Category Archives: travel

Today we continue the road trip theme started with Monday’s blog.

My first digital camera was a nifty five-megapixel affair with a 5x lens.  That lens was sorely lacking on the wide-angle side, coming in at a pretty pathetic equivalent of a 38 mm lens, but extending out to a not-to-shabby (at the time) 190 mm at the telephoto end.  The lens was also pretty darned  fast, ranging from f2.0 to f2.4.  Pretty state-of-the-art at the time, but certainly not something that would make me want to give up my 35 mm camera and lenses.  Nevertheless, I decided to give this camera a workout by relying on it solely during a 2005 road trip we made though the Pacific Northwest.

We flew into Seattle and rented a car.  From there we first headed south, to Tacoma, for the Museum of Glass.  The Museum of Glass is not one of those venues at which you want to practice your Black & White photography.  Trust me on this.  The vibrant colors are the main attraction here.

From Tacoma we reversed course and proceeded to our farthest planned destination of Whistler, Canada, site of the 2010 Winter Olympics.  Whistler is first and foremost a ski town, and the accommodations and ski lifts emphasize that point.  Don’t let that fool you, though.  Whistler has much to offer year round, including extreme downhill inline skating (but not for this kid), hiking (watch out for the black bears), some great gourmet dining (now we’re talking), and a fantastically stocked wine shop in nearby Whistler Blackcomb.  Take the lift up to the top of the 7,156-foot-tall Whistler Mountain for some great vistas, including the village of Whistler and Blackcomb nestled far below.

Turning back to the south we ferried the car over to Vancouver Island and drove over to the famed Butchart Gardens.  Butchart Gardens  takes advantage of Vancouver’s moderate climate (by far the mildest of anywhere in Canada) to produce some truly spectacular flowers ranging throughout the color spectrum.   Victoria, at the southernmost tip of Vancouver, is the capital of British Columbia (who says politicians don’t know where to meet?), and the town itself is a charming mix of seaport and sophisticated cosmopolitan architecture.  The ivy-covered walls of the Fairmont Empress Hotel, just a short distance from Parliament, is a photographic gem.  Unfortunately, I didn’t capture the wondrous Parliament building on this trip, but in a later blog I will share pictures of it that were taken on a subsequent visit.

Another ferry ride brought us and our rental car to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands archipelago.  We stayed at the Rosario Resort, built on the site of the Robert Moran Mansion.  The mansion still exists as a rather interesting museum and is well worth the visit.

After our stay at Rosario, it was another ferry back to the mainland and a drive to catch our flight out of SeaTac.

Enjoy the sights, but remember that they were taken with some pretty inferior equipment:

Rosario on Dwellable

Looking for a unique and visually stunning road trip that will have you reminiscing and talking about for years to come?  For me, that road trip was the Canadian Rockies in late May back in 2006.  Ursula and I flew into Calgary, Alberta, and rented a car.  From there we drove west and then north, into some of the most beautiful mountain areas I have ever visited outside of the Swiss Alps.

Our first stop was Canmore, where we stayed in a beautiful Edwardian-style hotel and pub called the Georgetown Inn.  So enamored were we with our stay here that we made a second night of it on the return trip back through Canmore six days later.

The next day we started our way into the really high country toward Banff.  Along the way we stopped at Johnson Lake, where I was able to compose some really nice shots of mountains reflected in the cool, still waters.  Beyond Banff were Lake Louise and the even more stunning Moraine Lake.  Moraine Lake was particularly picturesque in that much of the lake was still blanketed in ice, however the ice had melted along one side of the lake revealing greenish glacial waters that reflected the Ten Peaks Range standing sentinel over the valley floor.  The pictures have the effect of an optical illusion in which water appears to cascade away from the ice sheet.  In actuality the water was perfectly still and reflected perfectly the mountains beyond.

Continuing further north took us into the vistas afforded by Natural Bridge in YoHo National Park, Athabasca Falls (captured a really neat rainbow refraction in the mist rising off the falls), and finally the quaint town of Jasper in which we stayed in a rustic and very romantic wood cabin.

In between we encountered the Athabasca Glacier, a truly awe-inspiring field of ice onto which we ventured via a remarkable vehicle called a Terra Bus.

What follows are just some of the many, many photographs I took on this adventure.  I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

I love the Desert Southwest.  The climate is great almost year-round.  The sights are incredible.  The sunsets can’t be matched anywhere for vibrancy and color.  And it’s a photographer’s paradise.  Add a road trip and you multiply your photographic opportunities.

The following vistas were photographed on one such road trip Ursula and I took back in October of 2006.  That trip took us through Monument Valley, Arches National Park, Telluride, the Ghost Ranch of Georgia O’Keeffe fame, and Santa Fe.  Some of the Ghost Ranch and Santa Fe shots are a bit dark because I somehow inadvertently set a -1.33 exposure compensation on my camera and didn’t catch it right away.  See?  Even an experience photographer can make the occasional boneheaded mistake now and then.  Anyway, I’ve post-processed some of that error away.