Back in October 2008, I embarked on one of Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventures. But rather than paying passengers along for the six-day/five-night trip, I had a video team and a writer from Arizona Highways magazine. The trip itself went great. Good weather, great flying conditions, most accommodations right in line with my usual offerings.

It wasn’t until months afterwards that I realized what a mistake I’d made.

The video company, which I’d contracted to produce three television quality documentaries with footage taken, in part, during the trip, was in way over its head. A visit to the video editing guy’s “state of the art studio” — a partially refinished garage right off his kitchen — was the wake-up call. He’d never bothered to catalog any of the hours of video he and his companion had shot on my dime, using equipment I’d probably purchased with my prepayment. He was attempting to create a “trailer” video with footage shot solely with the POV camera that had been attached, at an off angle, to my helicopter’s nose. His “audio recording facility” picked up the noise from his fan-cooled computers and barking dogs. He didn’t understand the concept of matching music changes to scene changes. In other words, he had no clue.

I won’t go into more details than that. My lawyers are dealing with it. Let’s just say I got ripped off badly and have nothing to show for it but a hard disk full of mediocre video in about a dozen different formats, none of which is organized or cataloged to make scenes easy to find.

But often it takes a bunch of crap (think fertilizer) to make something good grow (think flowers). And the good thing that came from the outrageous expense of the trip was the article written by Keridwen Cornelius, the Arizona Highways writer who came along and sat taking notes for most of the trip.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Before the article came out in the May 2009 issue of Arizona Highways, I was contacted by Jeff Kida, Photography Editor at Arizona Highways. I was familiar with Jeff’s work from the magazine. If you’ve never seen Arizona Highways, you should pick up a copy. It is, by far, the most impressive look at Arizona that you’re likely to see. The photography is beautiful, beyond description, and each issue of the magazine provides an in-depth look at the state that simply isn’t available elsewhere. Landscape photographers — amateur or professional — should use it as a standard to achieve in their own work.

Jeff said they needed a portrait of me and my helicopter for the article. We tossed around some ideas. I mentioned that near sunset, the late afternoon light often made the Weaver Mountains north of Wickenburg turn copper colored. I suggested that we put my helicopter out on the ramp at Wickenburg Municipal Airport with those mountains as a backdrop and stick me in front of it. He seemed to like the idea and made a date to do the shoot.

Jeff arrived early that day. So early that I figured I’d take him up for a aerial shoot of Wickenburg. I still had hopes about at least one of my videos and my husband, Mike, would shoot some HD footage with our Sony Handycam to use as B-roll. I pulled another door off in back for Jeff. We flew around town. He seemed to enjoy the flight, but he didn’t take many photos. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was an on-the-ground kind of photographer who liked to get up-close-and-personal with his subject matter. Aerial photography — especially in less than perfect conditions — didn’t interest him much.

We went back to the airport and I landed on the spot I’d envisioned. We put the doors back on. I went into the restroom to fix my hair a bit. I’d already put on makeup and a Flying M Air shirt. The sun crept lower into the horizon. The light started getting good.

The airport was deserted, which is (1) nothing unusual and (2) a good thing. Jeff had me stand at least 50 feet in front of the helicopter while he set up his tripod at least 50 feet from me. He used a long lens to frame me and the helicopter.

This is the difference between a photographer who knows what he’s doing and one who doesn’t. Sure, I could have stood closer to the helicopter and Jeff could have stood right in front of me. But instead, he’d decided to take advantage of the distance-compressing capabilities of a telephoto lens. By lining up his two subjects (me and the helicopter) in front of a distant background (the mountains 10 miles away) and framing us in a telephoto lens, he made everything appear much closer together. At the same time, he was able to sharply focus on me and leave the helicopter and mountains in a much softer focus.

The result, as you can see here, is likely the best portrait of me that I’ll ever see.

What I like about this photo — other than the simple fact that I look happy and alive and even a wee bit attractive in it — is that it tells a story about me. I’m the subject, the helicopter is the topic, and the desert mountains in the distance is the setting. It can be rewritten as a sentence: “Maria is a helicopter pilot who flies in the desert mountains.” And I think that’s what a good portrait should be. More than just a picture of a face. A description of that person.

Anyway, I didn’t see the photo until the May 2009 issue of the magazine came out. I was thrilled with it. I wrote to Jeff to ask if I could have a copy to use elsewhere. I also asked a few other questions. He answered the other questions, but didn’t send the photo. I thought perhaps the magazine had said no, so I let it go.

The article did great things for my business. I sold more excursions last year than I had in all the years I’d been offering it. While I didn’t net enough to cover the cost of my huge mistake with the videographers, it was great to get out there and share the trip with other folks.

This month I started a new project and really needed a good “author photo” to go with it. I remembered the photo from the Arizona Highways article. I contacted Jeff again. He apologized, saying he’d meant to send it to me the last time I’d asked but had forgotten. And he sent a high resolution image with permission to use it anywhere I wanted to.

I’m thrilled.

So now I have a good portrait that I can use on my blog (you’ll find it formatted as you see here on my Bio page) and on Flying M Air’s Owner/Chief Pilot Background page. And I’m sure you’ll see it elsewhere, too.

So that’s two good things that came from the ill-fated trip: the great article by Keridwen Cornelius in Arizona Highways‘ May 2009 issue and the great photo taken by Jeff Kida for that article. Thanks again, both of you!

I’m often told that I’m a great photographer. While I don’t usually correct the person handing out the complement — hey, everyone likes to have their ego stroked once in a while — I have to admit here that it’s simply not true.

The real truth is, I can occasionally make a great photograph.

What Makes a Great Photographer?

There’s a difference, at least in my mind. A great photographer can consistently make great photographs. He often goes out with his equipment with an idea in his mind of what he wants to achieve. He considers location, lighting, composition, and camera settings. He takes full advantage of his equipment, no matter what it is, to help him achieve great results. Consistently. His worst photos may be about the same quality as my best.

I, on the other hand, try to do all of these things. I don’t usually succeed. I’m limited by my experience, my capabilities, and my equipment. It’s experience that helps you know when the light is just right and how to set your camera for the shot. It’s capabilities that make it possible to use all the tools on the camera to make the shot as good as it can be. Its equipment that ultimately determines whether the shot is composed properly (think lens focal length) and in good focus (think lens quality).

I’m also limited by my willingness to sit in one place for hours, waiting for the light to get just right. Or my willingness to hike that extra two miles to get into the perfect position to frame the shot. Or my willingness to face the cold or heat or strong winds. Or my simple willingness to carry a tripod when the light seems “bright enough” or that extra lens I probably should have with me. (I’m working on getting over all of these personal limitations, but it ain’t easy.)

In the end, I get mixed results. Some of my shots are really good and make me really happy. Others are crap. The rest fall in between. The fact that there’s no consistency is what keeps me from being a great photographer.

And I’m okay with that. I’ll keep trying and, hopefully, get better. But I don’t think I’ll ever be great. I’m okay with that, too.

How to Make People Think You’re a Great Photographer

So why is it that so many people tell me I’m a great photographer? Here’s my trick: I only show off my best photos.

