Had a busy weekend of shooting, despite less than perfect conditions for both days. Much of Arizona is currently on fire, and there’s a distinct haze in the sky in a lot of Northern AZ.
Saturday Doug and I headed to Jerome and walked around taking photos of the city. Cloud cover was awesome, but the haze was hurting landscape shots. Jerome is a great little town and walking around was a lot of fun.
After probably 3 hours in Jerome, we headed up to Red Rocks State Park. After a $6 entrance fee, we started walking around only to find most parts are currently blocked off for conservation reasons. Not a lot of opportunities for photography unfortunately. This is one of those paved parks where you are not allowed anywhere but the trail and much of what you can see is obscured by the paving or tourists. Blech.
Sunday we headed out to Walnut Canyon. This canyon hold the ruins of many native cliff dwellings. Unfortunately, much like Red Rocks, heavily paved, and little to shoot. You can’t get to the bottom of the canyon, and the trails provided little in the way of shoot-able scenery. Montezuma’s castle is much more interesting, as is Waputki. Don’t think I’ll be checking this out again.
This trip was my first one shooting with a circular polarizer. I only decided to get one right before heading out, and could only find a cheap one at a local store. It caused a pronounced blue shift and cost easily 2 stops worth of light. There is a reason that B+W and Hoya multicoated filters cost $130. Need to buy a better one, loosing 2 stops worth of light makes shooting handheld extremely hard even on sunny days. But I’m still pleased with how much of the stuff turned out.
Picked up the Adobe CS 2 suite this weekend, and today ordered some crystal clear bags for storing and shipping prints. I’m currently mulling over putting some prints up on e-bay to try and bring in some exposure. While prices tend to be lower, apparently one can really make it up in volume. Seems like some people do very well selling $15 8x10s on ebay. If I got 4 prints a month sold that would be a good start.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been mulling gear again. I’m pretty sure I’m going to move over to a 20D and get a vertical grip for it which I was longing for this weekend. Also high on the list is a lighter tripod for hiking. My current 7lb monster gets heavy real quick when scaling canyon walls. Beyond that, better gear will depend on sales of prints as I’m trying to get a down-payment together for a house. Whee!