Highlights of 2012: Bryce Canyon

I went on several fun road trips in 2012.  One of my favorite stops was a pit stop I made at Bryce Canyon National Park in southwestern Utah.   Like the mountains of Zion National Park and the expanse of the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon is part of the massive and layered sedimentary Grand Staircase formation which covers much of southern Utah and northern Arizona.

I reached Bryce Canyon at the end of the sightseeing portion of a road trip which had begun in Phoenix.  I was scheduled to attend the spring Association of Government Risk Pools conference as representative of Prism Risk Management (appropriate, as the company was operating the Texas Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative and Oklahoma Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative) the week before SXSW.  Since I was flying to Arizona anyway, I moved the flight back a couple of days to allow for a short road trip.  Sedona, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park went on the list immediately   Bryce was a last minute decision.

example of hoodoos

Dixie Nat'l Forest

 Northern Arizona and southwestern Utah are amazingly beautiful parts of the country.  I'll hit a few of the trip highlights later in the month.  Bryce Canyon was definitely the right way to end things.  In order to get there, I left Zion and drove north toward the Dixie National Forest.  The most prominent feature of this area was the bright red sandstone with little hoodoos popping up on the top of pine tree covered ridges.  This was a good prelude to the geologic features of Bryce Canyon National Park.

Once you leave the most scenic parts of the Dixie National Forest, the road seems non-descript without the contrast of the oddly formed red rocks to the evergreens.  At the edge of Dixie, you turn north on Highway 89 and then turn onto Highway 12.  Within about 30 minutes you'll arrive at the entrance to Bryce Canyon National Park, which the National Park Service as:

Bryce Canyon, famous for its worldly unique geology, consists of a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters carved from the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The erosional force of frost-wedging and the dissolving power of rainwater have shaped the colorful limestone rock of the Claron Formation into bizarre shapes, including slot canyons, windows, fins, and spires called "hoodoos".     

 There is more to the park than the main amphitheater, but that's the feature which upstages everything else and really forms the basis of making the decision to drive deep into an sparsely populated region of Utah.

Hoodoos in the Amphitheater

"Amphitheater" is what best describes the principal attraction at the park.  If you take a look atthe (kind of low quality iPhone) video to the left, you'll see that the amphitheater area gets its name because it looks like a bowl carved out of sandstone with hoodoos jammed in like music fans with standing room only (to me, anyway... I can see how they might look like chairs).  According to the Wikipedia, Bryce Canyon has one of the largest concentrations of hoodoos in the world (The photo to the left is a closer shot of the hoodoos in just below the rim, note the concentration).  Apparently, the geologic formations of Bryce Canyon are 100m years younger than those in Zion.  The rocks which form hoodoos tend to erode quickly, thus we are able to enjoy the hoodoo stage of the rocks which form Bryce Canyon as they are relatively rapidly (geologically speaking) dissolving into smoother formations.
Bryce Canyon was a pleasant and unexpected surprise built into the March road trip.  It took me about eight hours to drive from Bryce Canyon National Park back to Phoenix; however, the route involved a lot of back roads and was rather indirect until I hit Flagstaff.   If you want to take a more direct route to Bryce Canyon (or to Zion National Park), your best bet appears to be flying into Vegas and then driving up I-15 into Utah.  You could also fly into Salt Lake City, but then you wouldn't be able to play craps at the end of your wholesome road trip.
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Photography: Nikon fEE Error

Nikon D90 with Nikkor f1.8 50mm Lens

Earlier this evening, I was over in West Lake shooting some photos for the Christmas card of some friends.  I decided to try my Nikon AF 50mm f/1.8 AF Nikkor lens for a couple of shots.  Unfortunately, when I attached the lens to my Nikon D90 the error message "fEE" popped up where the f-stop setting usually appears.  Not sure what this meant, and not in the mood to stop shooting in order to look it up, I put the 50mm away and went on with a different lens.  The message didn't reappear, and thus I figured that the problem lay with the lens and not with the camera body.