Too many people share too many of their photos. You know the folks I’m talking about. They go out with their camera and take 50 shots at the zoo. They then dump all (or almost all) of them on Flickr or some other photo sharing site. You go through them and are overwhelmed by the mediocrity. The great head shot of the giraffe munching a leaf is lost in the shuffle of poorly framed images of zebras and ostriches. The interesting image of the rhino’s sleeping face is buried among out-of-focus or poorly exposed images of monkeys and lions. You get bored after the first ten shots and may not browse any further to see the buried gems.

Digital cameras turned everyone into photographers and services like Flickr make it too easy to put photos online. Too many people think they need to share all of their photos. As if every shutter snap is the creation of a great work of art.

It isn’t.

Don’t Share Your Crappy Photos

There’s a lot of crap out there. It’s easy to distinguish yourself from other photographers. Simply share only your best images.

Be honest with yourself. Put one photo against another and keep the best one. Then do the same repeatedly to pare down the 50 zoo shots to three or four.

If necessary, get feedback from others — and I don’t mean the bullshit “great shot!” comments from fellow Flickr users who are fishing for reciprocal comments and “friends.” I’m talking about feedback from people who know good photos when they see them and are not afraid to tell you.

Don’t believe me? Try it and see for yourself. Weed out the crap you’re sharing on Flickr (or other online photo sharing sites) so only your best remain. Then see what people say about you, as a photographer. I think you’ll be pleased.

This photo of Bowman Lake at Glacier National Park appears in my photoblog, Maria’s Pix, today.

The watermark/copyright notice argument goes back and forth all the time.

On one side are the bloggers and readers of Web content who have created and seen more crap online than the rest of the human race combined. These people claim that copyright notices on photos are tacky and make the photos look ugly. They go on to say — and there is definitely some truth to this — that the average photo on the Web is so poor in quality that the photographer has no need to worry about it being stolen.

On the other side are the serious — or possibly professional — photographers who want to show off their work online but protect it from theft. These people are tired of seeing the results of their hard work and investment in costly equipment appearing on someone else’s Flickr account or in blog posts. Or, as in my case, in an e-mail postcard sent to me.

Why People Steal Photographs and other Web Content

I clearly recall lying on my stomach on cold rock to get the right angle for this shot. Photographed at Joshua Tree National Park.

There are two reasons why people steal photographs and other content they find on the Web:

• They mistakenly believe that anything that appears on the Web is in the public domain. This is not true. Most Web content is protected by the same copyright law as the most recent Dan Brown masterpiece of fiction (yes, I’m being sarcastic) or Black Eyed Peas single (do they still call them that?) or Pixar animated feature film. When these people honestly don’t know any better, they’re making an honest mistake. But when they’re told they’re infringing someone’s copyright and they refuse to believe it, they’re being downright stupid and putting themselves in the next group of people.
• They simply don’t care about the rights of content creators. These people know that what they’re doing is wrong but they simply don’t care. Perhaps they think they’ll get away with it. Or that since everyone does it, the content creator won’t bother trying to stop them. They’re wrong. Many bloggers, photographers, and other content creators actively pursue copyright infringers — and win in court.

I follow many photographers on Twitter and have seen more than one of them complain about their work being used elsewhere without their permission. In many cases, a bunch of us will “gang up” on a copyright infringer to attack him/her for his actions in blog or photo comments. This usually gets some kind of result. A properly prepared DMCA Takedown Notice usually does a better job.

Just Say No to Flickr

In one blatant case I recall on Flickr, a woman was stealing photos from photographers all over the Web and passing them off as her own. If she really had such a huge, diverse library of quality photos, she’d be famous. But all she had was a big, diverse collection of quality photos she’d stolen from other photographers, removing any copyright notices she found along the way. It was quite easy to convince the powers that be at Flickr that she was a thief. Flickr closed down her account. Has she learned her lesson? Who knows?

The worst thing about Flickr is that if someone steals a photo and puts it on his/her Flickr account under a Creative Comments Attribution License, anyone else is free to use the image if they give the Flickr user credit. That means that not only is he/she making a photographer’s work “legal” to reproduce, but he/she will get credit instead of the photographer!

As you can imagine, I don’t use Flickr. It simply makes content theft too easy.

Why I’m Watermarking

I’ll be the first to agree that watermarking photos — putting a visible copyright notice on the face of a photo — can be downright ugly. Depending on how it’s done, it can really detract from the aesthetics of the photograph as a whole. That’s why I’ve avoided them for so long.

But the other day, I got an e-mail from one of Flying M Air’s aerial photography clients. He’d given me permission to include some of his images on Flying M Air’s Client Photos page. Flying M Air has an unusual photo format. Each photo is brought into Photoshop, given a yellow background, white border, and drop shadow. It’s then tilted 2° or 3° to give it the feel of a photo album. I purposely use small images, not only to offer more room for text but to make the photos less useful to a thief. Unfortunately, one of his photos had been stolen and it appeared in a Flickr photo stream. The photographer was certain it had come from my site. He said that he’d given me permission to reproduce them, but only if I watermarked them. (I honestly don’t remember the watermark requirement.) To avoid problems in the future, I simply removed his photos from my site. If he experiences any more theft, it won’t come from me.

But the whole thing got me thinking. Here was a professional photographer whose work was being lifted from a third party site and being displayed on yet another site. He’d relied on me to watermark his work. Wouldn’t it have been better if he simply watermarked it himself?

And wouldn’t it be better if I simply watermarked my best work myself?

You might be asking why: what’s the purpose?

The purpose is education. While a watermark probably won’t deter a content thief who simply doesn’t care that he’s stealing from me, it might educate the person who thinks all content on the Web is free to take and use as desired. Or it might protect my work from the person who thinks that only those photos with a copyright notice are protected.

My client issued a takedown notice to the person who stole his photo from my site. The photo was immediately removed. I like to think that the person who stole it simply didn’t know any better. Now he does.

Zenfolio

I should mention here that in addition to my photoblog, I also maintain a library of images at a custom Zenfolio site. Zenfolio is a photo sharing site that offers a number of features a service like Flickr doesn’t offer. For example:

• I can have my own domain name (www.FlyingMPhotos.com).
• I can sell photos using format I specify — and actually profit from a sale.
• I can create custom watermarks that are automatically placed on each image for display.
• I can limit the sizes of photos that can be displayed.
• I can customize the appearance of my photo gallery pages.

I photographed these wildflowers near a mine site last February.

The list goes on and on.

Yes, I do pay an annual fee for this service. But I think it’s worth $100 a year to have control over how my photos are displayed and offered for sale. And I like the fact that my Zenfolio portfolio is completely separate from all others. On services like Flickr and Red Bubble (which I used to use), your photos are simply part of a much larger portfolio of diverse and often quality-challenged work. People who visit my portfolio aren’t exposed to that — unless they want to be.

I like the way Zenfolio places watermarks on images. They’re visible yet don’t need to jump out of the photo at you. I chose the same method for my photo blog; you can see it on all the images on this post. I used Photoshop to create the notice, applied an Emboss filter, saved it as a PNG with transparent background, and then applied it to photos with 20% to 50% opacity. Done.

