Dave Wilson Photography » Travel

Taj Mahal, Agra, India

Dave Wilson — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:19:01 +0000

This post is really about the old Scout motto - "Be Prepared". I'm pretty happy with this shot, taken a few years ago during my first business trip to India, but if you take a look at the EXIF data, you'll see it was taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4600 point-and-shoot. This was a $150 camera at the time (you can't buy it now and, if you could, it would be given away with Corn Flakes). I originally bought it as an expendable camera prior to a slighty earlier trip to Guatemala where I was worried that carrying a DSLR would be inviting a mugging (which wasn't true by the way) but it became an able backup and "keep in the car" camera after that and did a good job until I bought the Canon G9 and passed it on to someone else.

The odd thing about the fact this was shot on the 4600, though, is that I had lugged a backpack full of DSLR gear half way around the world with the express intent of using it to shoot the Taj Mahal. The Coolpix was thrown in at the last minute "just in case".

At the time, I only had a single DSLR body, a Nikon D70, and, on the way down to Agra from New Delhi, we stopped on a dark road to grab some shots of the Lotus Temple. While trying to get back into the car, however, I fell in a hole (it was very dark) and smashed my D70 into the ground, killing the shutter release mechanism and turning my bag of lenses into just another dead weight.

Thank goodness for the point-and-shoot since it allowed me to record some of my memories of the Taj Mahal, albeit with lower dynamic range, in JPEG rather than RAW and without access to super-wide-angle views. The moral here is, regardless of how reliable your main camera is, always have something to fall back on, even if it's a $100 point and shoot or a camera phone, since you never know when you'll need it. I strongly suspect there's a correlation between the amazingness of what you intend shooting and the likelihood that you'll suffer a main camera problem, though :-)

Fir, Snow and Moon

Dave Wilson — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:20:15 +0000

This is the last of the Steamboat pictures and another one taken on the perfect, final morning as we prepared to leave. I love the clarity of a blue sky when you're at altitude. Underexpose it a stop or so and you end up with a fabulous background for a pretty minimal shot like this one. In this case, I was lucky that the crescent moon was at an elevation that allowed me to include it in the frame but unlucky that I didn't have the option of a longer lens to make it a bit larger.

Gondolas in the Mist

Dave Wilson — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:42:20 +0000

This was the view on our last full day in Steamboat. We had taken the boys, both new to skiing, to the top of the mountain to ski all the way back on an easy green run when the snow started in earnest. By the time we all got to the base again, we looked like a collection of snowmen and liberal quantities of hot chocolate were required to thaw us out.

The perceptive among you will realise that the "mist" here is actually snow but the title just wouldn't have worked if I had been completely honest :-)

Billy Kidd at Sunset, Steamboat

Dave Wilson — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:05:09 +0000

Billy Kidd, ex-US Olympic skier, is a bit of a legend in Steamboat Springs. He was brought up in Stowe, Vermont but relocated to Steamboat in 1970 and is now their local hero. If you are visiting the town, you can actually meet and ski with him since he leads a group from the top of the gondola each day at 1pm.

Although I didn't get to meet him, I did take a look at this well-known bronze sculpture which is right at the base of the slopes by the main gondola. This shot was taken on our first night in the town when the sunset light on the mountain was absolutely fabulous.

Snow Texture 2, Steamboat

Dave Wilson — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:57:41 +0000

Here's an altogether more natural snow texture image. Landscapes covered in new snow are so wonderfully soft - it's like the world has been sent through a rather aggressive low-pass filter, smoothing out all the high frequency jagged edges.

Snow Texture, Steamboat

Dave Wilson — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:19:06 +0000

Here's another minimalist shot from Steamboat. The grooming machines (or "piste-bashers" as we used to call them when I was skiing back in Europe) do a wonderful job of breaking up an icy crust and smoothing out the snow. In doing so, they leave the whole terrain covered in a pattern of thin lines like these.

Seven Eighths, Blue on Blue

Dave Wilson — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:41:39 +0000

Time for another minimalist image, I think. This shows one of the flags near the base of the mountain at Steamboat where the ski school meets. Levels 7 and 8 are the most advanced lessons (I was in a level 6 class) and I guess they don’t get too many people interested in lessons at that level since they only have a single meeting place for both levels.

As far as this image goes, I was drawn to the contrasting blues in the flag and the sky. I underexposed deliberately to enhance the effect.

Looking at this again, I notice some hideous banding in the sky. I guess I overcompressed the image during export so please forgive me. Unfortunately, the photo management software I’m using on this blog doesn’t let me replace an existing image (though I suppose I could delete the post and do the whole thing again, leaving anyone looking at the RSS feed with a 404 error if they try to click through…)

Steamboat Gondola

Dave Wilson — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:46:15 +0000

We just got back from a rather nice 4 day weekend in Steamboat Springs, Colorado where we got to ski a couple of days on what the tourist board refers to as "packed powder" but the rest of us think of as a mix of snow and ice. Regardless of the conditions, it was still great fun and I've added Steamboat to my list of ski destinations definitely worth a return visit.

In a wonderful quirk of weather fate, the skies opened on our second day there and dumped 8 inches of wonderful new snow just in time for us to finish skiing for the year. The morning we left, we woke up to absolutely perfect conditions. Although we weren't skiing that day, our flights were pretty late so I managed to spend some quality time with my Canon G9 wandering the lower slopes and grabbing some images of fresh snow. I had thought about lugging a DSLR with me but decided against it since I wanted to ski and probably wouldn't have had time to use it. Maybe next time, I'll change my mind?

Downtown Manhattan and Bridges

Dave Wilson — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:37:48 +0000

We're back from our long weekend trip to Colorado but I've not had any time to prepare new pictures yet so here's another one from the archives to keep things moving along.

As you can probably guess, this was shot from the window of an airliner during a trip to New York 18 months or so ago. It shows downtown Manhattan and three of the well-known bridges, from right to left, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge.

As with all airliner-window shots, this one required quite a bit of mucking with in Lightroom. Haze is reduced by pulling up the black point and overall colour and contrast can be helped out using curves.

Hoodoos, Bryce Canyon

Dave Wilson — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:18:03 +0000

Bryce Canyon in Utah is a spectacular place pretty much any time but the views are, to my mind, their absolute best when covered in a sprinkling of snow. During my last visit, however, we had rather too much of the white stuff and all the trails into the canyon were closed. Oh well - next time, I'll have to get there either at the start of winter or the beginning of spring.