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Azure Ray, is a 9-year old duo, recently re-formed, and just recently discovered by me, which I’m enjoying very much. Can’t remember if it was KCRW or Pandora that led me to them. All three are awesome.

“November” (youtube)

A week ago, on June 24th, 2010, my little brother got hitched.  Aside from being outdoors during a heat wave, the whole affair went off quite well with, I think, a happy couple and happy guests. I enjoyed having lots of subjects to photograph, and I think wedding photos make a great excuse for a flash gallery, so here it is:

• The Flash Gallery
• The Simple Gallery – In case you prefer something less flashy

Most of the time, on a bright sunny day, the world looks a lot better when you remove the polarized light glaring from reflective surfaces and the atmosphere. If you’ve ever worn polarized sunglasses, you probably know what I mean. A few months ago, I spent the $100 or so and bought a Hoya HMC PL-CIR filter for my most oft-used lens, and it pretty much does for the camera everything the polarized glasses do for your eyes. It does wonders for mid-day, bright sunlight photos, or shooting through glass or other reflective surfaces like water. Choosing between dark foreground and blown-out, highlighted sky is also a lot less of a problem. I figured I’d share some example shots showing what a polarizer can do:

I should disclose the details of the experimental setup here: I did not actually remove the filter in any of these shots. In the “polarized” shots, it is simply rotated to block the polarization of the sun glare, and in the other rotated away so that it does not (in which case, it should behave like an ND filter, just making the whole image darker). The camera is in Aperture Priority mode, so the exposure varied between the shots according to the incoming light. It is important to rotate the filter to the right place before each shot, as the required angle depends on the angle of the camera as well as the location of the sun.

Mary and I spent an awesome Fourth of July weekend camping and hiking at the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite. I love this place; especially at this time of year. Green meadows, babbling brooks, snow streaked mountains, waterfalls, and the occasional remnant snow patch. Also, it was not nearly as crowded as Yosemite Valley was, I’m sure. The valley in the summer, especially on a holiday weekend, is a traffic jam. Here, people are much more manageable; and once we got a mile into the wilderness, there’s hardly anybody at all. The meadows were teaming with wildlife, especially deer and marmots. Lots of marmots.

We spent Friday night at the Tuolumne Meadows Campground. It was full when we got there, but fortunately they have a backpackers section where you can spend the night before/night after you hit the trail. Saturday morning we took off south down Rafferty Creek trail, heading for the Vogalsang lake area. We ended up camping next to Fletcher Lake at 10,160ft, in a little grove of trees next to an open meadow, next to a cliff overlooking the valley we had just climbed up. There is something very relaxing about setting up a tent by yourself in a perfect alpine meadow and cooking a mountain house for dinner.

As long as I’m in California I think a trip to Tuolumne after the snow melts and Tioga Pass opens is going to be an annual tradition.

More photos are on flickr. You can check-out/download the GPS track on trimbleoutdoors.com.