What Do You Think?

I’d be very interested in hearing what other serious and professional photographers think about watermarking images. I’d also like to see examples of what photographers think are successfully applied watermarks. Use the comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts, horror stories, and links to one or two of your watermarked images.

I’m not interested in hearing from Internet trolls who want to criticize concerned photographers for wanting to protect their work. Or people who want to argue that Internet content is not copyrighted — get with the program already, folks.

This photo of San Xavier Mission is somewhat marred by three signs. (The third is very small and hard to see in this size.)

While at Saturday’s San Xavier Mission shoot, I commented to the other photographers about how unsightly some of the signs on the outside of the building were. (Whenever possible, I’d actually moved portable signs before pressing the shutter release.) All of the photographers I was with at the time agreed, but one of them went on to complain that they were a pain in the neck to remove in Photoshop. When I asked whether he actually did that, he replied that he always used Photoshop to remove signs he didn’t want in his photos.

Of course, I knew this was possible and, in all honesty, I’ve done my share of Photoshop editing. Still, I was amazed that someone would go to all that trouble to remove elements photograph of a photograph in post processing.

You see, I’m a bit of a “purist.” I believe that a photograph should be created in the camera. The photographer should photograph what’s there, carefully framing the shot to create his image of what’s in front of him. Creativity comes with exposure, depth of field, composition, choice of lens, point of view. What the camera records on digital media — or film, for that matter — is the photograph. Editing beyond the removal of specks and scratches or minor adjustments to exposure or color balance is — to me at least — not photography. It’s image editing.

You could argue that a real “purist” wouldn’t edit at all. I’d have to agree with you. I didn’t say I was an absolute purist — although I’d love to be one. My photos, unfortunately, sometimes need a little help. Like most other photographers these days, I turn to Photoshop or another image editing application to get that help.

I think the difference is how much help I get from Photoshop. I draw a line before a lot of other people do. Maybe it shows — for good or bad — in my photos. I don’t know. But I’d rather get it “right” in the camera than “fix it” in Photoshop.

After a little sign removal. The photo certainly looks cleaner, but is it a true representation of what I saw?

But after the shoot, when I went back to my camper to relax for the afternoon, I started wondering what kind of difference sign removal would make and how well I could pull it off. So starting with the photo you see above, I used the brush and clone tools to remove the three signs that were visible. You can see the end result here.

I’m not sure how this would hold up if printed as a large photo. I’m confident that the closest sign, which appeared on a stucco wall, was neatly removed. The far sign was too small to be noticeable in the first place. But that middle sign…well, who knows?

Would I do this all the time? No way. I’d rather find creative ways to keep the signs out of the shot in the first place.

What do you think? Use the Comments link or form to share your views.

This past weekend, Mike and I took the camper down to Tucson, parked it at Gilbert Ray Campground (highly recommended) on the west side of the city, and joined the members of Arizona West Shutterbugs for a photo outing at the San Xavier del Bac Mission just off I-19 south of Tucson.

I’ll likely blog about the rest of the trip another time; for now I wanted to share some information about the photo shoot, as well as a few photos.

We were scheduled to meet the group at 7:30 AM at the mission. We’d spent the night nearby, so we were less than a half hour away when we started down there. We arrived at about 7:10; less than 15 minutes before sunrise.

The place was almost deserted. A few members of our group had arrived and were parked off to one side. We parked in the back of the parking lot so as not to block anyone else’s long shot of the mission.

It’s not my purpose to tell you about the mission. You can learn about it on the San Xavier del Bac Mission Web site or Wikipedia. So please don’t criticize me for being short on facts here. I’m typing this in a camper and have to literally dial-up (via my cell phone and Bluetooth) to go online and check facts.

It was cloudy to the east when we arrived, so sunrise was pretty much a non-event. Although I did take some photos of the front of the building in first sun (or what we had of it), I detoured to a small shrine-like building on the west side of the main church building. My friend, photographer Ann Torrence, had suggested this. I took a number of photos of the multitude of statues in candlelight before light started creeping in through the door behind me. The one here was shot with one of the 10mm lenses we rented from BorrowLenses.com.

Only a few minutes later, a pickup truck backed up to the front of the church gates. There was a blue coffin in the back. A man set up a coffin dolly and several others carried the coffin over to it. People started assembling in front of the church. Any photographer present stopped taking photos in respect for the family and friends of the deceased. A priest in traditional Catholic priest garb came out. He spoke with the family, then stood in the doorway of the church and began the service. The sound of his voice echoed in the building behind him and for a while, I thought it was a trick of the acoustics. I later discovered that he was wearing a wireless microphone. So much for construction design miracles.

The service lasted about an hour. During that time, the rest of the photographers arrived and we swarmed all around the outside of the church, snapping photos just about everywhere. There were about a dozen of us. Most of us had tripods and digital SLRs, but there were a few folks shooting without tripods or with less sophisticated camera equipment. I’d come fully prepared with a tripod, my Nikon D80, and four lenses: 10.5mm fisheye, 10-24mm, 16-85mm, and 70-300mm. I mostly used the 10-24mm rented lens and my usual 16-85mm lens.

When the funeral ended, we paused as the blue coffin was loaded into the back of a Cadillac Escalade hearse — which I didn’t even know existed. As the mourners departed, the photographers swarmed into the church.

The mission is beautiful in a weird old Spanish/Native American way. It’s amazingly colorful and ornate, with dozens of statues of saints and angels. Spotlights are strategically placed to bring certain statues to life. Don’t get me wrong: you’ll need a tripod (recommended) or flash (not recommended) to get good photos in there — it’s mostly pretty dark. But with the right exposure, you can get some stunning images.

The main altar area, which is shown here, is a crazy ornate masterpiece of southwestern art. Having grown up Catholic, I can’t imagine sitting through a mass amid such decorations. Yet the church is active and has mass daily. (No photography allowed during church services.)

There are also candles all over the place. The sale of candles is probably the church’s biggest fund-raiser. They’re not expensive — only $3 each — and they’re quite beautiful when lined up in racks near statues. I bought one in memory of my grandmother. I’m not religious, but she was. She would have liked the place, so I bought a candle and put in in front of Saint Anthony (or “S. Antonio,” as the label at the bottom of the statue said). My grandmother used to have a Saint Anthony statue in the guest room — my mother has it now — so Saint Anthony statues remind me of her.

By the time we were finished inside, the sun was out and the sky was nearly clear. I shot this photo of the front of the mission, after waiting about 10 minutes for various tourists to meander in and out of my composition. This was shot at f/16 with a polarizer to enhance the color of the sky. There’s definitely some distortion in this shot, but I rather like it. It’ll probably end up in my photo blog.

I also got a little creative, working with various elements inside and outside the main building. These two photos are examples. The first is of the backs of the church pews. They’re simple carved wood with this unusual scalloped edge. It was sad to see that more than a few people had carved words into the backs of them.

This shot is a closeup of a scroll design in the stucco finish of a wall outside. I like textures and try to experiment with them in my photography. Although not very interesting, this is a good example.

These are only a few of the 100 or so photos (not including bracketed exposures) I shot at the mission. I’d like to go back and try for a sunrise shoot again.

If you plan to go, here’s some advice:

• Bring a tripod. You’ll need one if you plan to shoot indoors.
• Leave your flash at home. All it will do is make ugly shadows behind the statues.
• Don’t plan on photographing any kind of church service inside the mission. It felt good when the priest came into the church a half hour after the funeral was over and thanked us for respecting the privacy of the mourners and waiting until they were gone before shooting. And there are signs outside that warn against any kind of photography during mass.
• Go early. The earlier you go, the fewer people will be there to wander through your shots. And with a good sunrise, the front of the mission building would likely glow in that early morning light.
• Go everywhere you can. There are lots of public areas. Explore them.
• Leave behind a donation — or buy a candle in memory of a loved one. Entrance to the mission is free, but it’s certainly worth your support.

Yesterday, the two lenses I rented from BorrowLenses.com arrived. This morning, Mike, @AnnTorrence, and I headed out for an early morning photo shoot to get a feel for them.

It might seem odd, but I rented two almost identical lenses: the Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G AF-S DX ED (shown here) and the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM for Nikon. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the challenge of wide angle photography and want the ability to get up close and personal with my subject matter while still fitting much of it in the frame. I like the oddness introduced by a wide angle lens — the way a wide angle photo makes you look closer to see what’s not quite right. I’ve had a lot of fun over the past two years with my 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye Nikkor Lens, but that introduces too much distortion. The photos I take with that lens look downright weird. I want a lens without that much distortion that still has the ability to frame big landscape backdrops to my foreground subjects.

This could be just a stage I’m going through, but I feel a need to explore it fully to see where it takes me as a photographer.

I want to buy the Nikon 10-24mm lens. I wanted to buy it before I rented it. It has the kind of range I’m looking for to complement the 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX ED VR Nikkor lens I keep on my camera most of the time. But it’s a costly lens and it wasn’t readily available from my first choice supplier. With an upcoming photo shoot, I figured renting it was a good alternative. And since my husband would also be shooting with his Nikon, it made sense to rent the Sigma so we could compare that lower-cost alternative.

The photo shoot is in Tucson, at the San Xavier Mission. About 15 members of the Arizona West Shutterbugs “Meetup” Group will be gathering there on Saturday to shoot the mission and then head into Tucson for a museum with an Ansel Adams exhibit. I’m looking forward to trying the lenses at the mission, although I am a bit concerned that my up-front-and-personal approach might put me in front of the other shooter’s lenses. I hope not. If the group shoot turns out to be a bust but the location has potential, I’ll likely return on a weekday when there will be fewer people around.

This morning, we headed out before dawn to nearby Rancho de los Caballeros, a local guest ranch. At night, their horses — all 93 of them — are kept in a big fenced in area at the south end of the property. At about 7:30 AM, the wranglers herd them all into a smaller enclosure closer to the ranch’s main buildings. They return the horses to their nighttime enclosure at around 5 PM. This movement is referred to as the “running of the horses” (even though they don’t actually run the entire mile or so). I thought it would be interesting for Ann and she did seem to enjoy it, although I don’t think any of us got any good photos. (I’ll try again another morning, perhaps from a different vantage point.)

The east side of Vulture Peak, shot at 10mm with the Nikon 10-24mm lens.

Afterwards, I took us all by Jeep down a few of the more rugged Jeep roads on the east side of Vulture Peak. The light was still good, at least for a while. We all made lots of photos from the two or three places I stopped and we got out. Then the light got too harsh and we headed back to my house.

Mike and I each tried each of the 10-24mm lenses. Mike thinks the Nikon may be better, although we really don’t have a good test yet. He’s in love with the lens and it’s very likely that we’ll buy one. But not yet. We still have 6 days with these rentals and we plan to shoot a lot of photos.

About a year and a half ago, I discovered the Monotone theme for WordPress. Monotone is a unique theme in that it can “see” the colors in a photo, choose one, and use that color as a background. The results can be quite spectacular when used as a theme for a photo blog.

Indeed, the theme is designed for just that. It’s minimalistic and doesn’t even support WordPress widgets. It showcases the photo, which it protects from right-click saving, and offers room beneath it for a description. There’s also the usual post date, category, and tags, as well as big navigation buttons. Navigation can also be achieved by clicking the left or right side of the image.

Back in the summer of 2008, I put quite a few images online in a photo blog called Maria’s Pix that I created with Monotone. But then I discovered Zenfolio as a gallery/selling tool and simply stopped posting new photos. The site languished, unchanged, for over a year. It even became inaccessible as my ISP changed my DNS record and I didn’t update the subdomain to the new IP address.

But yesterday I decided to revive Maria’s Pix, partly as an experiment to see if I could do what so many photographers — amateur and professional — try to do: post a photo a day.

While updating the blog to prepare it for its re-unveiling, I discovered another theme by the same theme author, Duotone. Like Monotone, Duotone matches photo colors. But it goes a step further by taking a second color and using it as a page background, thus eliminating the unimpressive white background found in Monotone. I downloaded it, installed it, and activated it.

And found that it displayed PHP errors instead of photos.

Apparently there’s an incompatibility between Duotone and WordPress 2.9, which is the latest version (as I write this). While some folks more knowledgeable about PHP than I’ll ever be offered some hacks to fix the problem, the only thing the hacks did for me was remove the errors. The pictures did not appear.

I switched back to Monotone.

Eventually, Duotone will be fixed and I’ll begin using it. I like it because it supports widgets, so I can add a bit of other information under the photo. I believe it reads EXIF info, too, so I won’t have to manually insert photo info. We’ll see.

Until then, I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix — at least once in a while — to see a few of my better photos.

Since Mike and I each visited our families earlier this year and had no other plans for Christmas Day, we decided to take our cameras and my Jeep out into the desert north of Wickenburg to explore a few roads we’d never been on. The day was crystal clear with deep blue skies and only a scattering of high cirrus clouds. We left midday, right after lunch. We’d explore, from the ground, places I’d flown over countless times by helicopter.

[A side note here: it's really unfortunate that Wickenburg's economy can't support a younger, more vibrant population. The town is absolutely surrounded by opportunities for outdoor activities -- hiking, Jeeping, mountain biking, exploring ruins, digging for gold, etc. The writers at wickenburg-az.com have covered many possibilities. Although some of the retirees that dominate Wickenburg's winter population do occasionally climb into ATVs and get out to explore, the vast majority have no interest. As a result, the desert around Wickenburg remains a vast untapped resource for recreation.]

I do want to mention that all of the photos in this blog post are straight out of the camera — no Photoshopping at all. I just threw this post together on my laptop. So if colors look weird — especially that extra blue sky! — it’s natural — at least as far as my Nikon D80 thinks.

