Every year I put together a calendar of my favorite images of the year. I order a couple for me, and one for my friend Bill. This year, Bill asked for more information about each photo to give it some context. And thus was born a recurring series on this blog. Every month I’ll take the photo from that month’s calendar page and tell the story behind it.
My 2015 calendar had a landscape orientation, but I had a number of vertical shots that I wanted to include. So for the month of July, I had two portrait orientation photos side by side- both waterfall shots.
The first is Fish Creek Falls, just outside Steamboat Springs, Colorado. In late July and early August, we took a family trip across southern Wyoming and northern Colorado. We started in Saratoga, Wyoming, and then moved to Steamboat. We stayed in a friend’s condo for a few days and explored the area.
On this particular day, we hiked to Fish Creek Falls. This trip was memorable to me for two reasons. First, we came up with the idea of making hiking bingo cards. The cards contained things like “black ant”, “yellow flower”, and of course “waterfall.” They did a fantastic job of keeping Nate interested during the hike.
The second thing is that this was the first trip with my Singh-Ray Vari-ND Filter. This was my first day using it, and my first set of failures with it. I had it cranked up to increase the length of my exposures. The problem is that I was using my flimsy tripod, which wasn’t up to the task. Many of my shots were blurry from the tripod wiggling during the long exposures. This was one of the few that came out.
Technical Details: Canon 7D, EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM at 33mm, 6 sec at f/11, ISO 100.
Das Haus von Ruh 