fEE Error Message

Needless to say, once I finished shooting the photos I wanted to know what the ominous "fEE" message meant.  It turns out that the message wasn't serious in my case.  The "fEE" means that the camera can't control the f-stop setting on the attached lens.  My 50mm lens has a manual f-stop setting which must be turned to 22 in order for the camera to be able to operate the aperture automatically.  I had accidentally twisted the setting ring to 18.  As soon as I put the setting back to 22, everything was fine.  This was a relief, as I was concerned that a more serious problem might have occurred.  Therefore, if you have seen this error message pop up on your Nikon, try the simple steps of checking to see if your lens has a manual f-stop setting ring and then placing it on the top setting.  If this doesn't help,  the Nikon support page recommends removing and reattaching the lens.  If that doesn't help, or your lens is only automatic and you see the fEE message, then you may have some larger and more expensive problems on your hands.

The 50mm is a great lens for shooting in low light and it can be good for portraiture (when used with a Nikon DX format sensor).  My 50mm f/1.8 is the cheapest lens in my kit (I paid $150 for it at Precision Camera in Austin) but it has proven itself as a great choice for my needs when I want to use a prime lens.  You can use the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AF lens on auto-focus as long as your Nikon dSLR has its own auto-focus motor.  If your dSLR body lacks this feature (e.g., a Nikon D40 or D60) then you will need to buy the internal auto-focus motor equipped Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AF-S Nikkor lens or a third party lens with this feature.

 

Tumblr

I have become much more active with my Tumblr site.  Tumblr appears to occupy a space between a traditional blog (like this one) and Twitter.  For me, it seems to be very useful for posting travel photos and other photos which I'd like to share along with a blurb and/or some links, but which don't merit an entire post on this site.  I have also used it to post video links, article links, as well as repost items of interest I've found on the Tumblr sites of others.

If you are interested in a more comprehensive collection of my photographs, please visit my Flickr account.

Software: Aperture 3, A Good Deal From The Mac App Store

At the Home Office

Now that I'm back in business with my new MacBook Pro, I've been reinstalling and adding software to the system.  One Mac specific app I've been wanting to try is Aperture 3.  

Since I've started biking, I haven't been as active with photography.  Thus, it will probably be after SXSW and my quickie trip to Florida (I have some night photography planned) before I do much photo importing and editing to the MacBook.  At that point I'll be able to comment on using Aperture (which, from what I have read, is a photo management and light editing system similar to Picasa or Adobe's Lightroom).

In the mean time, I decided to toss up this post to mention that while the full version of Aperture is $199 at a retail establishment, it is only $79 as a download from the Mac App Store.   Not a bad deal, thus I went ahead and downloaded it. 

This is by far the most compelling deal I've seen at the Mac App Store.

Photos: I've Put a Few Up

[photo (by Sara): me in front of Elvis' jet, The Lisa Marie]

Since buying the bikes, I've been doing a fair amount of riding and not much photography. Well, that and I've been busy with planning the Catalyst 8 Mad Hatter Tea Party and working on strategic/tactical/operations plans for Prism Risk Management (but unfortunately, not much on the Prism Risk Management blog). And, I read a lot of legislation these days.

However, I totally love photography and thus I finally made some time to add a few shots to the wdfloyd Flickr page (you can access it through the Flickr widget on this blog's sidebar). Mostly, it's more stuff from my trips to Marfa, the coast, and then my road trip (with the gf) from Illinois which included a fantastic layover at Graceland. I won't say any of this is my best stuff, but I think a lot of the shots are entertaining, somewhat interesting, and/or representative of the subject matter.

Meta-info:

If you are curious about my camera equipment: most of the shots posted on this blog are done with my Nikon D90. The cheap Nikon 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G AF-S VR II zoom lens is my workhorse, although I do own some swankier stuff.

Rugby is Awesome

Rugby is a lot of fun to watch. If you haven't seen a match before, I highly recommend it.

I took these today out at Burr Field. Teams are the Dallas Reds and the Austin Huns.