Getting Started

Our journey started on Rincon Road, right off of Highway 89/30. It’s a right hand turn not far from the second roundabout if you’re coming from the south. The road takes you past some pasture and a roping facility, then crosses the Hassayampa River, which is usually dry there. The pavement ends and starts and ends multiple times. You’ll cross the river twice. After the second crossing, you’ll find yourself at the site of an old manganese mine. There’s a big parking area there and it’s often filled with trucks pulling trailers for ATVs or horses. Yesterday, there were two camps set up, looking out over the riverbed.

We made a sharp left to continue along Rincon Road. It climbs out of the river area into the low mountains northwest of town. At an obvious intersection, we made a right to continue on Rincon. This short piece of road is extremely rough but offers outstanding views back toward Wickenburg, as well as lots of typical Sonoran desert vegetation. And rocks — did I mention the rocks?

As we continued along this piece of road, we passed a pickup truck with a cap on top. A man was standing, shirtless, at the back. He appeared to be washing his hands. A peek inside the truck cap revealed a mattress on a platform with various supplies under it. It was clear that this was the man’s “camper.” Not everyone needs a 35-foot fifth wheel for living in the desert.

After another quick photo stop, we joined Scenic Loop and headed north along its maintained dirt surface. This was familiar territory for us, so we didn’t remain on it long. Instead, when the road descended into a wash and turned to the east, we turned left into the wash and followed the sandy road northwest. According to our maps, this was scenic loop and the road we knew as Scenic Loop was actually called Stanton Hall Road. As if road names make a difference out there — none of the roads are marked and few people using the roads know their names.

We took our time along the drive, making a few stops along the way. At one point, we turned right off the main road and climbed up a side road covered with loose gravel. The road was steep and I think this is the only place where 4WD may have been required on the trip. Although we both expected the road to end, it continued past the top of the hill toward the east. We decided to turn back and stay on our original path.

The Photo Spots

I won’t bore you with the turn by turn details beyond this point — partly because I can’t remember every single turn we made as we wound down one dirt road after another, through washes, up steep grades, and around obstacles. I was glad we were in a Jeep and not something with a wider wheelbase. For most of the time, it was slow going. We didn’t stop many times for photos, on the first half of the trip because there wasn’t much of interest to photograph.

There were some exceptions, of course. One was Sand Mill, site of windmill, cattle tanks, and corral. I have a thing about windmills and did my usual study of this one. Unfortunately, it was broken, although I do think it could be repaired. What I found more interesting was the welded iron water tank behind it and the fencing around the corral — which was in unusually good shape. There had been two cows standing in the area when we drove up, but they ran off when we stopped. Cows out in the open range are funny like that. No matter how hard you try to not spook them, they get spooked anyway.

Anyway, here are three portrait view shots I took in the area. (Unlike a lot of amateur photographers, I’m not afraid to turn my cameral sideways.) These are a little more “artsy” than scenic. It was fun to play with the textures and patterns.

Later on, near a place called Brick Tank, I managed to get this shot of two cows. They stood there for about two minutes just staring at us as I rolled the Jeep into position and framed this shot. Then, just as I pushed down on the shutter, the smaller one (on the left) turned her head and ran off. The other followed, of course.

We also passed a herd of about eight mule deer along the way. I stopped while Mike tried to get some photos. They weren’t quite close enough for our lenses — we hadn’t brought along my 70-300mm zoom. Here’s my only shot, which I admit isn’t very good. I cropped it here.

As we reached Stanton, we found the road blocked by a fence and a “No Trespassing” sign. This wasn’t good news; if we had to go back to find another route, it could have easily taken another hour to get to the same spot. Fortunately, two-track roads led around the fence, dumping us right outside the ghost town of Stanton on Stanton Road.

Stanton is owned by the Lost Dutchmen Mining Association (LDMA). It’s always had a caretaker on duty, so the few buildings that remain of the original town — stage stop, hotel, and opera house — still stand. The LDMA offers campsites for its members. On Christmas Day, the place was crammed with RVs of all kinds, from the crappiest conversion van you could imagine to a 35-foot Cameo that looked very new. These folks spend their time panning for gold, which is kind of cool. I say “kind of” because it’s a ton of work and not the easiest way to make money. But every once in a while, someone finds a gold nugget big enough to keep everyone else looking. And it’s nice to be able to spend so much time outdoors with folks who share the same interest.

The Mountainous Portion of the Trip

Stanton Road meets up with Mina Road right there and that’s where we headed to start the second part of the trip — the part I wanted to do. I’d seen a Jeep road up in the Weaver Mountains that I wanted to check out. It wasn’t far from Stanton on the back road that went from Stanton to Yarnell: Mina Road.

Our landmark was a switchback to the left in the road. The road we wanted would go straight instead of making that left turn. But sure enough, it was blocked off with a fence and a “No Trespassing” sign. We made a U-turn and went back a short distance to another road that looked as if it might parallel the one we wanted. According to my GPS and the topo maps we’d brought along, the road we were on ended. But those maps are from the 1980s, before folks with ATVs and gold fever started exploring the area. We explored the road and its side roads until we found the place it met up with the road we wanted, beyond that private property.

We drove across Antelope Creek, which still running as a small stream with a mix of spring water and runoff from snow and rain at higher elevations the previous week. I threw the Jeep into 4WD and powered up a steep, narrow Jeep trail with lots of loose rock. When I leveled out and could see the road beyond, I realized that I just wasn’t prepared to go any farther. The road was very narrow, very steep, and covered with very loose rock. I was tired from almost 2 hours of driving on back roads. I’d had enough rough road exploring.

We got out for a while to take photographs in the area. There was a lot of slate-like rock, standing straight up. Much of the rock was covered with orange and yellow lichen. It made an interesting contrast to the green and brown of the desert, the blue of the sky, and the deep shadows cast by late afternoon sun. The light hadn’t gotten “good” yet, but it wasn’t bad — probably because of its low winter angle.

We also walked down to Antelope Creek. It was great to see so much water flowing in the desert. I knew that downstream, the flow dried up before it even reached Stanton. I tried to get some photos that showed reflections in pools of relatively smooth water. The water, in some places, was about two feet deep. Although Jack the Dog drank some of it without side effect, I wouldn’t think of drinking it without treating it first; just too much open range and wildlife in the area. (That’s why its best to bring your own water, even if you know you might find some along the way.)

The Way Back

We returned to Mina Road and headed back toward Wickenburg. But rather than take the fast way — Stanton Road to Route 89 — we turned left on Stanton Road and headed back on more dirt roads.

But first, we stopped at one of the few buildings that remain at Octave, another ghost town. The afternoon sun had drifted down quite low when we arrived and I think I got some of my best photos of the day. I have a thing about photographing abandoned buildings, and even though this was a small one, it kept me busy for a good 20 minutes. This is one of my favorite shots.

We also stopped alongside the road where the boulder-and-saguaro-strewn side of Rich Hill was illuminated by the low-lying sun. As you look at this photo, remember that each cactus stands at least 15 feet tall. Really gives you an idea of how big the boulders are, no? The horizontal version of this photo will be my desktop pattern.

