2024 Southwest Trip - Day 15 - Arches National Park

Gallery (50 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 15 - Arches NP

After a peaceful night of backcountry camping just outside and slightly north of Arches National Park, we went on a very hot hike along the Devil's Garden loop which is basically at the end of the park drive, deep in the park. Some amazing views of Navajo Arch were to be had (one photo above), and my ultra-wide Fujinon XF 8mm f/3.5 R WR lens really helped with some unique perspectives when shooting under the relatively small arch. We also saw the long, thin and quite fragile looking Landscape Arch as well as Partition Arch, with two side-by-side openings. On the hike back, there were also some super clear, beautiful views towards the snow-capped La Sal mountains with the red mesas of Castle Valley in the distant foreground, shifted purple by the slight intervening blue haze. The clarity was rare and made for some nice shots with my longer focal length Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2 R WR lens. Also, I had a hard time choosing which arch shot I liked the best, so there is an abundance of photos in this gallery!

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 14 - Reef and Goblins

Gallery (20 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 14 - Reef and Goblins

After Bryce Canyon, we started heading for Moab but a winter storm warning with calls for up to 10cm of snow prevented us from camping at the entrance of the Burr Trail, where we had intended on taking the back road through Capitol Reef National Park. The dirt roads in the area have a lot of clay and with rain or warm snowfall, they become near impassable. So, we drove north over the 9,700 foot summit (beating the snowfall) and stayed near Torrey, Utah. The next morning, we drove the main paved route through Capitol Reef National Park but it was still quite cloudy and we weren't sure if the sun would come out any time soon. We waited around for about 45 minutes and finally saw a bit of sun hitting the reef and took a bunch of photos, although we never really had more than just hazy sunshine.

Alas, the sun left us again with some thick cloud cover that looked like it wouldn't clear for a long time, so we decided to continue on towards our ultimate destination, an area just north of Arches National Park near Moab, where back-country camping is allowed. On the way we also stopped off at Goblin Valley State Park and there too, the cloud cover was quite significant. We also waited patiently there and eventually the sun broke through. I also often waited for the few people who were hiking around the Valley of the Goblins to tuck in behind formations so I could get the occasional pristine shot with no other people visible.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 13 - Bryce Canyon NP

Gallery (35 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 13 - Bryce Canyon NP

After a few hours of driving from Lee's Ferry, we arrived at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. The lioght wasn't great as it was not a good time of day to be taking photos and of course the majority of the dunes are covered in ATV/Quad tracks since most of the area is open of OHVs. The first few times I visited the dunes, probably between 20 and 30 years ago now, there were no off-highway vehicles permitted at all, and it was wonderful to wander the dunes and take photos. especially across to where the sand starts moving up the sparsely pine tree populated rocky hillside. So disappointing now as a photographer.

We only walked onto the part of the dunes where OHVs are not permitted, only to spot some tracks there anyway. At least Emily got to see the uniquely coloured sand! So that was it... and off we drove with Bryce Canyon as our next stop. Just before reaching Bryce though, there is a very colourful spot known as Red Canyon, and we spent an hour or so wandering the trails there and taking photos. Bryce Canyon was wonderfully clear and the distant hills too, with a recent storm having likely cleared the air.

See the following link (opens in a new window) for some Native American Lore.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

Also, there is a stitched panorama from Bryce Canyon shown in my 2024 Southwest Trip - Highlights blog posting.

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 12 - Horseshoe Bend

Gallery (25 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 12 - Horseshoe Bend

Next up on our agenda was Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River in northern Arizona. Due to time constraints, we had bypassed the Grand Canyon since Emily had been there with her parents and I had been a few times, most recently with my father during our 2019 road trip. It had been quite a number of years since I had visited the Horseshoe Bend viewpoint and wow, what a change. Before, there was a nearly unmarked dirt road leading off the highway with a small gravel lot, then a short rocky trail leading to the overlook. The last time I was there, there was only one other person. Now... well now there is a huge paved parking lot that accommodates multiple tour busses, they charge an entrance fee (which I actually do not mind), and the trail to the viewpoint is built up to allow for strollers, wheel chairs and such. And the people... so many people everywhere! Before it was a wonderful, quiet spiritual spot to take in a magnificent view but now, you have a hundred or more people dotting the landscape, many taking selfies and somehow just ruining the experience, at least for me.

That said, I understand making beautiful scenery like this more accessible for people, especially those who might not otherwise be able to hike rocky trail, so I suppose I shouldn't really complain. However I am certainly very happy to have been to this spot a few times previously where there weren't masses of people, but this might have been the last time I bother visiting. To get a sense of some of the crowds, see this image in the gallery or open the cropped panorama below...

On the way to driving to Lee's Ferry, we walked out onto the old Navajo bridge and took a few photos, and then lastly some photos of the photogenic crumbling buildings at Lee's Ferry where we also camped for the night.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 11 - Petrified Forest NP

Gallery (45 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 11 - Petrified Forest NP

The first few images in the gallery are from when we drove through Rice, California, a modern ghost town with a handful of ruins, including what I believe are the remnants of a gas station that have been turned into a "shoe tree", a bush that appears to be growing COVID masks, and an old who-knows-what-it-was remains of a building that are near 100% covered in layers of colourful, artistic graffiti.

