Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/200 sec at ƒ/4, ISO 100

I woke up really early this morning (3:30 am) to photograph the stars and sunrise in Arches National Park. It was another beautiful morning … I think this will be the last planned photo venture of my trip. I might take it easy the rest of the day and check out the town. I photographed this image of a cairn in the wash near Three Gossips after getting all of my other shots in (Three Gossips is one of my favorite sites here at the park, btw).

The first night I was here I hiked out to Delicate Arch to photograph it at sundown. It was a nice hike and I made it up there with plenty of time to set up and get a bunch of great images. I stuck around until dark, along with another girl named Renee, who was also hanging out to check out the stars. There were too many clouds in the sky so we decided to leave, but it was pitch black out, minus a little bit of moonlight and the light from our flashlights. It’s not a paved trail, so we were relying on finding the cairns to guide us back. I’ve always seen them in photographs and used as “zen” or “spa” imagery, but this was the first time that they ever had real purpose and meaning for me. If it weren’t for those little pillars of stones it would have been a real challenge to find the way back to the start of the trail.

It sure would be nice to have these things guiding me through life … I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark with a flashlight most of the time. ;)

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, 38 sec at ƒ/4, ISO 800

This is the first image I photographed this morning … not the best starry-sky image in the world, but it was refreshing to have it be the first image I saw on the LCD Monitor on my camera. I only got a few star images this morning before the sunlight started creeping in, so tomorrow morning I plan on getting up even earlier to have more time to set up. I’ve always had a fascination with stars and planets, and really want to try photographing them more often.

Last night I made the trek up to Delicate Arch (here’s a photo of me and the arch) and I think I got some nice shots. Cliché stuff, no doubt, but still fun. :) I’ll be here in Moab for a few more days photographing at Arches National Park. This place is soooo gorgeous … I’ll have to start making the drive out here regularly from now on.

Photo © Rich Legg

I needed an new portrait for my upcoming book that will be released in a few months, and my good friend Rich was kind enough to help me out. I’m like most photographers in that I prefer to be the one taking the photos, but my only request to Rich was that he make me look good. I think (hope!) he did a good job. :)

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm ƒ/1.8 lens, 1/8 sec at ƒ/11, ISO 1600

Last night Rich was gracious enough to pose for a quick photo at Joe’s Crab Shack. They have some really cool lights hanging from their ceiling and it made a perfect backdrop for this type of photo. This image is a fun re-creation of an image I shot w/ my point-and-shoot about a year ago … it’s accomplished by twisting the camera while dragging the shutter and using the flash. I wrote an article about this technique on Photofocus … you can check it out here.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

As you probably know I am a huge fan of Photoshop, and I thought it would be a good idea to get up-to-speed on the new features of CS5. I also really enjoy the tutorials on Lynda.com and thought it was a good place to go (along with NAPP, of course) to learn about the new features.

While watching a video on the new puppet warp feature I all of a sudden realized that they were using my photo! I’ve watched tons of Lynda.com tutorials and know that they oftentimes get their images from iStock and other microstock sites, but this was the first time I saw one of mine in use.

It’s always fun to find my images in-use on my own when I’m not looking for them. :)

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L lens, HDR (1/13, 0.6 and 5 sec.), ƒ/14 at ISO 100

I drove out to Utah Lake last week and had more fun doing some landscape HDR photography. I’m kinda getting into HDR, it’s a lot of fun so far and I really like the results. I’m also really looking forward to installing Photoshop CS5 to see how well it can create HDR images, even though I just bought Photomatix (lol)!