We turned south toward Wickenburg a while later. Again, I can’t remember where we turned; you’ll need to check my GPS track log to see. The following 90 minutes was spent exploring various ways to get through the desert and back to pavement near Scenic Loop or Rincon Road. We made a lot of “wrong” turns. In looking at our track and knowing the desert from previous non-GPS-assisted trips, I know we didn’t take the best path. But it was a new path, and that’s all that really mattered.

We joined back up with Scenic Loop near Sand Mill and retraced our steps. By then, the light was very low and the mountains were glowing copper colored. We made one more side trip in search of a good spot to take some final photos and found ourselves quite close to the Hassayampa River on a short cliff. Although Mike took some shots, I didn’t like anything I saw through the lens.

We backtracked all the way back to 89/93, drove through town, and headed home. It was a great way to spend Christmas Day.

Trace Our Treads

If you’re interested in following our route, I offer my Garmin GPX track log file for you to load into your GPS. Once you load the track log into your GPS, you can go to the center of town in Wickenburg to pick up the track and follow it. For best results, you’ll want a GPS that you can load topographic maps on; you’ll see that many (but not all) of the dirt roads we followed appear on the Garmin MapSource maps — or standard USGS topographical maps. You’ll also see where we made wrong turns and hit dead ends. You might want to review the track log before following it blindly; here it is on EveryTrail.com.

You’ll also need a vehicle with high clearance and a relatively narrow wheelbase. Leave the Hummer or big pickup truck home. You’ll do better with a Jeep or quad or some other ATV. Although we threw the Jeep into 4WD a few times, I don’t think we actually needed it more than once or twice. In this area, I always recommend using 4WD when driving in deep sand (especially along the Hassayampa River, which is notorious for quicksand).

And I know I don’t have to tell you to bring water, emergency gear, etc., right? Our route travelled to some pretty remote areas of the desert. If we had a breakdown, it would have been a long walk to help.

This year, I decided that I needed an affordable yet memorable holiday gift to send out to all my customers and the folks I do business with. I wanted this gift to be an in-your-face-all-year-long item. That means it had to be something the recipients would want to keep and refer to.

A calendar seemed to fit the bill.

Now every year, I get sample calendars with my company name on it from various printers who print promotional items. They’re usually pretty boring; certainly not the kind of calendar you’d want to use all year long. Clearly, I had to do better than that.

The solution was a custom calendar using the photos I’ve taken over the years to show off the places I fly to and my helicopter. The challenge was to make a professional-looking, attractive calendar that was cost-effective to print.

iPhoto’s calendar printing option was the obvious choice for creating the calendar. It offers several different formats, many of which would meet my needs. What did not meet my needs, however, was the price: $19.99 per calendar. Since I figured I’d need at least 50 of them, that was far more than I wanted to spend.

My husband suggested MagCloud, which I’ve been using for other print-on-demand needs. At first, I didn’t think it would work out. After all, MagCloud produces stapled magazines sized just under 8-1/2 x 11. But then I held a sheet of paper up to the Robinson Helicopter calendar on my wall. And guess what? It was the same size.

So I decided to go with MagCloud for printing.

At that point, it looked as if I’d be creating a 28-page calendar from scratch. Not something I looked forward to. But I did a Google search for 2010 InDesign Calendar Template, which directed me to the 2010 InDesign Calendar Template by Juliana Halvorson on the Adobe Web site.

I downloaded it and discovered that it was almost what I needed. The template assumed a landscape orientation. I wasn’t sure if MagCloud would accept the document created that way. So I modified the template to make it portrait orientation and rotated all the calendar grids. A few adjustments to the margins and bleeds (which I initially got wrong) and it was a good starting point for my own project.

First up was reviewing the holidays. Juliana had included several extra religious and “Hallmark” holidays that just weren’t appropriate for a general use calendar. I removed them. I also changed the wording of some holidays — for example, changing Thanksgiving Day to just plain Thanksgiving.

Then I needed to redo the thumbnail calendars for the previous and next month that appear on each calendar page. The type was just too small. That turned out to be a time-consuming chore, as I had to basically reformat each little calendar individually. But it was worth the effort; the numbers are now far more readable.

Then the big task: finding the images I needed in my calendar — 12 full-page images and about 16 smaller ones — cropping them for the right proportions, saving them as TIFFs, and dragging them into my working file. It took me two full days to get the job done. In the end, it was very tedious and I just couldn’t wait to finish it.

Since the calendar’s pages had to be in multiples of 4, I had to stretch my 26 page document to 28 pages. That also meant filling in 2 more pages with something. I decided to put information about Flying M Air’s services, along with thumbnail images from the big pictures.

Once completed, I created the PDF MagCloud needed to print my calendar. The first upload (which took 4 tries on my miserably slow Internet connection here in Wickenburg) resulted in an error. I’d gotten the bleed measurements wrong. I fixed them and (fortunately) did not need to adjust the layout. Two hours later, after about 8 upload attempts, the file was online. The preview looked good.

I ordered the free proof and am now waiting for it to arrive. If it passes muster — and I’m about 95% sure it will — I’ll order about 50 copies to give as holiday gifts to clients and friends.

In the meantime, I’ve “published” the calendar so others can preview and (hopefully) buy their own copies. There is one caveat, however. Because MagCloud publishes magazines and not calendars, if you buy from MagCloud, you’ll have to punch your own hole in the top of the calendar.

I’ll be doing a lot of hole-punching next week.

The public entrance to Kolb Studio, which clings to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

If there’s any such thing as “luck” I think it has to do with being at the right place at the right time. People who are truly lucky can recognize such an alignment and take advantage of it.

Like I did yesterday.

I was in the Kolb Studio at Grand Canyon Village. The Kolb Brothers were the original photographers of the Grand Canyon. They shot more images of tourism at the South Rim — there are 60,000 negatives in the archives — than anyone else. They also made a movie of their boat trip down the Colorado River through the Canyon and it played daily at their studio for over 45 years, making it the longest running movie in the world. That’s what the Ranger told us, anyway.

Today, the Kolb Studio is known primarily as a bookstore and art gallery. The old movie screening room which is on the second level down, has been converted into a gallery. Last time I was at the Canyon, the gallery was closed for some reason. This time, when I stood at the top of the steps to look down into it, I saw that they were packing up artwork to ship it back to the artists.

But as I stood on that upper landing, a young, thin, female ranger walked by, followed, like a mother duck, by a long string of tourists. There must have been about 15 of them. They were walking purposely down the stairs, past the barrier that had been erected to keep people out. I asked one of the last people, “Is this a tour?”

“Yes. Go to the desk to see if you can join us.”

I knew that if I went to the desk, even if they said yes, I’d be too late. So I just followed them.

Mind you, I had no idea what the tour was about. I had time to kill and it was clear that these people were going someplace I’d never been before. I wanted to go with them.

The sitting room in the living quarters at Kolb Studio. Beyond this is a “sunroom” with windows looking over the canyon.

I’d hit the jackpot. It turned out to be a tour of the Kolb Studios living quarters — the home of the Kolb Brothers.

Emory and Elsworth Kolb were given a piece of land at the edge of the canyon by Ralph Cameron who owned Bright Angel Trail and a bunch of other land on the rim. This was back in the early 1900s and Bright Angel Trail was a toll road. The Kolbs were given the land with the stipulation that they were to collect the tolls when Cameron wasn’t around. The Kolb brothers built their studio — first a tent, then a wooden frame building — on the edge of the cliff. A window on the building looked out over the start of the trail. The Kolbs would snap photos of the groups of mule riders going down. Then one of them would run all the way down to Indian Gardens, which is 4-1/2 trail miles and 3,000 feet down, where there was water. He’d develop the glass plates, make prints, and run all the way back up to the studio. When the riders returned, the photos were ready for purchase.

Inside the actual photo studio. The window on right right is the one they took photos of mule riders through.

There’s a lot more history to the Kolb brothers, but I’m not about to retell it here. Check out the PBS documentary about them or look them up in Wikipedia to learn more.

The more interesting thing is the house. It was built with its top floor level with the canyon rim. Subsequent floors were added below that. So the house literally clings to the side of the cliff. And it looks as if it were built over time by people who cared more about functionality than architecture.

The dining room at the Kolb Studio living quarters. Those windows look right out over the Grand Canyon.

But inside — wow. A perfect example of early 1900 homebuilding. The house I grew up in was built in 1901, so I know the style. Plaster walls, wood floors, molding. And all the windows looked right into the Grand Canyon.

The ranger led us though about a dozen rooms, including the sun porch, sitting room, kitchen, bedrooms, dining room, and, of course, studio and darkroom. (The darkroom was added after water became available at the Rim.) We were invited to take photos — even through the window the Kolb Brothers had used all those years ago. It was fascinating and a real treat for me.

The kitchen at Kolb Studio.

Let’s face it: I come to the Grand Canyon at least two dozen times a year. I’ve seen all the usual things. I’ve taken photos from the rim trail and every single rest stop or parking area on the rim. I’ve visited all the shops and eaten in all the restaurants and stayed in all of the hotels. I’m at the point where I’m almost bored when I come here. Almost.

When I finished the tour, the first thing I did was call Mike to tell him. I think he was jealous. Heck, I’d be if he’d gone without me!

Yesterday afternoon, I hiked up Doe Mountain, a mesa west of Sedona, AZ. The mesa has sheer rock walls on all sides except the northwest — that’s where you’ll find a 8/10 mile trail that climbs nearly 400 feet to the mesa top. The top is almost completely flat with stubby trees, bushes, yucca, and various types of cactus and desert grasses. It’s an amazing place at any time of day; simply walk to the side of the mesa with the view you want, sit down on a rock, and suck it all in.

I went up there around 3:30 PM; sunset was around 5:30 PM. It took nearly an hour for me to do the hike. I can hike on flat terrain or downhill all day long, but make me climb and you’ll be waiting for me. I was by myself, so I didn’t hold anyone back. When I got to the top, I was hot and thirsty.

I wandered around as the light continued to soften and redden. I found an excellent spot for photos on the north side of the mesa and shot the two you see here. These are unedited.

I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with foreground/background combinations. This shot of grasses, rocks, and trees with the red rocks in the distance behind them really called out to me. The foreground elements are on the mesa top. About 10 feet beyond them is a sheer cliff with a drop of 300-400 feet. The green trees you see beyond that are full-sized pinon and juniper pines. The red rock cliffs are several miles away. This one’s a “keeper” that I’ll likely put in my Photo Gallery. (That’s also why it’s so small here; I don’t share larger images unless their watermarked.) The only reason it’s not there now is that I haven’t had time to examine it closely and remove any optical imperfections due to dirt on the sensors. (It’s a never-ending battle against dust here in Arizona.)

This second shot is a self-portrait. I broke my third wired shutter release and there’s no way I could have used the self-time for this. So I used the camera remote. Of course, the sensor for the remote is on the camera’s right side (when looking at the front) and I was sitting at the left. Hence the stretched out arm and rather cranky look on my face. It’s a dopey picture and I look like an idiot. I guess that’s why I like it.

Oh, and I was about 5 feet from the edge of the cliff in this shot.

More from this trip in future posts. I’ll have better WiFi in Page.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might be aware that I’ve been fooling around with panoramas. Last night, I created a panorama from 11 vertical images shot at Monument Valley:

The ability of Panorama Maker 5 to stitch these together so perfectly sold me on the product. I bought it as soon as the stitched image appeared on my laptop screen so I could save my latest creation at full-size. The resulting image is a whopping 16,724 × 3,485 pixels in size and weighs in at 37MB — as a JPEG file.

On close examination of the photo, however, I realized that there was one thing that marred it: a silver pickup truck dead center of the image (see red box above and blowup right). It wouldn’t be so bad, but the darn truck is shiny and really does stand out when you look at the image in full resolution.

So the question is: Do I Photoshop it out?

I experimented with this and did a reasonably good job with the cloning tool. But then I got to thinking about it. To me, a photograph represents reality. The reality of this image is that a silver pickup truck driven by what looks like a Navajo man was there when the image was shot. Removing the truck removes part of the reality of the image.

Or am I over analyzing this? Putting ethics where they don’t belong?

Are you a photographer? If so, how do you feel about modifying images to remove unsightly elements? If you’re not a photographer and just like to look at photos, how do you feel about a photographer’s honesty when creating and sharing photographic images?

I was at Monument Valley again today. I come here several times a year by helicopter with passengers on my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. I was here last month and will be back again next month. I’m always here on a Wednesday.

I land on one of the helipads at the landing strip at Goulding’s Lodge. Before my blades have stopped spinning, a shuttle van from the lodge drives up to meet us. The driver loads up my passengers and our luggage while I tie down the blades and lock up. Then he drives us all up to the lodge — a distance of about 1/2 mile — we check in, and we go to our rooms.

The next day, my passengers take a 3-1/2 hour ground tour of Monument Valley. I unwind, blog, and relax. Then I bring the luggage down to the helicopter (by van), preflight, and get ready to go. When they return from their tour at 1 PM, we head out to our next stop: Flagstaff.

The point of all this is that I don’t usually get to go into Monument Valley. Instead, I spend the entire 20 hours of our stay at the lodge or helicopter.

Now, I’ve been in Monument Valley many times. I’ve driven in twice and taken the tour at least three times. I highly recommend it. It’s the only way to really experience Monument Valley — and to take some really great photos. I just don’t have time to do a tour during our excursion. And since I don’t have a vehicle here — other than the parked helicopter — I can’t drive myself in for a brief trip.

Today, however, I asked one of the folks at the lodge desk to drive me in. All I wanted was a few shots from the overlook — which happens to be the best place in the park to shoot The Mittens with the late afternoon sun on them. She dropped me off with my camera and tripod. I then proceeded to spend the next hour shooting 85 images, many of which were destined to be part of panoramas. When she picked me up 90 minutes later, I was happier than a pig in you-know-what. I knew I’d gotten some really great photos.

And here’s the first panorama:

You’re looking at 12 vertical images, stitched together with Panorama Maker 5 — which, by the way, I’m now pretty much sold on and will be buying when I get home and can play on a beefier machine. It handled this stitch job very well, probably because I shut down all other applications while it worked.