From there, we continued on to Petrified Forest National Park. At the south end of the park, there are fields of fractured petrified tree logs, just lying on the surface of the ground, some seeming as though they have been cut into sections with a chainsaw. These logs have been agatized, in other words, the wood has been replaced with very colourful agate while it was buried over the millennia. Arizona petrified wood is known to be some of the most colourful in the world and seeing these beautiful logs of agate lying everywhere is truly incredible. The rest of the park has some amazing scenery too, sculpted purplish badlands and to the north, an area known as the Painted Desert, an vast plain of red/orange badlands and mesas contrasting beautifully with the blue skies and fluffy white clouds.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

Also, there is a stitched panorama from the badlands shown in my 2024 Southwest Trip - Highlights blog posting.

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 9 - Joshua Tree

Gallery (45 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 9 - Joshua Tree

While in Death Valley, we were surprised to hear that Emily's aunt and uncle, who live just south of Los Angeles, insisted we come for a visit while in southern California. So, rather than heading over to Joshua Tree National Park immediately, we cancelled one night of stay at the campground there and made the detour to drive to the coast again and stayed overnight with them. They generously made us feel right at home, gave us food to take, let us do laundry... and showering after hiking around in Death Valley was most certainly welcome as well!

The next day, after taking a few photos of their wonderful cactus garden, we drove off to Joshua Tree National Park to camp at the aptly named Jumbo Rocks Campground. We hiked around for a few hours that evening and took photos, but since we had pre-booked all of our campsites for the trip already, we couldn't linger at all. The following day was a five hour drive to our next campground east of Phoenix, Arizona, and I wanted to leave some time for the potential to sightsee along the way too.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

2024 Southwest Trip - Day 7 - Death Valley

Gallery (35 images): 2024 Southwest - Day 7 - Death Valley

After camping in Echo Canyon at a designated back-country campsite, we made our way to the Inyo Mine Ruins in the morning to photograph all the crumbling buildings. One in particular has suffered over the years that I've been visiting the ruins, and now seems in danger of imminent collapse. See photos 9, 10 & 13 in the gallery.

We drove out of Echo Canyon and made our way to the quite high Aguereberry Point, with a wonderful long view down into Death Valley. That evening we camped at the Stovepipe Wells campground and took some more night photos, with one of the Orion Nebula included at the end of the gallery.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

View all galleries: 2024 Southwest Trip

2026 Ottawa - Two City Walks

Gallery (40 images): 2026 Ottawa - Two City Walks

This gallery contains photos taken on two different days, one a walk in the evening to meet Emily after an event, and the other a walk along the newly reopened Ottawa River Pathway, part of the Trans-Canada Trail. It is the first time we've seen the newly revamped Cliff Energy Centre with some interesting architecture and two huge, nearly flat, mirror finished exhaust stacks that look like something out of a sci-fi movie. There was also the interesting Thunderhead memorial, part of the 2SLGBTQI+ National Monument, which is a large white tower that looks like it was attacked with an enormous ice-cream scoop, having unevenly shaped openings and an interior finished in small glass tiles. The evening light and shadows made it even more interesting.

Web Gallery Transition

An example of my previous web gallery look (left) vs. the new look with jAlbum (right)

Finally, just about a week ago with the latest update to Adobe Lightroom (v.15.5.1), the TTG Highslide export module that I had bought, extensively customized and had been using for the last 16 years, has stopped working properly. Exporting a gallery gave messed up formatting and visible XML code scattered all over every page, so finally it became totally unusable. I can’t really complain too much, since I did manage to eke out 16 years of use from that plugin!

Interestingly enough, a few weeks prior to the Lightroom update, I had already started hunting for alternative web gallery software since I had a feeling I might need something in the near future. Since I no longer wanted to be at the mercy of Lightroom updates, I tried a number of different stand-alone web gallery export programs and emailed a few companies for details when they didn’t have free demo versions. Unfortunately none gave me the flexibility and features I was looking for either, and no company I contacted even bothered to reply back to my questions. With some more research and more specific Googling, I finally came across jAlbum (https://jalbum.net) the other day. After some promising tests with the free, feature limited version and seeing some sample galleries online that seemed to do most of what I wanted, I decided to give it a go and bought the mid-tier package.

2026: Ottawa Fireworks Finale

 Gallery (40 images): 2026 Ottawa Fireworks Finale

On August 15th, Emily and I went to see the Les Grands Feux du Casino Lac-Leamy fireworks festival finale at Kiweki Point Park in Ottawa. We only managed to get there about an hour before the fireworks started, so there were no more spots with an unobstructed view. Any spots with a direct view of the Ottawa River and the fireworks barge were taken, so after scoping out a few early teaser bursts (which Emily also helped me with since she knew the area better), I decided on a spot with some foreground trees and no crowds of people right in front of the camera. The vast majority of the fireworks were plenty high enough to see from that vantage point, and it made for a different framing than my usual. As the show progressed, the fireworks got progressively higher, so I adjusted the camera up a bit, shooting with my widest lens that I had with me. Due to the height and spread, I also decided to crop all the fireworks shots to a 5:4 aspect ratio, instead of the native 3:2 of my camera.