After 22 days, 3,229 miles, and 4,650 photos I finally arrived home in the San Francisco Bay Area on July 1st. My car was still not fixed and subsequently visited a competent local dealership in Sunnyvale, CA and required a $1,300 head gasket repair. I won’t be posting a review of my Honda Civic on this blog, but if I did it would be nowhere near positive.
Here is a map showing my route throughout the West. I made it to 9 states, including every Western state except for Washington and Montana. What a beautiful country I am fortunate enough to live in! Let’s do everything we can to keep it beautiful and not drill for oil or shale gas in the Western United States. Keep our air and our rivers clean! I will do everything I can do slow global warming. Let’s do our best!
[Click on the map to see the large version with details.]
Processing the over 4,600 photos has been quite a challenge, though I am making steady progress and expect to be processing until I begin my graduate studies at Stanford at the end of September. I’ll continue to share my photos on this blog and will perform a large website update once I’m done with the entire trip’s worth of photos. Like all endeavors in life, nature photography requires patience and determination. The following photograph is an excellent example of this. I took this photo at Lake Abert in Oregon and waiting all afternoon for the sun to break through storm clouds on the horizon. My patience paid off and offered a spectacular sunset behind the dramatic shoreline of this beautifully desolate lake. I determined to make the most of this incredible light and shot many different compositions. It was by far the best shoot of my three week trip.
“Lake Abert Sunset” – Lake Abert, OR
Nikon D700, Nikon 16-35mm lens
3-stop hard grad ND
2 image blend for luminosity (ISO 200, f/13, 1/10 sec and 0.4 sec) – blend is iHDR (manual PS blending using luminosity masks/painting)