I had my 16mm to 85mm lens set to 50mm for these shots and they were taken 15° apart. You’re looking at a 180° view here.

The image had some exposure issues that I patched up sloppily in Photoshop. I’ll do a better job when I get serious about making these panoramas.

But I wanted to share this here. Although it’s not perfect, I think it’s a good step in the right direction. And I’m so proud of it that I put my name on it.

I also got some great shots of The Mittens by themselves. I’ll likely put those in my Photo Gallery one day soon.

One of the things I like about the Grand Canyon is the interesting little places that the tourists generally don’t know about. Visiting these places can get you out of the glut of tourists and fool you into thinking that the Grand Canyon is your own backyard.

Grand View FIre Tower

Grand View Fire Tower is one of these places — especially when the main tourist season is over. This rickety old fire tower stands tall just outside the park boundary on Coconino National Forest Land. You can get to it from within the park by following signs for the Arizona Trail. You can get to it from outside the park by following a series of numbered forest roads.

The tower area has been spruced up considerably since I last visited it back in 2004. I was flying helicopter tours for one of the Canyon’s operators back then and I’d gone straight from work to the tower, hoping to watch the thunderstorms move around the area. It was fire season back then and the tower was “manned” by a female observer. I visited with her atop the tower. Afterwards, I drove into the park and got completely soaked to the skin — in my pilot uniform — while visiting Grand View Point.

The entire area was deserted when I arrived. I immediately noticed the big Arizona Trail sign that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there when I last visited. The Arizona Trail cuts north/south through the center of Arizona. I don’t know if it’s complete. But at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, it’s clearly marked and evidently available for hiking, horseback riding, and, in the winter, cross-country skiing. I’ve never hiked any part of it.

I also noticed a guy wire stretching from near the tower’s top to the cabin set aside for the observer’s use. I don’t recall that from my previous visit, either

There’s a sign at the bottom of the tower warning visitors that the tower is maintained solely for the use of fire observers. Although others can climb the tower, the park service takes absolutely no responsibility for any injuries. The sign also limits the number of people on the tower at any one time to four. That number had been written over another number that was likely higher.

I climbed. It was a windy day and the higher I climbed, the windier it got. I was about halfway up when I could feel the tower swaying. Unnerving when you consider that the tower had probably been built back in the 1930s as part of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) program.

The sound of a helicopter caught my attention. I caught sight of one of Maverick’s EC130s making its way from the west toward the tower. The Green 1 tour route passes within a mile of the tower to the south. As I finished my climb, four helicopters flew by. They would be the last four on that route for the day. It was about 4:15 PM and this time of year, all helicopters have to be out of the canyon by 5 PM.

The view was better than I remember it. The tower stands tall around a forest of mostly ponderosa pines with some oak trees starting to show autumn color. Most of what you see from up there is trees. You can see other peaks in the area, of course — the San Francisco Peaks, Mt. Kendricks, etc to the southeast near Flagstaff stand out. I looked for and easily found Red Butte, where the next closest fire tower is. If smoke is spotted, the two observers will communicate by radio to triangulate the exact location of the fire.

To the northeast, where the Grand View Ridge drops off, I could see the rim of the Grand Canyon and some of the buttes inside it. I took a series of three photos for a panorama that actually came out quite good. As you can see, it was a cloudy day and the light was a lot softer than I like it.

I climbed down from the tower a short while later. It was almost spooky being there all by myself. I’d just left Grand View point where I’d been stuck in traffic in the parking lot. Here, less than five miles away, there was no one.

I spent some time taking weird photos of the tower’s structure with my 16-70mm and 10.5mm fisheye lens. Fun stuff. Then I climbed back into my truck and headed back into the park to join the rest of the tourists.

I spent part of Sunday afternoon in Sedona, AZ, on top of a red rock with about 270° views of the red rock cliffs around me. I was playing with panoramic photography.

Manfrotto 488RC2

I’d just bought a new tripod head for my camera. I wanted a ball head set up with a swivel base for panoramas. That means compass points marked off for precision panning. I wound up with another Manfrotto, which makes sense because the tripod is Manfrotto, too. It cost about twice what I wanted to spend, but I figured that between it and the tripod head it was “replacing” I’d have all the tripod heads I’d ever need.

Anyway, I was experimenting with panoramas shot with the camera held vertically, in portrait view. Most folks don’t think of doing panoramas that way, but if you want great big finished photos, you need to maximize your pixels. Do the math. My 10 megapixel Nikon D80 shoots photos that are 2592 x 3872. Shoot that vertically, and your panorama becomes nearly 13 inches tall at 300 dpi. That’s 5 inches taller than if the photos are shot in landscape.

Of course, the drawback is that you need to stitch more photos together to get the final image. Like this one, which is 8 images:

In case you’re curious, the images in this panorama were shot with a 50mm focal length (that’s a 75mm equivalent for standard 35mm film cameras, if that matters anymore). All the shots had the same exposure: f6.3 at 1/160th second. The tripod head was rotated at 15° increments. If you’re looking for a seam, you won’t find one — not even in the full sized image.

This represents my first stitching attempt with Panorama Maker 5, a Mac OS application by ArcSoft. Panorama Maker takes a lot of the guesswork out of creating panoramas by automatically identifying shots taken around the same time (and likely to be part of a panorama) and handling the stitching for you. Just click a photo in its browser and it selects the shots that go with it. Tell it what kind of panorama you want, and let it get to work.

I ran into frustrations with the software immediately. For this particular panorama, even though the software’s browser recognized the images as vertical shots, the stitching component wanted to turn them all sideways before stitching. This would basically attempt to stitch the top of one shot to the bottom of the next. I couldn’t find a way around this — at least at first. But then I just told it to create a vertical panorama. I saved the resulting image and opened it in Photoshop, where I rotated it 90°.

Later I realized that if I used the software to rotate the images 90° and then rotated them back, it properly recognized them for a stitch. Personally, I don’t think that step should be required. I think the software should stitch photos in the same orientation they appear in the browser. Period.

I also tried a 360° panorama. The images were great (if I do say so myself) — 24 shots taken at equal intervals using a tripod with manual exposure settings. The software had a lot of trouble with it. It failed on several attempts and when it finally succeeded, one of the images was shifted way higher than it should have been. I had to manually edit the match points on one shot. That fixed things, but it really did take forever (or almost) on my old 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is what’s with me on this trip. At one point, the fan was screaming. And the resulting QuickTime movie looked like the first effort that it was. (You can click here to download it; didn’t think it worth embedding in this post.)

Panorama Maker is try-before-you-buy software and the folks that make it don’t time-limit it. Instead, they display the usual annoying reminder and limit save size to 1/16 of full size. Perfectly fine for testing purposes. It costs $70 to buy and I’m not 100% sold on it because of the problems discussed here. When I get time — if I ever get time again — I’ll try it on my iMac back at home. I suspect it’ll be a bit quicker and not have to wheeze to get the job done.

If I see any improvements, I’m sure I’ll have more panoramas to show off here.

In the meantime, I’d love to get comments from readers about solutions they’ve found that work on Mac OS.