December | 2011 | Seldomly Updated

Hiking Long’s Peak:

A slideshow

I know some people appreciated the timelapse-slideshow I made of my Europe trip, so I decided to do the same to all the photos from the hike. You can watch the video in HD on Vimeo, or in the embedded video below.

In August of 2011, some friends and I attempted to hike Long’s Peak – one of the more well-known fourteeners in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The journey is grueling, and reportedly perilous. Would we make it? Watch the video to find out!

I blogged and posted some photos of the hike a couple months ago (https://jletookthis.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/longs-peak-my-first-fourteener/), but then I decided I’d put together a timelapse-style slideshow of the hike with all the photos I took. These photos were shot in raw, and were taken straight out of camera with no editing or cropping, and batch exported to jpeg.

Gear: Nikon D700, Nikon 20mm f/2.8, Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8

Song: Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

Crater Lake in July

Crater Lake National Park (Crater Lake, Oregon)

This past July, my brother and I were able to take a roadtrip across the US. One of our stops was Crater Lake National Park. If you ever find yourself in Oregon, I would definitely recommend taking a trip to Crater Lake National Park. If I recall correctly, it’s about a 5 hr drive from Portland, OR, or just over 3 hrs from Eugene, OR. You can drive almost all the way around the lake, and there are some great little hikes in the area.

My brother and I hiked down to the water, which is where I snagged this shot. The water stays close to freezing year round, but that doesn’t stop tourists from jumping into the water from a rocky outcropping. If we would have known, we’d have worn our swim trunks and taken a dunk as well.

Tourists taking a Dip in Crater Lake

If you’d like to learn more about Crater Lake, I’d recommend you check out the wikipedia entry for Crater Lake, OR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crater_Lake

On Content-Aware Fill:

For most photos, I tend to only use Adobe Lightroom 3 for my post-processing needs. However, sometimes some photos have distracting elements that just can’t be fixed in camera or in Lightroom. For times like this, I use Adobe Photoshop CS5. CS5 has a new feature called “Content-Aware Fill” which allows you to easily select distracting elements, and the program automagically fills in that area helping it blend it into the background. For the first photo, I used content-aware fill to remove a distracting rock from the foreground (on the lower right side), and some lens flare that I found distracting.

Here’s the original photo: