New Neighbors

After a day of driving, we pulled into our campsite at Craters of the Moon National Monument.  This little guy was checking out his new neighbors from the adjacent lava fields.  He made quite a racket with his chirping - almost  sounded like a bird when I first heard him rather than the squirrel he was.  This image was taken with my 75-300mm lens at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/125 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 100.

Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch

Tunnel Arch is along a side trail off the main Devils Garden trail at the end of the main road into Arches National Park.  I'm not sure which of these two arches is Tunnel Arch - they both go through though the one of the left is smaller and has a ceiling opening into the rock above it, so I suspect it is the larger one on the right.  This image was taken with my 24mm lens with an exposure of 1/50 seconds at f/5, ISO 100.

Pine Tree Arch was the last one we visited on this hike into the Devils Garden trail area and is not too far beyond Tunnel Arch on the side trail off the Devils Garden trail.  You can even see it from the crest of the trail before it drops into the valley below.  If you look closely at the rock at the top of the opening in the arch, you can see lots of cracks that makes me think that only the slight "V" shape of the area and that the crack on the right doesn't go all the way through to the other side of the fin the arch is in is the only thing keeping these blocks of rock from falling and enlargening the arch.  I ran through the window in the arch quickly to minimize the probability that I would be under the block when it eventually falls....  This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 1/80 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 100.

Sand Dune Arch

Sand Dune Arch in Arches National Park is a short and easy hike into a narrow canyon between two fins of sandstone.  The hard part of the hike is the soft sand but the tall canyon walls makes the area cooler than other more exposed hikes elsewhere in the park.  This image was taken with my 24mm lens with an exposure of 1/50 seconds at f/5, ISO 100.

Landscape Arch panorama

This is a mini panorama of Landscape Arch in Arches National Park.  With my 24mm lens, I could not quite get the whole arch in one shot, but a left-center-right set worked great.  This arch is the longest in the world and has shown some signs of its eventual demise when  a large chunk of rock fell from it in 1991.  As the rangers in the park said: See it while you can!

Delicate Arch at Arches National Park

We spent the last week on a road trip from Tucson up to Yellowstone National Park via several other parks along the way.  We arrived at Arches National Park on Tuesday last week. This view of Delicate Arch was taken from the upper viewpoint about a mile away.  It was created by doing an HDR combine of 3 images  at -1 stop, 0 and +1 stop from the nominal metered exposure that would have been at 1/800 seconds at f/8, ISO 200.  The exposures were obtained with my 75-300mm zoom at 300mm focal length.  Note the person standing next to the arch to get an idea of the size of it.  This is the most famous Arch in the park and is the Utah state symbol.  Below is an HDR combination of three images using my 24mm lens with -1, 0, +1 stop exposures showing the general setting of Delicate Arch: