2017-11-07 Travel Tuesday, Sedona AZ

Sedona has long been a favorite place for my wife and I to visit. During the most rescent excursion, during this past October, I was able to convince Heidi to get up very early and join me at one of the lookout points on Schnebly Hill Road. It was the only morning there was any significant cloud cover, so I was very happy to be shooting.

This is a little while after sunrise. You can see the mountain in the back is fully illuminated on the right side (the Sun is behind my right shoulder) and the closer Red Rock edifice is still in shadow. I felt it made for a nice composition and explored the nuance of the early morning Sun.

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Nikon D800E Sigma Art 135mm f/1.8 @ 1/160 sec f/6.3 ISO 100

Travel Tuesday Fireworks in the New York Harbor

This Independence Day my wife and I took a brief trip to New York City for a different view of fireworks. The Fourth of July is her favorite holiday so we try to do something special. This year we took an evening dinner cruise into New York Harbor to watch the festivities. For a photographer this poses a few interesting problems, the main ones being light, and speed. Taking a fireworks picture usually means putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the shutter open for a few seconds (4-20, I usually average about 7) while the explosive soars into the sky and erupts with glorious showers of light and color. Leaving the shutter open for this long captures the entire trajectory of the display. Being on a moving boat made this quite impossible. Seven seconds of picture while floating and turning would create a blurry smudge of color where the firework should have been and streaks of lines from the buildings on Manhattan and the other ships in the water.
My plan was to shoot with as quick a shutter speed as I could while letting a lot of light in quickly with a not too high ISO. The Nikon D4 is a great camera for speed and produces clean images at very high ISO settings, but noise in a black sky would be easily perceptible so decided to go with the fastest glass I had with me. My final setup was using the Sigma 35mm f/1.4 and the D4. Depth of field wasn’t much of a concern since the action was taking place quite a ways away, and was reasonably centered around one focus point. I’m pretty happy with the result.

Nikon D4 Sigma 35mm f/1.4 @ 35mm f/1.8 ISO 2000 1/160 sec

 

Nikon D4 Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 @ 25mm f/2.8 ISO 2000 1/50 sec

 

#TravelTuesday The Bellagio Fountains

One of the coolest and inexpensive things to see in Las Vegas is the fountain show in front of the Bellagio casino. The man made lake is roughly nine acres and houses fountains that can shoot water 150 feet into the air. The fountains erupt every half hour during the day and every quarter hour after nightfall. The performance is accompanied with music ranging from opera, to country, to pop songs. It is a refreshing breath of fresh air on the Las Vegas Strip.

Nikon D4 Sigma 15mm f/2.8 fish eye @ f/b ISO 2000 1/30 sec

Nikon D4 24-70mm f/2.8 Tamron @ 24mm f/8 ISO 2000 1/13 sec

#TravelTuesday Las Vegas

Last weekend I was covering the NASCAR races at Las Vegas Motor Speedway so my wife and I had a limited amount of time to see Vegas. We had visited there a few years ago, so we had a general idea of the layout. After walking for hours at the track all weekend we decided to set out for a few hours Sunday night and walk “The Strip”. It was a pleasant 70°F and clear skies. We started our trek late in the afternoon as the Sun was going down which was nice for some photography. The sky was turning a deep blue and of course the lights of Las Vegas lit up the town. I’ll spend the next few days recapping our journey, but between us, Vegas is fabulous this time of year, and it’s almost always cheap to get there.

Nikon D4, Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm f/8 ISO 800 1/13 sec

#TravelTuesday The Caribbean

I thought, as my van was sliding its way along the snow covered roads this morning, that today’s travel post should remind us all that there are places to visit when we grow weary of our current situation. For the past few years my wife and I have visited someplace warm and tropical for a few days in the middle of Winter. I highly recommend this idea to anyone with seasonal blues. I believe anyone living North of the 35th parallel qualifies. I usually give the vacation as a Christmas present and my wife has always been most appreciative. So if I may suggest, if you have been wracking your brain about what give your significant other this holiday season, a few days away from the gloom of Winter, long hours relaxing on a sun soaked beach, island music and fruity drinks make the perfect gift. The bonus is that you get to go along.

Nikon D800 Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 40mm f/14 ISO 100 30 sec