Well, things have gotten so hectic lately that Ann and I are on another photo trip long before I’ve finished the 2018 Grand Fall Adventure posts.  I promise I’ll get back to them, but given I’m sitting in a time-share with the photographs I’ve taken from this morning on my laptop, I figured it would be better to share a blog post with you now than to hold off and keep things in sequence.  So here are some images I took Saturday morning of Phoenix Buttress at Smith Rocks State Park.

Ann and I are still recovering from our 2018 Grand Fall Adventure.  And while I managed to make time to watch El Classico (Barcelona won 5-1 - even without Leo Messi!), the weekend was a full one as Ann and I worked through our post-trip recovery checklist to get everything ready for our next adventure - whenever that winds up being.  So after the camera cleanings, and Beast’s bath, and a quick visit to visit mummy, the only thing that was left was to run a couple of prints through the printer and hope that having a 5-week break hadn’t clogged our printer head.  Fortunately, it didn’t.

Our first day of the trip was, in a single word, uneventful.  Which is what you want when you pretty much have a full day of driving to do.  We were on vacation and decided that warranted a side trip on day one to Cinders Cafe in Klamath Falls - a detour of about an hour, plus eating time.  Later that day, Yelp let us down for dinner, but my pre-trip scouting for a dispersed camp site was successful and we nabbed a lovely spot on BLM land in Water Canyon just south of Winnemucca, Nevada for our first night’s campsite.  Willie Nelson definitely has it right, it was great to be back on the road again.

As is too often the case, the weekend before our trip found us as busy as ever.  I wound up having to work, at least part of the day, while getting things ready for our trip.  While I was busy working on a LUBA brief, Ann was doing her magic to figure out not ONE, but TWO ways for you to follow us during our journey - without me even having to blog about it during the trip!  Read on to see how to join Beast, Jack, Ann and me on our 2018 Grand Fall Adventure!

A few weeks ago I was going through some older images from our trip to Bryce Canyon back in 2015.  As I looked at the images I realized that several of them made a nice example of what happens to light on the edges of the day - in this case sunset - and why Ann and I try to photograph during those periods.  It’s also a lesson on why patience and waiting can be so valuable with photography.  So here’s how much the light can change in 32 minutes!

Our August adventure was somewhat different than our others this year, it was more about family than about photography.  And though there was still some of that, it was still an adventure and well worth documenting.

Today’s answer:  To learn, and then implement.

Ok, that’s the obvious answer.  But that was the answer from this week’s trip out to Sweet Creek Falls.  And the lesson comes from August’s photographer of the month - David Ward.

As this post goes live, Brandon is probably sitting around at the San Francisco airport waiting for his flight home to Lauren and Puck, which marks the official end to our August adventure.  We’ll get to that story later.  But since Brandon and I took a hike yesterday (not that kind of hike) and because I not only took some photographs while we were out, I printed some images once I got home, I figured I should do a printing the image post.  And since Brandon had suggested making the images I wound up printing, it’s properly Brandon’s Edition.

I’d mentioned in our July 2018 Adventure post that, even given the limits of photographing the Palouse from Steptoe Butte, I had a field day.  The contrast in textures, the low angle of the sun and my ability to get in close with the telephoto zoom I keep in my camera bag (oh why didn’t I run back to Beast and pull out the big gun?) allowed me to make a range of images.  At the time I wondered whether they were better color images, or actually black and white images.  In working with them, I realized that they were both, although they had to be developed differently.  Since I’ve never seen anyone show black and white images of the Palouse, I figured I’d show you my results.