Death Valley Road Trip and Photo Safari

Last week I went on a 4 day photo road trip with a pal from work. We had a good time and accomplished a lot of sight-seeing and photo making. But, I also came face to face with many of my limitations as a photographer. I had a lot of equipment management problems and operator errors. I've forgotten how to operate some of my lesser-used but vital on this trip accessories, such as my wireless remote shutter controller.

I have mentioned to several people that I need to sit down and literally spread out my gear on the living room floor to do an inventory. I have too much stuff these days and have forgotten what I own. AND it's spread out all over the house too.

For example, I brought two 2 MB cards. I couldn't find one of them after I got to the motel so I had to limp along with just one card, which was filled by the end of the day each day. When I got home Sunday and began the process of transferring the files to my computer I noticed I had an 8 MB card right next to the monitor. A few days later I found my other 2 MB card. I had problems with my remote control. I was messing up camera settings. Battery power was an issue.

I totally did not put 2 and 2 together that my road trip buddy had a DC to AC converter power source; I could have plugged my battery right into my charger right there in the car or even transferred files to the laptop as my single 2 MB card filled up.

I have a dedicated gear spot in my office upstairs, I should start taking that seriously.

I've decided that I need to set up an High Dynamic Range custom function on my camera and want to see if I can force it to take 5 shots instead of the stock 3 shots from AEB. Plus I have decided I need to be in Aperture Priority mode when doing it. For panoramas I need to shoot in a small f-stop especially if I want to do a vertical one. Stay away from 1600 ISO long exposure night work. My night shots need noise reduction on, so now I have to get Noise Ninja to reduce the noise I have in those images I took out there with it off.

I learned a lot on this trip, mostly about how scatterbrained I am. I need a physical checklist of my gear and I need to develop more experience and skills so that I can execute a more accurate mental checklist for each type of shot; HDR, panorama, long exposure night, whatever. I will develop some paper checklists for these different techniques and then take them out with me and work with them until I've memorized them.

This photography stuff is hard, man.

Death Valley photos