glow | kritterspix

Arches National Park

Posted on April 6, 2016April 6, 2016 by kritterspaw

Arches, while aptly named with memorable arches to view and walk amongst, is so much more. It is multiple spires, hoodoos if you will, large canyons and seas of rock formations jutting out of the valley floor… and arches.

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Arches true colors shine at sunset when the colors turn a brilliant unreal orange-red.

The rock pillars radiate as if they were on fire, taking on an other worldly glow. It makes you stop dead in your feet just to take it in. It comes like a storm, lights up the world, then without pause or hesitation it disappears behind the horizon until it comes back tomorrow.

For me, I’m just happy to be witness to it’s grandeur and share in it’s awesome beauty.

Lake Powell – Alstrom Point

Posted on April 4, 2016 by kritterspaw

Have you been to… or heard of Alstrom Point? It’s on the back side of Lake Powell, north of Page. We have seen photos of this amazing place and wanted to check it out for ourselves. If you go to Page, continue west to Big Water. Stop at Big Water Visitor Center for a fascinating education in this dinosaur rich area, with over 4000 dinosaur’s being discovered just in the last 10 years, many newly discovered species. They’ll give you a detailed map on how to get to Alstrom Point. But essentially it’s behind Big Water along a long 2 hour dirt road.

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The overlook was nothing short of stunning.

We camped out so we could get sunset, sunrise, and star photos. We enjoyed it so much, we stayed 2 nights. It was one of those magical moments that you remember for a life time. Watching the full moon rise over the lake was fantastic. This orange ball rose just behind Gunsight Butte, lighting up the sky like it burst into flames.

Because we were there 2 nights we got to do sunrise and sunset, as well as night stars.

Pictures don’t do it justice. It was a fabulous couple days.

Campground Glow

Posted on March 6, 2016March 6, 2016 by kritterspaw

We went camping the other day, and to be perfectly honest, I’m a bit embarrassed by how FEW photos I took. The advantage to night camping (particularly at my age) is I can get night shots – stars, milky way, etc. But I took only a handful of photos… and didn’t stray far from the fire.

This time of year, there is still some snow on the ground, and the overnight temps can be chilly. So I didn’t even get out the tripod. I handheld my camera and took a couple pix of my favorite model – my faithful and patient love-of-my-life husband, John.

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It stuns me the quality of photo one can get in our digital cameras these days. With ISO’s that can go up to 200,000, one can make a pitch dark photo look like daylight. In the old days of film, you could buy high ISO film, but you paid for it in graininess and noise in your photos. Forget about using your zoom or stopping down your aperture, it was just grainy.

The photo above was taken at an aperture of f/9.0 at 4000 ISO. Amazing right?

Above was taken at f/4.0, 10,000 ISO. By shooting with a large aperture I could not only draw in as much light as possible, my depth of field is shallow, and I grab the cast glow from the fire. It’s just amazing to see what modern digital cameras are capable of.