after two months) that in addition to the article that Cowboys & Indians magazine published about me and my photography in their March 2010 issue, they also published a web-exclusive interview on their website. Check it out: Jack Brauer: behind the lens.
I just dug this photo from the dusty depths of my hard drive. I took this sunset shot of Snow Peak (13,024 ft.) way back in March 2004. I was living in Denver at the time, and took advantage of an unseasonably warm spell in March to go winter camping up on this high ridge in the Gore Range, just east of Vail.
One of the great things about the Gore Range is that on the west side of the range there are numerous high points and ridges that are relatively safely accessible in the winter, offering awesome panoramic views of the main spine of the range. Better yet, the west side of the range gets great sunset alpenglow light since there are no large ranges directly to the west. From a photography point of view, sunset shooting is always a bit easier since you don’t have to wake up early, and you can spend the afternoon casually scoping out photo possibilities. On this evening, I had a really fun photo shoot; there were so many photo possibilities in every direction, and the wind-sculpted sastrugi snow formations on the ridge provided lots of interesting foreground possibilities. You can see some more photos from this evening here, here, and here.
An early morning photo of Abrams Mountain and Ouray taken during my trip there last week. The next morning I slept in and unfortunately a friend informed me that I had missed an incredible sunrise… d’oh! Such are the disappointments of a lazy photographer.
This last week I took a vacation from Jackson to go home to Ouray, see some friends, and help track up the three feet of fresh snow there! I went splitboarding on the same mountain for four days in a row, riding different untracked lines each day. It felt great to be back in the San Juans for a little while… I love those mountains. Here’s a few skiing and snowboarding shots from the trip.
Mike Bryson carves into a beautiful untracked chute.
Matt Wade skis the pow.
Tom Kelly skis a line next to the trees. Notice the tantalizing, but insanely dangerous, San Juan terrain in the background!
Jay Godson enjoying the freshies.
Skinning up the ridge of my favorite mountain. That big crossloaded face in the center was virtually off-limits to sane people due to the avy danger; however, if you want to see a headcam video of me hauling ass down that face last year in more stable powder conditions, see here (the second descent in the video).
I just unearthed this photo taken back in February 2006. This is the view of Mt. Massive (center) and the Sawatch Range, as seen from the 14,440 foot summit of Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado.
I had hiked up Mount Elbert in the afternoon, knowing that the clear skies and full moon would provide plenty of light to make my way down at night. The evening turned out to be one of my most memorable summit experiences ever; the air was perfectly calm, I had warm clothes on, and I spent over three peaceful hours relaxing on the summit in the twilight and moonlight. During my time up there I also took what is perhaps my favorite photo to date, “Elbert’s Moonshadow”.
Both photos were taken with the 4×5 camera, with Provia film.
This was an early experiment with the 4×5 camera, taken back in January 2006 in the foothills above Boulder. I first exposed the film for a few minutes to record the city lights, then I covered up the bottom portion of the frame using a thin piece of cardboard cut to fit in my cokin filter holder. With the camera in the same position and the city lights blocked out to prevent overexposure, I left the lens open for several hours to capture the star trails.
It’s hard to see at web resolution, but on the center horizon are a bunch of light trails from airplanes taking off from Denver International Airport.
Despite my tenacious cold, I bundled up and walked around the block this morning to take the new Canon 5D2 and some new lenses for a spin. The fresh snow caking Ouray and the surrounding mountains made for a nice test subject!
The photo above was taken with a Contax/Zeiss 35-70mm lens, at 35mm f/8. This is an old, discontinued, manual focus and manual aperature lens, but I had read many glowing reviews about its incredible sharpness. Supposedly this zoom lens is as sharp or sharper than equivalent length prime lenses! So I picked one up on ebay for a reasonable price and this morning was my first trial run with it. I eagerly opened the files on my computer, and was not disappointed! The sharpness almost looks like it came from a Foveon sensor, but at a much larger resolution. In fact I’m so stoked I thought I’d share the fullsize file with all you pixel-peeping camera geeks out there.
>> Click here to see the sample full resolution file (7.6mb). The raw file had a sharpness setting of 3 (of 10), which does snap it up a little bit, but I figured since that’s about what I’d do anyways with my files, you might as well see it at that setting. The file was converted from 16bit to 8bit, I tinkered with the levels and color balance in Photoshop, added the watermark, and saved it as a quality 10 jpeg (to save a little bandwidth).
Anyhow, I am way stoked on the sharpness I’m getting from the 5D2, the 17mm and 24mm TS-E lenses, and now this Contax/Zeiss 35-70mm lens. I can’t wait to get out into the mountains again for some more real shooting with this setup! I’ve got to kick this pesky cold first though.
The rising moon casts lunar alpenglow on the peaks of Ice Lakes Basin in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado on this chilly November night. The 30-second, high ISO exposure enhanced the light and stars beyond what our eyes could see.
On Thursday I headed out backpacking to Ice Lakes Basin, near Silverton, Colorado. This previous week there has been a high pressure system over Colorado, with warm temps and clear skies, so I figured it would be a good time to head up into the high country for a quick overnight trip. The trail up to Ice Lakes Basin generally faces south, and I enjoyed a dry trail most of the way to the lower basin, and even after that the snow was only shin deep at most. With no snowshoes or snow-boots required it was like winter camping but easier! I found a nice little flat spot near the lake and set up my tent.
I knew the post-full moon would be rising an hour and half after sunset, so I hiked around looking for a good vantage point of the basin, set up my camera, and waited in the dark. While I was waiting I was having fun experimenting with my new camera setup – a Canon 5D2 with tilt/shift lenses. This camera has better high ISO performance than any other camera I’ve used, so it was fun to be able to take photo of the stars and the Milky Way. The moon rose on time, providing some nice lunar alpenglow on the peaks with the stars above. The photo above was a 30 second exposure at f/4 and ISO 2000, with the 24mm t/s lens.
Here’s the obligatory illuminated tent shot! Even though I was warm and cozy inside in my -30º sleeping bag, I hardly slept a wink due to the erratic gusty winds all night. The wind must have been coming in pulses, or else it was swirling around like mad in the basin, because it would be calm and quiet, then a blast of wind would pound my tent, over and over again every 30 seconds or so for the whole night. I knew the tent was fine, but still the noise was disconcerting enough to keep up awake most of the night.
A gorgeous sunrise over snowy Ice Lakes Basin, November.
This was right before sunrise. I was stoked to see clouds in the sky after a week of bluebird days.
As for the new camera, so far so good! Everything seems to be laid out nicely, and it seems to do what I expect it to do. But most of all, the lenses I got are sweet. I’ve said it before on this blog, but I am a sucker for good lenses, and the whole reason I decided to get into the Canon system was for their new tilt/shift lenses. Being able to carefully shoot a full-frame dSLR with lens movements makes it feel much more like shooting the 4×5 field camera; I can be ultra precise with the focussing from near to far in the scene. Also, I can easily make two-frame panos by taking two exposures with the lens shifted to either side; then the two exposures can be placed together almost perfectly, with no software stitching required. The first shot above, in fact, was made with two exposures with the lens shifted vertically. Anyhow, I’m sure I’ll write more about this camera setup later on when I know it better, but for now I can say I’m happy with it and will probably be using it for a while.
