INTRODUCTION
This is the photo story of my recent photographic trip to the USA this last autumn. For the first time I was using both film and digital cameras to find out the ease or difficulties of using digital cameras for travel photography. There was quite a lot of research to do in order to maximise the time on the trip and not to miss out on an important feature near to the route. As it happened a great deal had already been done the previous year as the events of 9-11 in New York had caused a cancellation at the same time the previous year. I had a lot of help from Lenny in the States who sent me a great deal of useful and detailed information on many of the places I was going to visit.
I
flew in and out of Denver and covered three States - Utah ,Colorado and Wyoming
and also touched Montana, Arizona and New Mexico.
Equipment taken was as follows:-
Nikon
f4 SLR and three zoom lenses covering 18mm to 300mm .
Minolta
Dimage 7 digital camera
Nikon 990 digital camera
Sony TRV30 Camcorder
Asus
Laptop computer and Lacie external hard drive.
The Nikon 990 was used only
for time lapse photography.
I have divided the tour into 15 sections
and you can either start at section 1 and work your way through or go direct to
a particular section from the map or the text below.
Section
1 days 1, 2,and 3 Denver to Cody
Section
2 day
4 Cody to Yellowstone
Section
3 day 5 Yellowstone
Section
4 day 6 Yellowstone
Section
5 days
7,8 Yellowstone ,Tetons, Jackson, Rawlins to Saratoga
Section
6 days 9, 10 Saratoga to Aspen, Independence Pass, St Elmo
Section
7 day
11,12 Redstone to Green River, Goblin Valley,Arches
Section
8 days 13,14 Moab, Arches
Section
9 days 15, 16 Moab to Mexican Hat, Monument Valley
Section
10 days
17, 18
Page, Antelope Canyon
Section
11 day 19 Antelope Canyon
Section
12 days 20, 21,
22 Page to Durango, Silverton, Ouray
Section
13 day 23 Gunnison to Alamosa
Section
14 days
24, 25 Alamosa, Colorado Springs, Denver
Section
15 Time Lapse Sequences
This
is typical of my set-up every evening to view images and recharge all the various
devices. From Yellowstone onwards where my Digital Wallet was awaiting me after
repair, at the end of each day the contents of the Compact Flash card was copied
onto the laptop hard drive the Lacie external drive and the Digiatal Wallet. A
real belt and braces approach. I used two battery chargers a Maha MH -C204f and
a Hahnel Rapid Powerstation. The latter charges each individual battery which
is preferred and I was able to last a full days photography with the Dimage 7
with only two sets of the four I had with me.
The images from film were scanned
in using a Nikon 4 scanner. The film was processed in Moab, Page and Colorado
Springs so I was able to compare the results with the digital ones and I must
say the images from the Dimage compared very favourably.
With
very few exceptions, all of the images you will see were taken with the Dimage
7 digital camera. The settings for most of the images were as follows.
res
2560 x 1920 : saved as fine jpeg :exposure -2/3 ev :contrast -2 :saturation +2
A
few images were saved as Tif.
