Mt Whitney Zone Forums Trip Reports Third Muir Trail with my kids

Yeah I did also! I noticed the same spot and was thinking that is where we were talking.



Actually no because I have no other lenses lol. Since it set me back 5000 to buy my starting gear I have not got anything else yet.

I did notice your use of flash which helps allot to balance lighting in bright portrait situations but I also took so few images of anyone else, I think allot can be learned with portrait photography but I have never had the chance to practice it at all.

I still have no flash though also because that is going to cost me another few hundred dollars for one.

I also mostly shoot in AF and I use the auto setting with options that allow quick changes to the aperture and shutter speed. I also use landscape mode for more proper blue and green balances.

This year I did not use my polarizer once, I stopped using it because of too many unbalanced skies that I could not correct and then I just never put it on, turned out to be dead weight.

I loved Iva Bell myself even coming from the showers at Reds Meadow, I never got into the pools up high with the nice views but my favorite pool had a nice gravel bottom that was just deep enough to sit on the bottom and lean against a rock being neck deep in the water, the pool was shaded by trees all day long and surrounded by wild flowers. When I was in there I thought to myself "life is always good in the Sierra but sometimes it's better" =P

I saw the pics where you said Claire had passed out due to dehydration, I almost passed out last year from that also, it's a problem in the mountains for sure!

When I started at Hetch Hetchy it was 100F and I almost had heat stroke on day one!

> I saw the pics where you said Claire had passed out due to dehydration, I almost passed out last year from that also, it's a problem in the mountains for sure!

I missed that. Can you fill us in a little?

she has a history of fainting from pain - started years ago when I popped a blister on her hand and she just dropped to the floor like a rock.

it happened again on the way down to woods creek this summer, exhausted, heavy downhill before that, some small blisters on her feet starting to bother her, probably dehydrated. We were sitting down at the far end of a creek crossing and she said she was thirsty and getting dizzy, and within seconds her eyes turned up and she started to drop. I was able to catch her body before she hit the ground and knew what to do (legs up, loosen straps, etc, and she came right back to, but it was scary. We took a long break, she drank a lot, and we made it down to Woods creek fine, checking on her every minute, walking close to be able to help in dangerous places should it happen again.

then, at the very end of the hike, in the Whitney Portal Store, it happened again - long downhill, neglect to drink on the final run the finish, I guess same thing. two more reasons why we called off the yo-yo well before we got to Whitney Portal.

the flash I use for those fill situations is the small thing built into the camera. You can do that with anything that works on a Canon. I don't do anything fancy with the flash - just pop it open, tell the camera nothing new. If the resulting image looks too bright and there's a chance for a second shot, i drop the flash by half a stop or so. If I was not hiking, I'd also try a diffuser.

re white balance - when you shoot raw, none of that really matters. It's a post processing decision. I leave it on auto, but only as a starting point. About half the images I have online needed white balance tweaking in Camera Raw. If you want to be certain you know what was "white" at the exact time of each image taken, you'd have to carry one of these white balance calibrators along and re-measure every single time you shoot, as the light keeps changing constantly over the course of a day. I just ballpark it when looking at the images next to each other.

I think a lot of my "not so blue" blue skies may be a result of my rather low-budget polarizer (it also doubled as lens cap), but I don't lose much sleep over it - this is digital, so by design it's going to be challenged in return for the convenience (1500 images this summer, that is about 50 rolls of slide film on three tiny plastic cards - well worth a little drop in quality, not even counting the $$$ for the film and processing saved). I keep telling myself I gotta take the film body back up there, but I think that train has left the station and it's digital from here on.

Sounds scary to have her pass out like that, probably freaked them out in the store!

Last year I almost had it happen at the Blayney Hotsprings, it had been a very hot day dropping down to that altitude and i'm sure I didn't drink enough then I sit in the hotspring for an hour with no water and I get out to walk over to the little lake near by and it took all my energy to walk the 100 feet to it and I started feeling dizzy so I closed my eyes trying as hard as I could to fight it and then I had to sit down and slowly I brought myself back but it was close!

I guess you have to learn yourself like twice I was going into shock over small wounds because I learned I was dwelling too much on it, like once at work I just cut my finger bad and I was all pissed and kept thinking about how much it sucked and how annoyed I was and I began to get dizzy and sweat horribly and my ears began ringing and I almost passed out. Had it happen another time also when I stabbed a power drill through my finger and smashed the bone on my finger tip, had a piece of bone on my drill tip lol.

But anyway as for flashes I really wish the 5Dmark2 had a flip up flash but it doesn't, no built in flash at all so your stuck with pulling out some big thing and putting it on.

Sadly I am stuck with white balance with these images because I shoot in JPG on really long trips because I don't have enough memory, normally I always shoot in raw but I get about 550 shots for a 16gig card and I only have 3 16 gig cards and even with JPG that just gets me through on a summer hike.

We just have to keep looking forward to the day digital becomes way better than film ever was, it will happen some day!

Perhaps the shutter could be scaled down to about 50 shutters and sensors to take every bit of the frame in the perfect balance of lighting to get rid of this "do I want over exposed sky or under exposed foreground?"

you're talking HDR now - I played a little with that idea this summer, bracketed a few shots, then tried photoshop cS4 HDR automate (forget about it) and a few days ago I installed the trial of Photomatix; result - yawn:



compare to the what I consider "proper" exposure of that view:



yes, more texture in highlights in the above, far more detail in the shadows, but it is like compressed audio - everything is loud, so nothing stands out nor is there any subtle gradiation of anything. If you turn the top image into gray scale, you can barely tell what you are looking at.

I figured a back-lit Rainbow Falls could be improved with HDR, but this turned out like a total cartoon, even though I used the "natural" preset to start



So even if cameras can record all that stuff in the shadows (the falls are based on a single RAW image, not a stacked set of many different exposures), the display of all that within the 8-bit contrast range of our screns just doesn't cut it. I doubt we'll really ever get far beyond what we see now, but cameras will increase their native dynamic range (Nikon D3 is 14 bit, my camera is just 12 bit, we look at 8 bit on the screen), that's really not what film was all about. Slide film especially didn't have anywhere near that contrast range, so it was all about something being more "natural" and analog I guess.

Flash - get the smallest hotshoe flash possible for your body - you won't need the wedding photogapher's mega blaster. Just a tiny filler is all you need to light up those shadows, but not having it built in probably means you'll rarely ever use it.

Did you use a tripod for the HDR shots or can you over lap them like panoramas do? I always thought you would need a tripod for a perfect fitting frame.

I have never tried to do an HDR because I don't know how! I do have CS3 but I rarely use it, I do all my work in Lightroom.

So much to learn about photography for sure and by the time you get it all figured out the rules change.

don't need a tripod with the good software, but it's better. Much bigger issue is moving water, but Photomatix can line that stuff up pretty nicely

download the photomatix trial - it's free and full featured, just puts that logo on the image you see above. You also can use it to "tonemap" RAW image files - much better than just using curves in Photoshop. I clearly haven't been able to figure out how to manually get to the setting I want, or I just don't like this look you are bound to get by making everything fit within the more medium brihgtness values.

so much to learn, you're right. I just bumped into something totally new to me that is based on HDR concepts, but for a totally different purpose - noise reduction in shadow areas:

http://www.guillermoluijk.com/article/nonoise/index_en.htm